# BrightScope in 2026: Where the 401(k) Ratings Went

*FiduciarySignal — updated 2026-10-05. Canonical: https://www.fiduciarysignal.com/alternatives/brightscope*

BrightScope is now part of ISS Market Intelligence, sold as "MarketPro Retirement powered by BrightScope" — an institutional distribution-intelligence platform for asset managers, insurers, recordkeepers, and plan advisors. As of 2026-09-13, brightscope.com redirects to issmarketintelligence.com and the per-plan rating URL we tested returned HTTP 404. That is a dated observation of the tested URL, not proof that every rating page is unavailable. Pricing is not published. Advisors who used those pages for prospecting need a different tool; FiduciarySignal grades any plan from its Form 5500 and ranks a territory by the odds of a winnable provider change — trustee, custodian, recordkeeper or administrator.

If you came here after typing "brightscope 401k" into a search box and landing somewhere unfamiliar, you are not imagining it. For years BrightScope was the one place on the public internet where anyone — advisor, participant, journalist, HR director — could pull up a named company's 401(k) plan and see a rating, a fee read, and a peer comparison, free, with no login. The rating URL we tested did not serve a plan page on 2026-09-13. This page lays out what the brand is today, exactly what we observed when we went looking for the old pages, what the various "brightscope 5500" and "brightscope data" searches are actually after, and what an advisor can use now. Fair warning on bias: we build a competing product, so every factual claim below carries a source URL and the date we looked.

## What is BrightScope today?

BrightScope is no longer a standalone company or a consumer website. It survives as a data asset and a product name inside **ISS Market Intelligence**, where the retirement product is sold as "MarketPro Retirement powered by BrightScope." Its published audience is institutional — asset managers, insurance companies, recordkeepers, and plan advisors — rather than the general public that used to read the rating pages.

The platform publishes real scale. Its own product page claims coverage of **797K DC plans covering over $7.1T in assets** (with 75K plans and $6.0T in assets carrying full investment detail) and **695K+ active CRDs** — meaning plans are linked to advisors by their actual registration numbers rather than by name matching. That is genuine entity resolution, and it is a harder problem than most people outside the data business assume.

Source: [issmarketintelligence.com — MarketPro Retirement powered by BrightScope](https://www.issmarketintelligence.com/solutions/marketpro/marketpro-retirement-powered-by-brightscope/) (as published, observed 2026-09-13).

## What happened to the free BrightScope 401(k) plan pages?

We checked rather than guessed. Here is exactly what we observed on 2026-09-13, requesting each URL directly:

| URL requested | What we observed on 2026-09-13 |
|---|---|
| https://www.brightscope.com/ | HTTP 301 redirect to https://www.issmarketintelligence.com/ (which returns 200) |
| https://www.brightscope.com/401k-rating/105047/Costco-Wholesale-Corporation/104525/Costco-401k-Retirement-Plan/ | HTTP 404 |
| https://www.brightscope.com/sitemap.xml | HTTP 404 |
| https://www.brightscope.com/robots.txt | HTTP 404 |

Source: direct HTTP requests to [BrightScope](https://www.brightscope.com/), [https://www.brightscope.com/401k-rating/105047/Costco-Wholesale-Corporation/104525/Costco-401k-Retirement-Plan/](https://www.brightscope.com/401k-rating/105047/Costco-Wholesale-Corporation/104525/Costco-401k-Retirement-Plan/), [sitemap.xml](https://www.brightscope.com/sitemap.xml), and [robots.txt](https://www.brightscope.com/robots.txt) (observed 2026-09-13). On that date, the root redirected to ISS and the other three URLs returned HTTP 404. The tested rating page was unavailable in those requests; these results do not establish whether other rating pages moved, require login, or were temporarily unavailable.

The truth is, we could find no announcement — from BrightScope, from ISS, from anyone — stating when or why the public per-plan ratings were retired. So we are not going to print a shutdown date, and you should be skeptical of any page that does. What we can say, dated and checkable, is what the server returned when we asked. If those pages come back, this page is wrong and we will update it.

Worth noting for context: the long-running joint research series with the Investment Company Institute continues, now published as the ICI/ISS MI Defined Contribution Plan Profile rather than under the BrightScope name. Source: [ici.org — BrightScope/ICI DC Plan Profile topic page](https://www.ici.org/topics/brightscopeici-dc-plan-profile) (observed 2026-09-13). The underlying database is alive and respected. The free storefront is what went away.

## What were people actually using BrightScope for?

Three distinct jobs, and it is worth separating them because the replacements differ.

