Roadmap to Retirement: When Your Employer or Plan Changes

A private retirement plan can change its rules or terminate at any time. These changes can occur for a variety of reasons: during company mergers, to streamline plan administration, to improve plan features, or to reduce costs.

While private retirement plans cannot change plan rules to reduce benefits that have been earned as of the date of the change, plan rules can be modified to reduce future benefit accruals and contributions.

If a plan terminates, participants are usually entitled to all benefits they have earned. However, if yours is a traditional or hybrid pension plan that ends without enough money to pay all promised benefits, your benefit will be limited to the amount guaranteed by the federal private pension insurance program, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

Changes to your plan

• When a Plan is Amended (Internal Revenue Service, IRS)
• When Future Benefit Accruals Will Be Significantly Reduced (IRS). All plan participants must be notified of a reduction in future benefit accruals
• Guidance on the Anti-Cutback Rules of Section 411(d)(6) (IRS). Federal law prevents cuts to benefits already earned, with a few exceptions for financially troubled plans.
• Pension Freezes (Pension Rights Center, PRC). This fact sheet discusses types of pension freezes.
• What happens when a pension is transferred to an insurance company? (PRC)
• Fact Sheet: Abandoned Individual Account Plan Final Regulations and Class Exemption (Department of Labor, (DOL))
• Abandoned Plan Search. You can search to find a plan you believe may be abandoned.