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Lowes 401(k) retirement plan: the investment options
Does your 401(k) vote the way you would? $5.94bn of the $9.16bn in the Lowes 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 Lowes 401(k) holds $9.16bn. Of the $5.96bn we could identify from the plan’s own filing, 99.7% sits in funds that publish no record of how they voted your shares — collective trusts, which unlike a mutual fund file no Form N-PX and leave no public trace of a single vote.
SourceLowes’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lowe s Companies, Inc.listed as “Common Stock **” | Directly held shares | Voted by the plan trustee | $3.10bn |
| Vanguard Target Retirement 2035 Trust Alisted as “Collective Trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $781m |
| Vanguard Target Retirement 2050 Trust Alisted as “Collective Trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $756m |
| Vanguard Target Retirement 2045 Trust Alisted as “Collective Trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $752m |
| Vanguard Target Retirement 2040 Trust Alisted as “Collective Trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $702m |
| Vanguard Target Retirement 2030 Trust Alisted as “Collective Trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $696m |
| Vanguard Target Retirement 2025 Trust Alisted as “Collective Trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $457m |
| Vanguard Target Retirement 2055 Trust Alisted as “Collective Trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $393m |
| Vanguard Target Retirement 2060 Trust Alisted as “Collective Trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $244m |
| State Street S&P 500 Index Securities Lending Series Fund Class IIlisted as “Collective Trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $239m |
| Vanguard Target Retirement 2020 Trust Alisted as “Collective Trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $186m |
| Vanguard Target Retirement 2065 Trust Alisted as “Collective Trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $146m |
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 Lowes 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 Lowes; 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 100% 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.