Auto-enrollment crossed 75%. Target date funds went from default option to default behavior. Roth went from rare to standard. Gen Z entered the workforce already saving. None of this is in Form 5500. All of it is in the survey record. Here is the ten-year picture.
Single-source benchmark reports track outcomes year over year. That is one slice of the picture. The other slice is plan design adoption, and it has moved more dramatically than outcomes have over the past decade. These charts use companion-report longevity to tell the design story.
Plans offering auto-enrollment as a percentage of all DC plans. The single most important plan design shift of the decade, tracked annually by PLANSPONSOR DC Survey and validated by Vanguard recordkeeping data.
Two parallel adoption curves: target date funds as the default investment, and Roth as a standard contribution type. Both are now near-saturation in larger plans.
These numbers come from recordkeepers with full census visibility. They are not Form 5500-derived and they are not subject to the 2023 participant-count rule change. This is what participation actually does.
Auto-enrollment adoption by Vanguard's eight aggregated sectors. Some industries adopted early. Some are still catching up. The gap is wider than the decade-long trend suggests.
Three generational behaviors that diverge sharply from prior cohorts: TDF concentration, Roth share, and contribution rate at the same career stage. The data here is Fidelity's quarterly Building Financial Futures cohort tracking.
If a plan sponsor walked away from this report remembering only three things, these would be the three.
Every chart in this report draws from a source that has been published annually for a decade or more. This is the longitudinal record Form 5500 alone cannot produce.