Updated August 13, 2026. Quick answer: among the 50,483 401(k) plans that were large enough to file a Schedule C for plan year 2023 and reported paying at least one named service provider out of the plan, the median plan paid 0.248% of plan assets — but that median is almost meaningless on its own. The median $1M–5M plan paid 0.560%; the median $1B+ plan paid 0.047%. That is 11.9 times the rate for the same category of service. And inside every size band, the most expensive quarter of plans pays roughly three times the cheapest quarter.
What this measures: what 401(k) plans paid their named service providers out of plan assets — that is, out of participants’ money — as a share of what the plan held.
As of: plan year 2023. Computed from the Department of Labor’s own public filing extracts, downloaded 2026-08-13. DOL also publishes raw extracts for 2024; 2023 is the most recent year its own Private Pension Plan Bulletin covers, which is what makes the universe check in Method possible. This is not a measure of total 401(k) cost — see what this number is not.
The findings
Eight columns. On a phone, swipe the table sideways to reach the percentiles, the spread and the dollar figures.
| Plan assets | Plans | 25th pct | Median | 75th pct | 75th ÷ 25th | Median paid | Median per participant |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $1M–5M | 6,509 | 0.242% | 0.560% | 0.919% | 3.81x | $17,378 | $102.85 |
| $5M–10M | 9,599 | 0.164% | 0.411% | 0.622% | 3.78x | $29,735 | $152.39 |
| $10M–25M | 15,150 | 0.129% | 0.301% | 0.451% | 3.51x | $46,667 | $175.27 |
| $25M–50M | 8,135 | 0.092% | 0.214% | 0.324% | 3.51x | $72,670 | $156.99 |
| $50M–100M | 4,770 | 0.069% | 0.150% | 0.240% | 3.50x | $103,486 | $130.46 |
| $100M–250M | 3,259 | 0.057% | 0.108% | 0.174% | 3.07x | $161,168 | $102.77 |
| $250M–1B | 2,127 | 0.041% | 0.074% | 0.117% | 2.85x | $322,108 | $79.65 |
| $1B+ | 934 | 0.026% | 0.047% | 0.074% | 2.79x | $1,026,304 | $65.26 |
Percentiles are of the ratio of direct provider compensation to end-of-year plan assets, computed plan by plan. The 75th ÷ 25th column is computed from the unrounded ratios, so it will not always reproduce exactly from the two rounded columns beside it. Dollar figures are medians of the band, rounded to the nearest dollar.
1. Rate falls steeply with size, and the fall is enormous. The median $1M–5M plan pays 0.560% of assets a year to its named providers. The median $1B+ plan pays 0.047%. Same kind of service — recordkeeping, administration, advice to the plan — at 11.9 times the rate.
2. Size explains the level and almost none of the spread. In every single band, the plan at the 75th percentile pays roughly three times the plan at the 25th percentile: 3.81x among $1M–5M plans and still 2.79x among $1B+ plans. Two plans of the same size routinely pay three-fold different rates. That is the finding we have not seen published elsewhere, and it is the one a plan sponsor can act on.
3. The dollars per participant peak in the middle, not at the small end. The median plan in the $10M–25M band pays $175.27 per participant with a balance — the highest of any band — falling to $65.26 at $1B+ and $102.85 at $1M–5M. A reader who assumes the smallest plans cost the most per head is wrong about the dollars and right about the rate: small plans have few participants and small balances, so a punishing rate is still a modest per-head bill.
Across the whole set, these plans paid $7,858,841,888 to named providers out of $6,119,580,139,271 in assets. Weighted by assets rather than by plan, the rate is 0.128% — lower than the median because the largest plans hold most of the money and pay the lowest rates.
The distribution across all 50,483 plans: 10th percentile 0.028%, 25th 0.090%, median 0.248%, 75th 0.459%, 90th 0.716%. The median plan named 2 service providers paid out of the plan (90th percentile 4). Where the largest-paid provider carries a code for the kind of service, it is recordkeeping and information management in 29.2% of plans, investment advisory (plan) in 16.5%, and contract administrator in 14.7%.
See how this fits the rest of your retirement plan
What your plan holds, what it costs you and what you do with it when you leave are one decision rather than three, and an adviser can look at them together alongside the rest of your savings.
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What this number is, and what it is not
It is what came out of the plan, and nothing else. The 2023 Form 5500 instructions define direct compensation as “Payments made directly by the plan for services rendered to the plan or because of a person’s position with the plan” — and then draw the line that matters here: “Payments made by the plan sponsor, which are not reimbursed by the plan, are not subject to Schedule C reporting requirements even if the sponsor is paying for services rendered to the plan.” So a company that writes the recordkeeping cheque itself shows a lower number here without its employees paying any less in total. Comparing two plans on this measure compares what was charged to the plan, not what the plan cost.
It is not “401(k) fees.” It excludes fund-level expense ratios, which for most participants are the larger part of the bill. Figures you may have seen quoted as the all-in cost of a 401(k) are measuring a different and broader thing, and this number should never be set against them as if it were a competing estimate of the same quantity.
It undercounts insurance-based arrangements. The instructions carve them out explicitly: for plans required to file Part I of Schedule C, “commissions and fees listed on the Schedule A are not required to be reported again on Schedule C.” Where an insurer is the provider, part of the compensation is on another schedule and is missing from these totals.
