Trends in Corporate Retirement Plan Offerings
In this piece, we take a look at the past, present and likely future state of the retirement savings vehicles offered by private sector employers in America. Much has been written about the death of the defined benefit (DB) plan and the rise of the defined contribution (DC) plan in its place. Are DB plans going the way of the dinosaur? What has been the impact of the movement to defined contribution plans? Are Americans saving enough for retirement?
To get a better sense of the overall trends in the retirement benefits offered by corporate America, we turned to the Private Pension Plan Bulletin issued by the Employment Benefits Security Administration[1]. In it we see that the number of employer-sponsored pension plans peaked in 1983 at roughly 175,000 and have been declining ever since to roughly 39,600 in 2020 (the last year data was available).1
