Story by Celia Bernhardt, Sarah Nassauer
The tax benefits of putting money into a 401(k) are well known. But not all 401(k) plans are created equal.
Take Costco, for instance. Many thousands of the retailer’s front-line, hourly workers have managed to amass over $1 million in their 401(k) accounts, thanks in part to a contribution that Costco makes whether or not the employees themselves are putting money in.
For employees with at least a year of service, Costco contributes an amount equivalent to 4% of their pay. That rises as employees accrue tenure, so workers who have been with Costco for 25 years or more receive a 9% contribution. The company also has a small match that allows employees to receive up to an additional $500 annually if they contribute $1,000.
For Costco, it’s one of the ways, alongside inexpensive healthcare and higher-than-normal hourly wages, that it retains experienced employees. The company places a premium on keeping turnover low, a strategy its founders believed would reduce costs associated with training new hires and lead to better customer service.
Some companies go far and beyond, offering jealousy-inducing match rates to win over prime talent. Employers in specialized fields who want to stay neck-in-neck with their rivals often conduct benchmark surveys to assess what kind of benefits are most attractive to their staff and what is offered by other companies.
Here’s a look at other better-than-usual retirement benefits offered by employers across industries.
A high match rate
The average company 401(k) match is about 4.7% of eligible salary, according to a Vanguard analysis of plans it manages. Only 6% of those plans offered a promised matching contribution totaling 7% or above in 2025.
A select few employers hungry for talent go well beyond that.
Southwest Airlines, for example, offered a dollar-for-dollar match of up to 9.3% of employees’ salaries in 2024. Boeing boasts an even higher one of 10%.
Competing credit-card giants Visa and Mastercard offer better than a dollar-for-dollar match. Visa will put in $2 for every $1 that an employee deposits in their 401(k), up to the first 5% of their pay; Mastercard puts in $1.67 for every $1 on the first 6%. Both of those add up to a 10% total employer contribution, but employees don’t need to put away as much in order to get it.
Although the most important number is that 10% total match, the warp speed matching rates are attractive, said Chris West, a managing director at human-resources consulting firm WTW.
“It’s distinctive,” West said. “It probably creates really strong incentives for employees to contribute. It’s also really easy to communicate.”
Nonelective contributions
With a limited matching program, the strength of Costco’s 401(k) lies in its nonelective—or nonmatching—contributions.
Nonmatching contributions are often structured as profit-sharing plans or, less commonly, as an employee stock ownership plan. Of the plans included in Vanguard’s report, 37% used both matching and nonmatching contributions; 11% used solely the latter.
Tobacco company Altria Group matches employees up to 3%—but add that to its profit-sharing plan and workers get a whopping 13% to 17% employer contribution in total. The Aerospace Corp., a nonprofit government contractor, also uses a 3% match but provides a total of 12% for the longest-tenured employees through added nonelective contributions.
The practice is more common in some fields than others. Legal-services firms are disproportionately likely to opt for nonmatching contributions alone, according to Vanguard data.
Unionized workers at Ford and General Motors receive a 10% nonelective contribution as their retirement plan. The employer contributions were bumped up from 6.4% as part of contract negotiations in 2023. Both automakers transitioned away from offering pensions to new hires about two decades ago.
An employee stock ownership plan, a specialized retirement plan to which a company contributes shares of its stock, is often offered in combination with a 401(k). ESOPs are most common in sectors including manufacturing, construction and engineering. The structure is thought to give workers a sense of investment in a company’s success and, in some circumstances, provides the business a tax break.
Publix, a Florida-based grocer, automatically provides employees with shares of the company’s stock after they have clocked in 1,000 hours within a year and offers an option for them to purchase more.
Stewart’s Shops, a regional gas and ice-cream chain in Vermont and upstate New York, operates an ESOP-only program in lieu of a 401(k). The company says its employees have seen retirement contributions of 17% on average in the past five years.
Publix and Stewart’s both say that some of their cashiers have become millionaires through stock ownership. Stewart’s puts the number at over 200.
Student-loan benefits
Boeing’s benefits don’t stop with a good match—it is among a growing group of employers that allow workers to receive matching contributions for some of their student-loan payments. A Boeing worker who puts 10% of their salary toward paying off a qualified loan will get a matching amount from the company in their 401(k).
It’s a relatively new program launched after the passage of the federal Secure 2.0 Act in 2022. That bill expanded the features employers can include in their retirement plans. Among the many other companies that have hopped on the bandwagon are Verizon, Chipotle, Comcast, Walgreens and News Corp, publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
Write to Celia Bernhardt at celia.bernhardt@wsj.com and Sarah Nassauer at Sarah.Nassauer@wsj.com