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National Grid 401(k) retirement plan: the investment options

Does your 401(k) vote the way you would? $6.97bn of the $7.38bn in the National Grid 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 National Grid 401(k) holds $7.38bn. Of the $6.97bn 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.

SourceNational Grid’s own annual retirement-plan filing with the SEC (Form 11-K, Schedule of Assets) · open the filing

What the plan holdsVehicleVoting recordValue
Vanguard Institutional 500 Index Trustlisted as “Collective Trust Fund” Collective trust or separate account NONE $916m
Vanguard Target Retirement 2030 Trust; Class Alisted as “Collective Trust Fund” Collective trust or separate account NONE $836m
Vanguard Target Retirement 2035 Trust; Class Alisted as “Collective Trust Fund” Collective trust or separate account NONE $623m
Vanguard Target Retirement 2050 Trust; Class Alisted as “Collective Trust Fund” Collective trust or separate account NONE $558m
Vanguard Target Retirement 2025 Trust; Class Alisted as “Collective Trust Fund” Collective trust or separate account NONE $544m
Vanguard Target Retirement 2045 Trust; Class Alisted as “Collective Trust Fund” Collective trust or separate account NONE $493m
Fidelity Managed Income Portfolio II; Class 3listed as “Collective Trust Fund” Collective trust or separate account NONE $480m
Vanguard Target Retirement 2040 Trust; Class Alisted as “Collective Trust Fund” Collective trust or separate account NONE $469m
Vanguard Target Retirement 2055 Trust; Class Alisted as “Collective Trust Fund” Collective trust or separate account NONE $418m
Vanguard Target Retirement 2060 Trust; Class Alisted as “Collective Trust Fund” Collective trust or separate account NONE $269m
National Grid American Depository Receipt (ADR) Fundlisted as “Common Stock” Employer stock Voted by the plan trustee $263m
Vanguard Institutional Extended Market Index Trustlisted as “Collective Trust Fund” Collective trust or separate account NONE $260m

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 National Grid 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 National Grid; 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.

Microsoft 401(k)$64.92bn in the planBank of America 401(k)248,103 savers · $62.90bnJPMorgan Chase 401(k)297,359 savers · $52.91bnGoogle 401(k)154,637 savers · $48.74bnWells Fargo 401(k)$43.80bn in the planAmazon 401(k)943,213 savers · $34.59bnInternational Business Machines 401(k)$28.25bn in the planIntel 401(k)$26.91bn in the planUnited Road Services 401(k)1,307 savers · $51mChico's Fas 401(k)3,177 savers · $195mKomatsu America 401(k)3,963 savers · $510mAstellas Us 401(k)5,532 savers · $1.88bnPeter Kiewit Sons 401(k)28,251 savers · $2.80bnCCL Industries 401(k)5,805 savers · $645m