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Costco Wholesale 401(k) retirement plan: the investment options
Does your 401(k) vote the way you would? $13.30bn of the $17.62bn in the Costco Wholesale plan votes in secret. Fidelity 500 Index Fund, the most common fund in the plans we track, publishes every vote: answer 3 of its ballots, then see your result.
The question on the ballot
As filed
The Costco Wholesale 401(k) holds $17.62bn. Of the $13.30bn we could identify from the plan’s own filing, every dollar sits in a fund that publishes no record of how it voted your shares — collective trusts, which unlike a mutual fund file no Form N-PX and leave no public trace of a single vote.
SourceCostco Wholesale’s own annual retirement-plan filing with the SEC (Form 11-K, Schedule of Assets) · open the filing
| What the plan holds | Vehicle | Voting record | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| T. Rowe Pricelisted as “TRP Ret 2045 Active Trust K **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $2.02bn |
| T. Rowe Pricelisted as “TRP Ret 2040 Active Trust K **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $1.76bn |
| T. Rowe Pricelisted as “TRP Ret 2055 Active Trust K **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $1.74bn |
| State Streetlisted as “S&P 500 Index Securities Lending Series Fund Class X **” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $1.73bn |
| T. Rowe Pricelisted as “TRP Ret 2035 Active Trust K **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $1.51bn |
| T. Rowe Pricelisted as “TRP Ret 2050 Active Trust K **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $1.43bn |
| T. Rowe Pricelisted as “TRP Ret 2030 Active Trust K **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $1.40bn |
| Wellingtonlisted as “CIF II Growth S5 **” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $1.33bn |
| T. Rowe Pricelisted as “TRP Ret 2060 Active Trust K **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $985m |
| T. Rowe Pricelisted as “TRP Ret 2025 Active Trust K **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $862m |
| Capital Grouplisted as “New Perspective Trust U3 **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $629m |
| PIMCOlisted as “Income Institutional **” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $611m |
The 12 largest holdings in the plan. “Vehicle” is the description the filing itself gives each investment.
Why there is nothing to show
A mutual fund has to file Form N-PX every year listing every vote it cast on your behalf. A collective investment trust does not. It is a bank-run vehicle sold only inside retirement plans, it is cheaper, and it is now where most 401(k) default money sits — including most target-date funds, which is where savers who never chose anything are put.
So the shares bought with Costco Wholesale employees’ retirement savings are voted every proxy season — on executive pay, on board seats, on climate and workforce proposals — and there is no public document anywhere recording how. This is not an oversight by Costco Wholesale; it is what the disclosure rules currently require, which is to say: nothing.
What you can do
Check whether your plan offers any registered fund as an alternative — those publish their records, and you can read them here. If it does not, the menu itself is the thing that has to change, and that is a decision made by the plan’s fiduciary committee, not by you alone.
See how funds that do publish voted →
CoverageWe classified 77.3% of this plan’s assets from the filing. The figure above is the share of the money we could classify; anything we could not identify is excluded from it rather than assumed either way.
Other employer plans
The largest employer plans on the site, and a few more. Each page shows what the plan’s funds did with the shares its savers paid for.