- **"brightscope 401k" — the rating lookup.** A participant, a job candidate comparing offers, or an HR person wanting to know whether their company's plan was any good. The BrightScope rating was the only free, plain-English answer on the open web.
- **"brightscope 5500" — the filing shortcut.** Advisors and journalists used the plan pages as a friendlier front end to Form 5500 data: fees, providers, participant counts, without parsing federal filings themselves.
- **"brightscope data" — the prospecting use.** Advisors used plan pages as free, ad-hoc research before a call: who the recordkeeper is, roughly what the plan pays, how it stacks up. Never a territory workflow, but genuinely useful before a meeting.

Only the third job is a prospecting job, and it is the one this site exists to do. The first two are lookup jobs, and the honest answer for them is below.

## Where can you look up a 401(k) plan now?

The data never went anywhere — only the friendly interface did. Every ERISA-covered plan still files a Form 5500 with the Department of Labor each year, and those filings remain public and free. You can search them with territory filters and export results to CSV through the DOL's own [EFAST2 Form 5500 Series Search](https://www.efast.dol.gov/5500Search/), and you can download the full annual datasets from the [DOL's Form 5500 Datasets page](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-activities/public-disclosure/foia/form-5500-datasets). Free, no subscription, no login to search.

The catch is the one everyone discovers on day two: a raw filing is not a rating. It is a stack of coded schedules that do not join themselves, with no peer group attached. Knowing a plan paid a given amount in administrative expense tells you nothing until you know what genuinely comparable plans — same industry, same size band, same filing year — paid. That comparison was the actual product BrightScope's public pages delivered, and it is the part that has to be rebuilt by somebody.

Form 5500s can be filed up to seven months after plan-year end, with extensions to October 15 — so public filing data is typically 6 to 18 months old by the time anyone can search it, per the filing mechanics published on [EFAST2](https://www.efast.dol.gov/).

## Is ISS MarketPro the right replacement for an advisor?

For some buyers, absolutely — and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Credit where it is due: ISS supplements DOL filings with additional sources to produce fund-level investment-menu detail that raw Form 5500 data does not contain, and its linkage of plans to advisors by CRD is real entity resolution rather than name matching. Very few products in this space can say either thing. If you are an asset manager mapping distribution, an insurer sizing a market, or a recordkeeper tracking competitive share, that depth is exactly what you are paying for.

The fit question for an individual advisor is different, and it comes down to two things. First, shape: MarketPro is market-intelligence software — built to answer "what does this market look like," not "which eleven sponsors should I call Tuesday." Second, procurement: no price is published anywhere on the product page; every path is a demo request. Source: [issmarketintelligence.com — MarketPro Retirement](https://www.issmarketintelligence.com/solutions/marketpro/marketpro-retirement-powered-by-brightscope/) (observed 2026-09-13, no pricing published). For an enterprise that budgets annually, quote-driven is normal. For a solo advisor who wants to see a number and decide this afternoon, it is a different buying experience entirely.

## How does FiduciarySignal compare?

Full disclosure: this one is ours. We built it for the advisor seat specifically, which means it answers a narrower question than an institutional intelligence platform and should be judged on that question alone. Two tools, same public record. The **401(k) Report Card** grades any plan from its own Form 5500 — administrative cost against genuinely comparable peers, participation, red flags, the provider roster — which is roughly the job the old BrightScope plan page did for advisors, rebuilt for prospecting rather than for the general public. The **Change Predictor** does the job no lookup page ever did: it ranks every plan in a territory by the odds of a winnable provider change — trustee, custodian, recordkeeper or administrator — before that change happens.

|  | BrightScope / ISS MarketPro Retirement | FiduciarySignal |
|---|---|---|
| What it is today | Institutional distribution intelligence inside ISS Market Intelligence (observed 2026-09-13) | Advisor-seat prospecting software |
| Public per-plan pages | The tested rating URL returned HTTP 404 and the domain redirected to ISS when we checked on 2026-09-13 | Plan grading inside the product; plan directory is not public |
| Published coverage | 797K DC plans / $7.1T assets; 695K+ active CRDs (company claims, observed 2026-09-13) | Every plan in the public Form 5500 corpus scored and ranked; model trained on 8.9M filings across 10 years |
| Primary buyer | Asset managers, insurers, recordkeepers, plan advisors (per its own product page) | Individual advisors and retirement plan practices |
| Forward switch ranking | Not described on its public product page as of 2026-09-13 | Yes — the Pre-Switch Signal Stack, back-tested against the next year's Form 5500 filings |
| Pricing | Not published — demo request only (observed 2026-09-13) | Published and self-serve: $90/month or $900/year |

Source: [ISS MarketPro Retirement powered by BrightScope](https://www.issmarketintelligence.com/solutions/marketpro/marketpro-retirement-powered-by-brightscope/) and [BrightScope](https://www.brightscope.com/) (observed 2026-09-13).

