Plan-level sponsor-controllable cost metrics and cohort ranking.
Plan
BROWN-FORMAN CORPORATION SAVINGS PLAN
Investment Mgmt (bps)
1.66
Employer generosity score
71.7
Employer generosity
How much the employer contributes relative to employees and how that compares to peer large plans.
Employer match ratio
0.52Top 50%
Employer $ / active participant
$5,902Top 25%
Employer share of total contrib
31.8%
Employer contrib % of assets
1.89%
What these mean
- Employer match ratio
-
A simple proxy from the plan’s annual Form 5500 filing: employer contributions divided by employee contributions for the year.
It is not the same as the match formula you see in the plan summary (for example, “50% match up to 6%”),
and it can also reflect non-match employer contributions (such as profit sharing).
- Employer $ / active participant
- Employer contributions for the year divided by active participants. Useful for per-person benchmarking.
- Employer share of total contributions
- What percentage of all contributions came from the employer versus employees and other sources.
- Employer contribution % of assets
- Employer contributions for the year divided by average plan assets. This normalizes generosity by plan size.
Participation and engagement
How many people participate and how actively they save, based on reported Form 5500 counts and contribution totals.
Participation rate
99.2%Top 10%
Avg deferral / active
$11,454Top 25%
Avg account balance
$241,366Top 10%
Active participant growth
-15.2%
Service providers
Provider lists and payment disclosures can differ by plan. Some filings list providers but do not disclose dollar amounts in the structured datasets.
Providers named
0
A names-only list. It does not mean these providers were paid directly by the plan.
Providers with disclosed payments
2
Providers where the filing discloses dollar amounts (direct and/or indirect).
Disclosure note
Amounts disclosed
What to do
Ask for a fee disclosure and provider invoice detail
Disclosed provider payments:
$169,888 total ($82.71 per active participant).
Providers with disclosed payments (2):
- EMPOWER ADVISORY GROUP, LLC ($106,169 total, $51.69/participant)
- EMPOWER ANNUITY INSURANCE COMPANY O ($63,719 total, $31.02/participant)
Why the two lists don’t match
Think of these as two different disclosure buckets in the Form 5500 provider disclosures. It’s common to see little or no overlap.
Providers named is a roster of firms that show up in the filing, but it may not include any dollar amounts. A provider can appear here even if it is paid indirectly or bundled into other costs.
Providers with disclosed payments is where the filing reports dollar amounts paid directly and/or indirectly. Those providers can be different legal entities (different EINs) than the roster list.
When a named provider has no dollar amount, it does not necessarily mean they were free. Common reasons include:
investment-related costs charged at the fund level (expense ratios), bundled arrangements where another party pays them, or indirect compensation arrangements.
Some indirect amounts may be credited back to the plan or participants as fee offsets (sometimes informally called rebates), but that detail is usually in vendor fee disclosures, not reliably in these structured datasets.
Less common: some arrangements involve non-cash benefits (sometimes called “soft dollars”) or other indirect benefits. These are not always itemized in the structured data, so the best validation is still the plan’s provider invoices and fee disclosures.
How this helps you
- Participants: use the match and savings signals to sanity-check whether you are leaving employer money on the table and how your plan compares to peer employers.
- Sponsors/committees: use cost and provider disclosure signals to prioritize RFPs, renegotiate fees, and document fiduciary process.
- Advisors: use outliers (high cost, low disclosure) to identify plans that likely benefit from benchmarking and vendor review.
How to read this rating
This scorecard helps plan sponsors, advisors, and committees compare a plan’s reported plan-level fees against peer plans using public Form 5500 filings.
It focuses on costs that are typically negotiable with providers, and it aims to avoid participant-specific charges (loan fees, QDRO fees, individual transaction fees).
Technical details.
- What is the cohort?
-
The cohort is the peer group we compare against. It is large 401(k) plans (1,000+ active participants) for the same filing year that include the required schedule and report a positive plan-paid expense amount.
Plans that report $0 expenses are shown, but they are not ranked because $0 often means fees were paid by participants or netted from returns (not that the plan is free).
- Final Score (0-100)
-
A simple relative score: higher is better (lower cost vs. peers). It is derived from where the plan lands in the cohort distribution of Total Cost (bps).
- Cohort Rank
-
The plan’s position within the cohort sorted by Total Cost (bps), from lowest cost to highest cost.
Example: 100 / 2,500 means the plan is among the lowest-cost ~4% of the cohort by this measure.
- Confidence (0-1)
-
A reliability indicator. 1.0 means the key fields needed for this scorecard are present and the filing looks usable for ranking.
Lower values mean missing inputs or a filing pattern (like $0 reported plan-paid expenses) that makes the comparison less reliable.
- Total Cost (bps)
-
Plan-level annual expenses expressed as basis points of assets. Roughly: 10 bps = 0.10% = about $10 per $10,000 of plan assets per year.
- Investment Mgmt (bps) and Admin Overhead (bps)
-
Two components of Total Cost. Investment Mgmt is the portion reported as investment management fees.
Admin Overhead is the remainder (recordkeeping/TPA/audit/other admin expenses as reported), grouped as a single bucket.
- Cost / Participant
-
Total plan-level cost divided by active participants. This can make it easier to think about per-person administrative pricing.
Technical details
- Basis points (bps)
bps = (fee / average plan assets) × 10,000.- Average plan assets
- If both beginning-of-year and end-of-year assets are present: (BOY + EOY)/2. Otherwise, EOY assets.
- Total Cost (bps)
tot_admin_expenses_amt / avg assets × 10,000.- Investment Mgmt (bps)
invst_mgmt_fees_amt / avg assets × 10,000.- Admin Overhead (bps)
- (
tot_admin_expenses_amt – invst_mgmt_fees_amt) / avg assets × 10,000.
- Cost / Participant
tot_admin_expenses_amt / tot_active_partcp_cnt.- Cohort Rank and percentile
-
Eligible plans are sorted by
total_plan_cost_bps ascending. Percentile is computed from index position (0 = best, 100 = worst).
- Final Score
final_score = max(0, 100 – cohort_percentile).- Confidence
-
confidence = fraction of required fields present:
tot_admin_expenses_amt, invst_mgmt_fees_amt, tot_assets_eoy_amt, tot_active_partcp_cnt.
Filings that report TOT_ADMIN_EXPENSES_AMT as $0 are treated as not scorable and confidence is capped.
