Form5500search.com: Pricing, Features, and a Fair Comparison

Source: Form 5500 Search homepage and pricing (as published, read 2026-10-05).

Form 5500 Search publishes a large public footprint for 401(k) prospecting — plan pages, state and industry directories, lead reports, free market reports. This page answers what it is, what form5500search pricing looks like, what data it uses, what it does well, and how it compares with FiduciarySignal. One disclosure first: we build FiduciarySignal, a competing product. That is why every fact about Form 5500 Search below links to the page we read it on, with the date.

What is Form 5500 Search?

Its about page says it "makes the U.S. Department of Labor's public Form 5500 filings searchable, readable, and comparable." It ingests filings from the DOL's EFAST2 public release of Form 5500 and Form 5500-SF, links the related schedules, and parses the Schedule of Assets out of the filing PDFs, so you can see which funds a plan holds and which plans hold a given fund. Its homepage headline is "Free Form 5500 search," with the line "Know the plan better than the advisor who has it," and it lists "465k+ indexed plan pages." The about page says the site is funded by the optional Pro subscription rather than ads or data resale, and that it is not affiliated with the Department of Labor.

Source: Form 5500 Search about and homepage (as published, read 2026-10-05).

Form5500search pricing: what does it cost?

The whole price list is public, on a page you can read without booking a call:

Source: Form 5500 Search pricing and homepage FAQ (as published, read 2026-10-05). The homepage FAQ adds that Pro can be cancelled anytime from billing settings and that "You're never charged for a contact we can't find." At the Pro rate, 50 unlocks for $49 is just under $1 per plan.

What data does it use — and what are its limits?

Its methodology page is unusually candid, which is worth respecting. Coverage is Form 5500 and Form 5500-SF for plan years 2022, 2023, and 2024 — about 2.9 million filings — and "no proprietary or licensed data enters at the row level" of the scoring. Small plans filing the 5500-SF file no Schedule H, Schedule C, or Schedule of Assets, so holdings and provider detail are thin for them; that is a limit of the public filing, not of the site, and it applies to every Form 5500 tool, ours included. The homepage says the data is "refreshed as new filings land."

The Plan Health Score is described as "a 0–100 directional indicator" built from four weighted pillars: compliance and integrity (35%), total plan cost (30%), plan health (20%), and vendor and structure (15%). The page lists what it leaves out, including investment menu quality and match design. Source: Form 5500 Search methodology and homepage (as published, read 2026-10-05).

Its lead reports and "plans likely to change advisors" searches

The homepage has a section titled "Ready-made searches for plans likely to change advisors," and the lead reports page lists twelve pre-built lists over the 2022–2024 filings. Each one, per the methodology page, is "the result of a deterministic SQL predicate" — a transparent rule you can read. Examples, with the counts the page displayed when we read it:

• Recordkeeper changed YoY — 634 plans, described as "Recordkeeper switched — leading indicator for asset-manager / advisor displacement."
• Auditor changed YoY — 1,322 plans.
• First-time filers — 82,659 plans, "greenfield prospects."
• Late filings (received after October 15, 2025) — 95,210 plans.
• Plans with >25% YoY asset drop — 12,916 plans.
• Plans with failed Schedule C disclosures — 1,671 plans.

Source: Form 5500 Search lead reports and methodology (as published, read 2026-10-05). Viewing is free; the page says CSV export is a Pro feature. The strength of a rule-based list is that you know exactly why each plan is on it. On the pages we read we did not find a published back-test of these searches against later switching, so we make no claim either way about how they perform as a forecast.

Free market reports

Its benchmarks section offers three reports that are free to view: a 401(k) recordkeeper market-share report, a plan fee benchmark report (all-in Schedule C compensation as basis points of assets, by plan size, industry, and recordkeeper), and a recordkeeper win/loss and asset-flows report, all drawn from Schedule C for large plans. Custom benchmarking and PDF exports are listed as Pro features. Source: Form 5500 Search benchmarks (as published, read 2026-10-05).

What Form 5500 Search does well

• Price. Free search and a $49 Pro plan, month-to-month, with no sales call.
• Contact depth per unlock. One unlock reveals every key decision-maker it finds on a plan, not a single name, and a failed lookup is not billed.
• Fund-level visibility. Parsing the Schedule of Assets lets you see what a plan holds — and find the plans holding a given fund family.
• Transparent methodology with stated weights and stated limits.
• Unlimited CSV export on Pro.

Source: Form 5500 Search pricing, homepage, and methodology (as published, read 2026-10-05).

Form 5500 Search vs FiduciarySignal

Same public filings in. A different question asked of them. Form 5500 Search is built to look a plan up, read it, and reach the people behind it. FiduciarySignal is built to decide which plans in your territory to work first. The right-hand column is ours.

Source: Form 5500 Search pricing, methodology, and lead reports (as published, read 2026-10-05). FiduciarySignal terms are on our pricing page.

Where a search tool stops and a ranking starts

Here's the thing: finding a plan is no longer the hard part. Free search, cheap contacts, and public lead lists mean the advisor down the street can pull the same plan you just pulled. The expensive part is the order you work them in.

FiduciarySignal's Change Predictor ranks the plans in your territory most likely to make a winnable provider change — trustee, custodian, recordkeeper or administrator — built on ten years of Form 5500 filings and back-tested against the next year's filings. It is strongest at the top of the list: a work-the-top-of-the-list tool, never certainty about any single plan. The 401(k) Report Card then grades the plan from its own filing — administrative cost against genuinely comparable peers, participation, red flags, the provider roster — so the first call has a specific reason behind it.

Which should you choose?

Choose Form 5500 Search if you want the lowest published price, free lookups, several decision-maker contacts per plan, fund-holder searches, or unlimited CSV export on a monthly plan. Nothing on this page argues against it.

Choose FiduciarySignal if your bottleneck is not finding plans but choosing among them — which ones to call this week, with the reason attached, the three reports for the meeting, and a ready-to-send email — on ten years of filings, at $90 a month after a 7-day trial or $900 a year. Some advisors will run both: a cheap lookup and contact tool, and a ranking for the calling order. That is a sensible answer.

Related guides

• 401kHunter: Pricing, What It Does, and a Fair Comparison
• Form 5500 Search: The Free Tools, Step by Step — and the One Thing a Filing Can't Tell You
• ERISApedia: Plan Data Intelligence, Pricing, and a Fair Alternative