If you have a 401(k) or other retirement plan at work, your employer may match some or all of your contributions. For example, the company may provide 50 cents for every dollar you save, up to 6 percent of your annual salary.
To encourage employees to stay loyal, your plan may include vesting requirements that you must meet to keep the extra money your employer contributes. Keep vesting in mind as you consider the impact of changing jobs.
Vesting is the process through which you gradually take ownership of a payment or benefit. In this case, it involves becoming the owner of any employer contributions to your workplace retirement account after a certain period. If you quit or are fired before that time has passed, you forfeit money to your employer. Vesting doesn’t apply to your own contributions to the retirement plan.
There are two approaches for time-based vesting. With a cliff schedule, it’s all or nothing. If you leave your job before working the number of years that your employer requires, you lose all the employer contributions. Once you pass the threshold, you get to keep everything.
Alternatively, your plan may use a graded schedule that unlocks a percentage of your employer’s matching contributions for every month or year you’ve worked. If your plan follows a four-year graded schedule, for example, you unlock 25 percent of the contributions per year before qualifying to keep everything after four years.
Say you receive $1,000 a year from your employer for the retirement plan, and after two years you have $2,000 of employer contributions. You then quit. If your plan uses a three-year cliff, you will forfeit all $2,000 because you haven’t reached the three-year limit yet. If your plan uses a four-year graded schedule, you keep 50 percent of the employer contributions.
You need to clear the plan vesting requirements only once. After you reach the required years of employment, all future employer contributions are 100 percent yours.
Federal rules cap the amount of time that workplace retirement plans can require you to stay with an employer to become fully vested. Three years is the longest a cliff vesting schedule can last; six years is the longest period a plan can use for a graded schedule. Your employer may choose to use shorter limits or even have no vesting at all.
Certain other rules apply, too. You must be fully vested by the time you reach the target retirement age listed in your plan. For instance, if your 401(k) lists a target retirement age of 65 and you join the plan at age 63, you’ll be fully vested within two years.
Additionally, if your employer shuts down the retirement plan, you immediately become 100 percent vested for all past employer contributions. If your employer lays off more than 20 percent of employees participating in the retirement plan, all affected employees are fully vested (employees who are not laid off are still subject to the standard vesting rules).
