Pension plans must warn workers before risky self-directed trades
S. 3083 — Providing Complete Information to Retirement Investors Act · Filed by Jim Banks (R-IN) · 1 cosponsor · Introduced Oct 30, 2025 · Referred to committee
Your members of Congress
Enter a ZIP to see where your representative and both senators stood on this bill.
Looked up on this device — your ZIP is never stored on our servers.
What it does
This bill requires pension plans that offer brokerage windows (allowing workers to invest in securities beyond the plan's curated options) to give participants a four-part warning before each trade: that designated alternatives are fiduciary-vetted, that brokerage-window investments are not, that self-directed picks may underperform and carry higher fees and risk, and a graph showing projected retirement balances at 4%, 6%, and 8% annual returns. The bill takes effect January 1, 2026.
Why we flagged it
The bill's operative mechanism is a mandatory disclosure requirement—a fiduciary-duty-aligned notice that workers must acknowledge before using brokerage windows. It is a consumer-protection measure, not a subsidy, carve-out, or deregulation.
What the text implies
- Brokerage-window usage may decline if repeated warnings deter participants from self-directed investing, reducing trading volume and fee capture by custodians and brokers offering those windows.
- Plan sponsors may face modest compliance costs (notice design, system integration to trigger acknowledgments) but these are routine fiduciary-duty expenses.
The full analysis lists 3 implications of this text.
Who it affects
Ordinary workers gain transparency about the risks of self-directed investing outside their plan's curated menu—a genuine information asymmetry that can lead to poor retirement outcomes. The notice is mandatory and repeated, reducing the chance workers stumble into high-risk, high-fee investments without understanding the trade-off.