Plan Features to Prioritize Now for 2026
As plan sponsors and advisors close out the year, many are looking forward to what’s in store for their retirement plans in 2026.
While 2025 saw an expansion of automatic savings features in defined contribution (DC) plans, an increased focus on managed accounts, and improved financial wellness programs, Halley Love, the national managing director for Defined Contribution at Bernstein Retirement, sees the retirement industry moving towards a renewed focus on pooled employer plans (PEPs), incoming provisions created in SECURE 2.0 legislation, and a push towards participant engagement beyond auto-enrollment features in the new year.
Those who act now can enhance compliance, improve competitiveness for recruitment and retention, and better serve their participants in the new year, at a time when budgets, governance agendas, and participation communications are being formed for the new year, Love says.
Below, let’s take a look at last-minute items employers and their plan advisors should review before wrapping up the year.
Take advantage of SECURE 2.0 catch-ups
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) originally scheduled Roth catch-up contribution requirements under SECURE 2.0 to go into effect on January 1, 2024, but then delayed the regulation until December 31, 2025, following severe complaints by industry organizations.
Beginning on January 1, 2026, 401(k), 403(b), and governmental 457(a) plan participants who are or have reached 50-years-old and who earn $145,000 or over in 2025 will have to make any catch-up contributions to their retirement accounts on a Roth basis.
While Roth retirement strategies have been around since the 1990s and the Roth 401(k) was itself invented in 2006, the feature has been severely underutilized, Love states.
“Roth has been a feature in plans for years, but there’s been a lot of inertia. There hasn’t been a good adoption rate, and so now it’s forced to be in there whether you like it or not,” Love says.
Plan sponsors should take this period to familiarize themselves with the upcoming regulation and understand how it could be marketed it to plan participants, whether that means spotlighting the tax diversification or increasing take-home pay.
It also opens the conversation for plan sponsors to recognize their plan’s missing components. Coming off open enrollment season, employers have an opportunity to understand what benefits are working in their plan and what’s not. “They’re either keenly either aware of how their retirement plan is, or how next year it could be better or different,” Love says.
Engaging participants with PEPs
Pooled employer plans (PEPs) will continue to see momentum in 2026 as small to midsize employers revisit vendor contracts and fiduciary agendas.
The plans have been lauded for its costs and ability to reduce administrative burdens on plan sponsors while transferring key fiduciary responsibilities. A survey from Transamerica in 2024 found that 47% of 400 employers used a PEP to enact their first workplace retirement savings plan.
Rather than being inundated with administrative tasks, employers who adopt PEPs can spend that time implementing personalized communication strategies and financial wellness targets for participants.
“What gets us excited about a plan that is adopting an employer and a PEP is that it gets right to the heart of participant engagement. When you think about how committee meetings may go or the fiduciary meetings, you’re not talking about how testing went, or how the audit season is going, or the required notifications, that’s all handled. We can get right into outcomes for employees and how we can be tailoring the information in that sense,” Love adds.
Boosting engagement
Implementing automatic features is no longer the benchmark for plan success—now sponsors must successfully measure engagement, too.
Studies say participants want rewarding plan benefits and will move on to different employers to find them. A 2025 study from HUB found that nearly three in four employees would be more inclined to stay with their employer if the plan benefits reflected their personal needs.
This includes expanding financial wellness initiatives and advice, implementing work-life balance and flexibility strategies, and offering healthcare features like health savings accounts (HSAs) and flexible spending accounts (FSAs).
“We know that when an employee feels engaged, they’re getting proactive advice, their communications are customized and tailored, they make better decisions,” Love notes. “We’re seeing plan sponsors make sure the engagement strategies are right for the participants.”
Amanda Umpierrez is the Managing Editor of 401(k) Specialist magazine. She is a financial services reporter with nearly a decade of experience and a passion for telling stories and reporting news. She is originally from Queens, New York, but now resides in Denver, Colorado.