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Sherwin Williams 401(k) retirement plan: the investment options
Does your 401(k) vote the way you would? $4.71bn of the $10.31bn in the Sherwin Williams 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
Sherwin Williams 401(k) match and balances, from the filing
- Company money in
- about $3,390 per active participant
- $160m in plan year 2024
- Employees saved
- about $5,870 each
- $278m in plan year 2024
- Average balance
- $172,900
- 61,101 people with a balance
- In the plan
- $10.56bn
- at the end of plan year 2024
Company money is the match plus any other employer contributions, averaged over all 47,319 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 SHERWIN-WILLIAMS COMPANY as “THE SHERWIN-WILLIAMS COMPANY 401(K) PLAN” · EIN 340526850, plan number 001 · search the filings
The Sherwin Williams 401(k) holds $10.31bn. Of the $4.71bn 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.
SourceSherwin Williams’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Sherwin-Williams Companylisted as “Company Stock Fund ( 14,886,577 shares) **” | Employer stock | Voted by the plan trustee | $4.82bn |
| Fidelity Management Trust Companylisted as “Fidelity Contrafund Commingled Pool **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $608m |
| Vanguard Group, Inc.listed as “Vanguard Institutional 500 Index Trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $564m |
| T. Rowe Price Trust Companylisted as “T. Rowe Price Retirement 2035 Fund **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $406m |
| T. Rowe Price Trust Companylisted as “T. Rowe Price Retirement 2030 Fund **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $405m |
| T. Rowe Price Trust Companylisted as “T. Rowe Price Retirement 2040 Fund **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $388m |
| T. Rowe Price Trust Companylisted as “T. Rowe Price Retirement 2050 Fund **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $361m |
| T. Rowe Price Trust Companylisted as “T. Rowe Price Retirement 2045 Fund **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $350m |
| T. Rowe Price Trust Companylisted as “T. Rowe Price Retirement 2055 Fund **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $317m |
| T. Rowe Price Trust Companylisted as “T. Rowe Price Retirement 2025 Fund **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $251m |
| T. Rowe Price Trust Companylisted as “T. Rowe Price Retirement 2060 Fund **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $214m |
| Vanguard Group, Inc.listed as “Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Index Fund Institutional Plus Shares **” | Not identified from the filing | Not counted either way | $195m |
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 Sherwin Williams 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 Sherwin Williams; 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 95% 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.