A new chapter begins

Updated regulatory agendas have few new retirement items 

October 13, 2025
The spring 2025 update to the regulatory agendas for IRS, the Department of Labor (DOL) and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC) contains a few new items related to retirement plans. This article highlights select items of interest, including regulatory projects relating to the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act of 2019 (Div. O of Pub. L. No. 116-94) and SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 (Div. T. of Pub. L. No. 117-328). However, this article omits routine projects and several others for which the only update was an extension of the anticipated completion date from 2025 to 2026 — as is the case for most of the ongoing items. The agendas’ anticipated completion dates are generally aspirational and routinely change as agency priorities shift. 

IRS

IRS’s agenda includes two new items:
  • Section 415(c) compensation
    IRS intends to issue proposed rules modifying the definition of compensation under Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 415(c) relating to back pay for purposes of applying the IRC’s limits on compensation and benefits from qualified retirement plans. IRS regulation Section 1.415(c)-2 currently permits plans to recognize back pay when awarded by a court, administrative agency or through an agreement with an employer to compensate an employee for lost wages, but only to the extent that the wages would otherwise be included in Section 415(c) compensation. The agenda doesn’t explain what prompted the inclusion of this item or what the change to the definition might be.
  • Defined benefit plans’ minimum funding requirements
    The agenda includes a proposal to modify the rules for calculating a single employer defined benefit plan’s minimum funding requirement under IRC Section 430. The proposal would change the calculation of the funding target and target normal cost “to reflect certain legislative changes,” but doesn’t specify which laws.
Additionally, the IRS agenda includes final rules on the following changes made by the SECURE Act and SECURE 2.0:
  • Long-term, part-time employee eligibility
    IRS plans to issue a final rule implementing the new 401(k) plan eligibility requirements for long-term, part-time (LTPT) workers first established by the SECURE Act and modified by SECURE 2.0. After issuing proposed regulations in late 2023, IRS Notice 2024-73 confirmed that final regulations on the LTPT requirements for 401(k) plans won’t apply before the 2026 plan year. The notice also addressed the application of SECURE 2.0’s LTPT requirement to ERISA-covered 403(b) plans, which weren’t included in the proposal. IRS’s agenda doesn’t indicate when the agency expects to propose 403(b) plan LTPT rules.
  • Updates to required minimum distribution rules
    IRS also intends to finalize regulations on remaining changes to the required minimum distribution (RMD) rules for employer-sponsored retirement plans and IRAs under SECURE 2.0, including the required beginning date for participants born in 1959, valuing partial annuities for defined contribution (DC) plan RMDs, RMDs for participants with both pretax and Roth accounts, and other changes.
  • Mandated auto-enrollment for new plans
    The agenda includes a final rule on the requirement that many 401(k) and 403(b) plans established on or after Dec. 29, 2022, include an eligible automatic contribution arrangement feature meeting certain minimum contribution and investment requirements, unless an exemption applies. The requirement applies for plan years starting in 2025 and later. IRS said in the proposal that the final rule would take effect for plan years beginning more than six months after final regulations are published. For earlier plan years, sponsors can rely on a reasonable good-faith interpretation of the statutory provision.
  • “One bad apple” rule for MEPs
    Under the IRC, a violation of the plan qualification requirements by one participating employer in a multiple employer plan (MEP) can jeopardize the entire MEP’s tax-qualified status. The SECURE Act provides relief from this rule for MEPs, including pooled employer plans (PEPs), if benefits and liabilities attributable to the non-compliant employer’s employees (and their beneficiaries) are spun off to a separate qualified plan or individual IRAs. IRS’s agenda includes final regulations on this relief.
IRS’s agenda doesn’t contain an entry for agency guidance implementing the provisions of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (Pub. L. No. 119-21) relating to Trump Accounts, a new kind of tax-preferred savings vehicle for individuals under 18. Starting next July, employer contributions up to $2,500 to the accounts of employees’ dependent children are excludable from an employee’s gross income if made pursuant to a program that meets certain conditions.

DOL

DOL’s agenda includes five new retirement-related items, although three of them were completed before the agenda was published. The remaining two items respond to the Trump administration’s deregulatory initiative under Executive Order 14219:
  • Investment advice fiduciary
    DOL intends to release another iteration of a regulation updating the scope of fiduciary investment advice under ERISA. The current version, finalized in April 2024 under the Biden Administration, would — among other changes — treat as fiduciary advice a one-time recommendation that a participant roll over their retirement benefit or take a distribution. However, the regulation — and related amendments to a slew of prohibited transaction exemptions — have been on hold since July 2024 when two federal courts issued orders preventing them from taking effect.
  • Investment duties regulation
    DOL intends to update current regulations finalized under the Biden Administration allowing ERISA fiduciaries to consider any factor they reasonably determine to be relevant to an investment’s risk and return. That regulation replaced stricter regulations adopted during the first Trump Administration, which stakeholders perceived as discouraging fiduciaries from considering environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors when selecting plan investments and voting proxies. 

SECURE 2.0 items on DOL’s agenda address final regulations on the new prohibited transaction exemption for automatic portability arrangements as well as proposed rules implementing the paper statement requirement and related updates to DOL’s e-disclosure regulations. The agenda also includes proposed rules on the statutory reporting requirements for the Retirement Savings Lost and Found.

DOL’s agenda doesn’t include entries for two recent executive actions directing the agency to issue guidance about retirement plan investments:

  • Alternative assets in DC plans
    An Aug. 7 executive order charges the DOL with taking action aimed at encouraging DC plan fiduciaries to offer participants greater exposure to private equity, digital currencies and other “alternative assets.” The order gives DOL until Feb. 3, 2026, to re-evaluate existing ERISA guidance on asset allocation funds — such as target date and balanced funds — that include these investments and clarify the agency’s views.
  • Foreign adversary investments
    A presidential memorandum issued Feb. 21 directs DOL to publish updated ERISA fiduciary standards for plan investments in public market securities of “foreign adversary companies” but provides no deadline.

PBGC

PBGC’s agenda includes only one non-routine new retirement item: technical corrections to PBGC’s 2022 rule regarding the Special Financial Assistance program for multiemployer plans under the American Rescue Plan Act (Pub. L. No. 117-2). The agenda also contains several ongoing retirement items, including an analysis of comments on a tri-agency request for information implementing a SECURE 2.0 directive to review retirement plans’ reporting and disclosure requirements.

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Margaret Berger
Matthew Calloway
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