Retirement Plan Participation Decreasing
November 13, 2007
The Employee Benefit Research Institute recently reported that fewer employees are participating in company sponsored retirement plans but that decrease may be due to the fact that fewer employers are actually offering retirement plans to their employees.
Those employees who are participating in the various plans declined in 2006. The decline was steep. A full 2 percent fewer employees (those who work full time and for the full year) are no longer involved in plans.
Full time-full year workers are considered by most experts to be those who are most connected to the general work force and are those most likely to participate in employer-provided retirement plans. According to the report, 53 percent of full time, full year wage-and-salary employees who are between the ages of 21 to 64 participated in an employer-provided plan in 2006, down from 55 percent in 2005.
When the report looked at all types of employees, including part-time workers, the percent who are in an employer sponsored retirement program declined to 40 percent in 2006, as opposed to 41 percent in 2005. The most recent high was in 2000 when 44 percent participated in these plans.
In 2006, of the 156 million workers in the U.S., nearly 80 million were employed by an employer who offered some form of retirement plan. A little over 60 million of those actually joined in the plans that were offered. In 2000, there were nearly 67 million participants in these types of plans