The engine behind the ranking is the **Pre-Switch Signal Stack**: 25 distinct switch signals — eleven of them live feeds, timestamped and refreshed weekly rather than annually — layered on a model trained on 8.9 million Form 5500 filings across ten years and back-tested against the next year's Form 5500 filings. We do not publish which signals, and that is deliberate: every cue we print is a cue a copycat ships next quarter. What you get is the verdict and the plain-English why, plan by plan, plus per-plan talking points and a merge-ready outreach email built from that plan's own filing.

And the limit, stated the way we state it to customers: this is a work-the-top-of-the-list tool. It produces calibrated likelihoods, never certainty about any individual plan, and its strength is concentrated at the top of the ranking rather than spread evenly across the broad middle. It will not tell you what every plan in your county is going to do. It will tell you where the first eleven calls should go, and why. Built on public DOL EFAST2 data; not affiliated with the Department of Labor.

## Which should you choose?

Choose **ISS MarketPro Retirement** if you are an institution and the question you need answered is about the market: distribution mapping, competitive share, investment-menu penetration, advisor coverage by CRD. That depth is real, the ICI co-published research is genuine third-party validation of the underlying database, and no Form 5500-only product will match it on investment detail. Budget for a sales process rather than a checkout page.

Choose **FiduciarySignal** if you are in the advisor seat and your Monday problem is ordering — which plans in your territory deserve this week's calls, with a defensible reason attached to each one, on published pricing you can see before you speak to anyone. And if all you ever wanted was to look up one plan you already have a name for, skip both and use the DOL's own free search; that is what it is there for, and nobody should sell you a subscription to do it.

## Related guides

- [The Best 401(k) Prospecting Tools: A Fair, Sourced Comparison](https://www.fiduciarysignal.com/tools/best-401k-prospecting-tools)
- [Judy Diamond Associates: Prospector, Pricing, and a Fair Comparison](https://www.fiduciarysignal.com/alternatives/judy-diamond)
- [Retirement Plan Prospecting Software: The Advisor-Side Category, Explained](https://www.fiduciarysignal.com/tools/retirement-plan-prospecting-software)

## Frequently asked questions

### Is BrightScope still around in 2026?

The brand and its data live on inside ISS Market Intelligence as "MarketPro Retirement powered by BrightScope," an institutional platform for asset managers, insurers, recordkeepers, and plan advisors. It is not a standalone company or a consumer website any more. Source: issmarketintelligence.com/solutions/marketpro/marketpro-retirement-powered-by-brightscope/, observed 2026-09-13.

### Why do BrightScope plan pages 404?

On 2026-09-13, the BrightScope root redirected to ISS, while the tested per-plan URL (https://www.brightscope.com/401k-rating/105047/Costco-Wholesale-Corporation/104525/Costco-401k-Retirement-Plan/), /sitemap.xml, and /robots.txt returned HTTP 404. Those results establish what the tested URLs returned on that date, not the status of every BrightScope rating page. We found no published announcement giving a shutdown date or reason, so we do not state one.

### Where can I find a BrightScope rating for my 401(k) now?

The rating itself is not published publicly any more, as far as we can observe. The underlying data is still free: the Department of Labor publishes every plan's Form 5500 through EFAST2, and the full annual datasets are downloadable from the DOL's Form 5500 Datasets page. What you lose is the peer comparison — a raw filing has no benchmark attached, which is the work that has to be done somewhere.

### Who owns BrightScope?

ISS Market Intelligence, part of Institutional Shareholder Services, publishes and sells it today as MarketPro Retirement powered by BrightScope. Source: issmarketintelligence.com, observed 2026-09-13. We did not find a primary source stating the exact date ISS absorbed the business, so we do not print one.

### How much does ISS MarketPro cost?

Not published. We checked the MarketPro Retirement product page on 2026-09-13 and found no dollar figure, no tiers, and no self-serve checkout — every path is a demo or contact request. That is normal for institutional data platforms; it simply means budgeting a sales process rather than a subscription.

### What is a good BrightScope alternative for an advisor?

It depends which job you mean. For a one-off plan lookup, the DOL's free EFAST2 search is enough. For institutional market mapping, ISS MarketPro is the direct successor. For advisor-side prospecting — grading a plan against comparable peers and ranking a territory by who is likely to change providers — FiduciarySignal was built for that specific job, on published self-serve pricing.

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