You Own Wall Street › Employer plans › Northern Trust
Northern Trust 401(k) retirement plan: the investment options
Does your 401(k) vote the way you would? $1.85bn of the $3.07bn in the Northern Trust 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
Northern Trust 401(k) match and balances, from the filing
- Company money in
- about $3,520 per active participant
- $34m in plan year 2024
- Employees saved
- about $13,750 each
- $133m in plan year 2024
- Average balance
- $239,300
- 13,938 people with a balance
- In the plan
- $3.34bn
- at the end of plan year 2024
Company money is the match plus any other employer contributions, averaged over all 9,702 active participants, including anyone who did not contribute. The filing reports dollars, not the match formula; the plan’s summary plan description states the formula.
SourceThe plan’s annual report to the Department of Labor — Form 5500, Schedule H, plan year 2024 · filed by THE NORTHERN TRUST COMPANY as “THE NORTHERN TRUST COMPANY THRIFT-INCENTIVE PLAN” · EIN 361561860, plan number 002 · search the filings
The Northern Trust 401(k) holds $3.07bn. Of the $1.85bn 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.
SourceNorthern Trust’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3,563,370listed as “Northern Trust Collective S P 500 Index Fund*” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $961m |
| 3,589,918listed as “T. Rowe Price Institutional U.S. Structured Research Fund” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $256m |
| 2,264,551listed as “Northern Trust Corporation*” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $232m |
| 1,036,127listed as “Northern Trust Collective All Country World ex-US Investable Market Index Fund*” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $198m |
| 872,230listed as “Northern Trust Collective S P 400 Index Fund*” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $168m |
| 1,212,067listed as “Jennison U.S. Small Mid Cap Equity Fund” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $128m |
| 1,123,679listed as “Northern Trust Collective Aggregate Bond Index Fund*” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $120m |
| 5,555,486listed as “BlackRock LifePath Index 2045 Fund” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $107m |
| 646,943listed as “Northern Trust Collective Russell 2000 Index Fund*” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $105m |
| 6,081,335listed as “BlackRock LifePath Index 2035 Fund” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $104m |
| 5,834,435listed as “BlackRock LifePath Index 2030 Fund” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $93m |
| 5,100,880listed as “BlackRock LifePath Index 2040 Fund” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $93m |
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 Northern Trust 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 Northern Trust; 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 62.4% 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.