Who Won and Lost 401(k) Plans in 2024

Retirement provider league tables are almost always built on assets under administration, which quietly makes them a report on the stock market rather than on the business. A provider can add a hundred billion dollars in a strong year while steadily losing plans, and nothing in an asset-ranked table will tell you it happened. The assets grew because the markets grew; the book shrank anyway.

Counting plans instead is harder, because it means tracking individual sponsors across years rather than summing a column, but it answers the question an advisor actually has: whose book is moving, and in which direction. What follows is the 2023-to-2024 movement for every provider holding at least 150 defined-contribution plans, measured by who occupies the lead service provider seat on each plan.

The first thing the data shows is a shape rather than a ranking. Among the 53,395 defined-contribution plans that name a lead service provider, five firms account for just over a third of them — 35.0 percent. Extend to twenty-five firms and you have covered 61.1 percent. The remaining 3,673 firms split what is left: a very long tail of regional third-party administrators, advisory practices and single-office consultancies, most holding a handful of plans each. That matters for prospecting more than the top of the table does, because it means the named national brands are a minority of the market by plan count, and any given plan you are chasing is more likely than not served by a firm you have never competed against.

One row does not look like the others. StanCorp Financial Group won 350 plans and lost 46, a net gain of 304 on a book of 1,093 — nearly a third of its entire book added in a single year, at a win-to-loss ratio no other provider in the study approaches at any scale. Fidelity’s row, by contrast, is the characteristic shape of a large incumbent: 871 plans in, 716 out, netting +155 on a book of nearly seven thousand. Gross churn at the top of this market is far heavier than net movement suggests, and a provider large enough can be simultaneously the biggest winner and the biggest loser in absolute terms without its position changing much at all.

Ranking by net movement rather than by size brings the mid-market firms forward, which is where the genuinely interesting activity is.

The declines require more care than the gains, because three quite different events produce a negative number here and the filings cannot tell them apart on their own. The first is competitive loss: the sponsor ran a search and hired somebody else. That is the only category representing a plan an advisor could have won. The second is book migration following an ownership change — when a provider is acquired and its plans are refiled under the acquirer’s EIN, the seller shows losses and the buyer shows wins that no plan sponsor ever chose, and several rows above have exactly the steady, one-directional shape that produces. The third is deliberate exit, where a provider leaves a segment, most often the small-plan end, and hands the book to a partner.

The ratio between wins and losses is usually the tell. A firm losing 196 plans while winning 112, as Vanguard did, looks like ordinary two-way churn tilted negative — plans going out and coming in, with the balance unfavourable. A firm winning 350 while losing 46 does not look like competition at all. It looks like a book arriving.

A related caution applies to reading any of these names as brands. Providers are identified by the EIN that appears on the filing, and large groups file under multiple legal entities. Empower, Lincoln, Transamerica and Morgan Stanley each appear more than once in the underlying data, and in some cases one entity is gaining while another is losing. Rolling those up to brand level requires judgement calls about which legal entities count as the same business, and we have not made them here — everything above is entity-level as filed, and brand-level totals would look different.

Measured as a share of book rather than in absolute plans, the movement concentrates firmly in the middle of the market. StanCorp gained 28 percent of its book in a single year. Guideline lost 16 percent of its. Fidelity’s much larger +155 is 2.3 percent of its book, which in practical terms is a rounding error on a relationship base that size. This is the argument for tracking plan counts by provider rather than reading industry rankings: the firms whose position is genuinely changing are mostly not the ones named in the trade press, and a twenty-five percent swing in a two-hundred-plan book is far more likely to surface in your territory than a two percent swing in a seven-thousand-plan one.

It is worth holding all of this against the base rates, though. Only about seven percent of plans genuinely drop their incumbent in a year, which makes these net figures the visible residue of a market that moves slowly and mostly stays where it is.