By Amy Feldman

How Does Your Plan Rank?

Is my 401(k) any good? Is it terrible? How does it stack up? Those are the questions that many employees invested in their company’s retirement plan want to know, especially after the rollercoaster ride of the past year. To answer them, we turned to San Diego-based BrightScope, a startup company that has been analyzing—and rating—the nation’s corporate 401(k) plans.

BrightScope’s process begins with the paperwork filed with the Labor Department and Securities and Exchange Commission, and other sources. To determine plan rankings, BrightScope developed a quantitative model that takes into account more than 200 factors, and runs algorithms on them, to come up with a single overall rating, on a scale of 1 to 100, for each plan. Key factors include the company’s generosity to its employees, its investment choices within the 401(k) plan, and the plan’s fees. BrightScope also gives each plan six component ratings (on fees, average account balance, and etcetera) that range from "great" to "poor," so that participants (and plan administrators) can more easily see where the 401(k)s strengths and weaknesses lie.

In this slideshow, we’ve culled the ratings by sector, showing you the best and worst 401(k) plans with at least $100 million in assets, among the more than 26,000 such plans that BrightScope rates, in 17 major sectors. We also show the runner-ups for those titles of best and worst. Some industries, such as retail, which tilt toward lower-paid hourly workers, tend to have lower contribution rates and lower balances. Wal-Mart (WMT), which runs the largest plan in the country ranked by employees in it, with roughly 1 million participants, gets a BrightScope rating of just 28. On the other hand, the lucrative oil sector abounds with top-notch plans, such as those from Saudi Aramco (rated 93) and ExxonMobil (XOM) (rated 86).

Unfortunately, there is a caveat. BrightScope relies on each company’s own choice of NAICS code—the official government-designed code to identify different industries—in regulatory filings to do its sector rankings. Choosing a code, especially for a company that has (or used to have) multiple business lines, is more of an art than a science. In some cases, companies appear to have chosen rather oddly. Even with that caveat, these rankings are, for 401(k) plans, the best that there is.

It’s up to you to put together the building blocks in your 401(k) plan in a way that creates a secure retirement regardless of whether your plan rates well or poorly on BrightScope. But it’s easier to do that if your company does the right things by the plan, offering solid investment options with low fees, automatic enrollment and—especially in these tight times—a generous company match.