It cannot see providers paid under $5,000, and it carries no usable figure for indirect compensation — revenue sharing and the like. 86.85% of these plans flag at least one provider as receiving indirect compensation; only 19.62% put a dollar amount on it. We publish no indirect total, because the data does not support one. The method page explains why.
Method
Every figure comes from the Department of Labor’s public Form 5500 filing extracts for 2023 — the filings themselves, not a research file or a summary. The universe is built in five steps:
- Start from the Form 5500 header file and drop Direct Filing Entity filings, whose Schedule C is master-trust level and would double-count.
- Keep plan years beginning in 2023 that carry pension feature code 2J, defined in the instructions as “Code section 401(k) feature – A cash or deferred arrangement described in Code section 401(k) that is part of a qualified defined contribution plan” — 94,396 plans.
- Deduplicate on employer identification number, plan number and plan-year start. No duplicates were found.
- Join Schedule H for end-of-year plan assets and Schedule C Part I for the sum of direct compensation to named providers.
- Keep plans holding at least $1M that are not filing a final return and not filing for a short plan year — 50,483 plans, the set every figure above is computed on.
Three independent code paths. The figures were built once in Python by column name, rebuilt in SQLite by column position resolved from each file’s own published layout (with the layout asserted against the file’s header), and five individual filings were re-derived end to end in Ruby by a third parser. All 50 compared figures agree; all five sampled filings agree.
The universe checks out against DOL’s own published totals. DOL’s Private Pension Plan Bulletin, Abstract of 2023 Form 5500 Annual Reports, Table A1, reports 724,720 401(k)-type plans holding $7,917,598 million. Building the same universe from raw filings gives 728,765 plans and $7.786 trillion — +0.56% on plans and -1.7% on dollars, against four definitional differences DOL states on that table: it excludes one-participant plans, weights for delinquent filers, uses plan years ending in 2023, and excludes allocated insurance contracts from assets.
The cohort convention is a choice, and it does not move the answer. This study uses plan years beginning in 2023; DOL’s Bulletin uses plan years ending in 2023. Rebuilt on the ending-2023 convention the set is 48,305 plans with a median of 0.246% instead of 0.248%.
What this study does not establish
It says nothing about small plans, and small plans are most plans. This is the single most important limit here. A 401(k) plan with fewer than about 100 participants generally files a Form 5500-SF, which has no Schedule C at all. There were 634,369 such plans in 2023 — median 13 participants — and this study cannot see a single one of them. Set against the whole 401(k) universe, it covers 6.93% of plans, 78.60% of dollars and 77.42% of participants. No sentence beginning “the typical 401(k) plan pays” can be supported by this data, and the direction of the error is knowable: the smallest plans we can see already pay the highest rates.
It does not name or rank a plan, an employer or a provider, and it never will. The filings are self-reported, provider names are not normalised, and a league table built on that would be wrong about individual firms. Every figure on this page is an aggregate.
The mean is unusable, so we do not publish one as a headline. Before the size and filing filters are applied — across all 51,498 plans reporting any direct compensation — the mean ratio is 16,040 basis points against a median of 25, because a handful of plans report real compensation against an end-of-year asset figure at or near zero. Within the core set the mean is 0.422%, usable but still right-skewed. Medians are the honest summary here, not a house preference.
The top of the distribution is mostly plans winding up. Of those same 51,498 plans, 218 (0.42%) pay more than 5% of assets. Final filings are 0.05% of that set but 4.13% of that top group — which is why the core set above excludes them. Any unfiltered “highest-fee plans” cut is a list of plans that were terminating.
Zero reported direct compensation is not zero fees. Plans that name providers but report no direct compensation are paying them indirectly or through the sponsor. They are excluded from the ratio figures and must not be read as free.
One year, no trend. This is plan year 2023 alone. Nothing here says whether the gap is widening or narrowing.
The data
Everything here is built from files anyone can download without an account, from the Department of Labor’s Form 5500 disclosure directory: the Form 5500 header file, Schedule H (plan financials), Schedule C Part I Item 2 (one row per named service provider), the separate Schedule C service-code file, and the Form 5500-SF file used only to size the small-plan population. Definitions are quoted from the 2023 Form 5500 instructions (PDF) and the universe check from the Private Pension Plan Bulletin. DOL republishes the filing extracts as late and amended returns arrive, so a rebuild months from now will not match to the dollar; the exact byte counts and SHA-256 hashes of the files used are recorded so the figures stay reproducible. The complete result set is the table above.
Cite this study
“Among 50,483 401(k) plans large enough to file a Schedule C for 2023, the median plan paid named service providers 0.248% of plan assets — 0.560% at $1M–5M and 0.047% at $1B+ (Clear Money Guide, 2026, from Department of Labor Form 5500 filings).”
Suggested citation: “What 401(k) Plans Pay Their Service Providers, by Plan Size,” Clear Money Guide, 2026, clearmoneyguide.com/401k-fees-by-plan-size/. Free to reuse with attribution under CC BY 4.0.
Related research
Form 5500 Schedule C is the method page for this study and explains how to pull up your own employer’s filing. Researching the funds in your 401(k) is the other half of the bill — the fund expense ratios this study deliberately excludes. The average 401(k) balance audits a related figure. The advice gap is our other study built the same way.