The Form 5500 Late Filer Report

Every year, tens of thousands of retirement and welfare plans file their Form 5500 after the final deadline has passed. Admin316 analyzed 358,429 Form 5500 filings released by the U.S. Department of Labor for plan years 2023 and 2024 to answer one question: how often does the annual report actually land late, and who does it happen to?

Method

Source: the DOL/EBSA public Form 5500 datasets (F_5500_2023_Latest and F_5500_2024_Latest, retrieved August 19, 2026). We used each filing’s plan year end (FORM_TAX_PRD) and the date the filing was received (DATE_RECEIVED). The statutory deadline is the last day of the seventh month after the plan year ends; a Form 5558 extension adds two and a half months. Because the public file does not reliably record whether a 5558 was filed, we credited every filer with the full extension — October 15 for a calendar-year plan. This is deliberately conservative: the real late-filing rate is higher than what follows.

Plan year 2023 is a complete cycle. Plan year 2024 is still filling in, so treat its numbers as preliminary and directionally low.

When filings actually arrive

The most striking number is not the late rate — it is the extension rate. For plan year 2023, 56.4% of all filings landed in the extension window rather than by the original deadline. The extension has quietly become the default schedule, which leaves no slack when something goes wrong in September.

How late is late?

Among plan year 2023 filings that missed the extended deadline, the median filing arrived 161 days past October 15, and the slowest ten percent arrived 407 days or more past it. 2,087 filings were over a year late. Late filing is rarely a near miss; once a plan slips, it tends to slip badly.

Plan size does not protect you

The comfortable assumption is that late filings are a small-plan problem. They are not.

The spread between the best and worst size bands is under two percentage points. A 900-participant plan was about as likely to file late as a 30-participant plan. What separates them is not headcount — it is whether someone owns the deadline.

Where late filings cluster

Ten highest late-filing rates by sponsor state, plan year 2023 (states with 500+ filings):

What it costs

The IRS penalty for a late Form 5500 runs to $25 per day up to $15,000 per return, and the DOL’s penalty is assessed per day with no statutory cap — over $2,600 a day under the current adjusted figures. The DFVC Program caps the DOL exposure at a few thousand dollars per plan, which is why 4,019 plan year 2023 filers used it. The pattern in the data is clear: the sponsors who self-correct pay hundreds; the ones who wait to be found pay five and six figures.

Why this keeps happening

In our administration practice the cause is almost never negligence. It is ownership. The Form 5500 sits at the intersection of the recordkeeper, the auditor, the payroll system and the plan sponsor, and in most plans no single party is contractually responsible for the filing hitting the deadline. The plan sponsor signs it, but the sponsor is usually a CFO or HR director with a day job. When a census is late or an audit slips, the deadline is the thing that gives.

That is the specific gap an ERISA 3(16) plan administrator closes. When a 3(16) administrator is named in the plan document — and when a 402(a) named fiduciary is appointed alongside it — responsibility for the compliance calendar, the signature and the filing moves off the employer and onto a party whose job it is. Admin316 signs and files the Form 5500 for the plans it administers. That is not a service add-on; it is the point.