You Own Wall Street › Employer plans › Microsoft
Microsoft 401(k) retirement plan: the investment options
Does your 401(k) vote the way you would? $53.18bn of the $64.92bn in the Microsoft 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 Microsoft 401(k) holds $64.92bn. Of the $53.18bn 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.
SourceMicrosoft’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vanguard S&P 500 Index Trustlisted as “Common collective trust” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $10.32bn |
| Fidelity Growth Company Pool Class S **listed as “Common collective trust” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $8.25bn |
| BrokerageLink *listed as “Participant-directed accounts” | Brokerage window | Whatever the saver buys | $6.60bn |
| BlackRock LifePath Index 2050 Unitized Account Mlisted as “Common collective trust” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $6.42bn |
| Microsoft Common Stock **listed as “Equity” | Employer stock | Voted by the plan trustee | $5.14bn |
| BlackRock LifePath Index 2040 Unitized Account Mlisted as “Common collective trust” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $5.06bn |
| Vanguard Russell 1000 Growth Index Trustlisted as “Common collective trust” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $4.79bn |
| Fidelity Contrafund Pool Class S **listed as “Common collective trust” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $4.44bn |
| BlackRock LifePath Index 2060 Unitized Account Mlisted as “Common collective trust” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $2.76bn |
| Vanguard Russell 1000 Value Index Trustlisted as “Common collective trust” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $2.44bn |
| BlackRock LifePath Index 2030 Unitized Account Mlisted as “Common collective trust” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $2.24bn |
| BlackRock LifePath Index 2055 Unitized Account Mlisted as “Common collective trust” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $2.16bn |
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 Microsoft 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 Microsoft; 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.