FreeERISA: What It Covers, What Deluxe Costs, and When Free Runs Out

Source: FreeERISA product page (as published, observed 2026-09-13).

Every advisor who takes retirement plan prospecting seriously hits the same wall in the first month, and it usually sounds like an accusation: Form 5500 data is public and free — so what exactly am I being asked to pay for? It is a completely fair question, and FreeERISA is the reason it gets asked. It has been giving away Form 5500 lookups since 1999. So this page answers the question honestly, in both directions: what FreeERISA genuinely covers, where its published limits are, and the specific point at which free stops being the cheaper option. We build a paid product in this category, so hold every claim below to the source URL attached to it.

What is FreeERISA?

FreeERISA is a free, registration-gated search over Form 5500 filings, operated by Judy Diamond Associates. Its product page describes what it is for plainly: "FreeERISA.com provides free access to all form 5500s filed with the Department of Labor over the past two years," covering "2.6 million ... Form 5500s, covering 1.3 million plans and 1 million plan sponsors," with data including sponsor contacts, plan renewal dates, retirement plan financial breakdowns, insurance policy details, and service providers, carriers and brokers. The same page states it launched in 1999 and claims 625,000 registered users.

Source: judydiamond.com/products/freeerisa/ (as published, observed 2026-09-13).

One practical note: the freeerisa.com address now redirects. When we requested it on 2026-09-13, www.freeerisa.com returned an HTTP 301 redirect to freeerisa.benefitspro.com — the app lives on the BenefitsPRO domain. Source: direct HTTP request, observed 2026-09-13. If you bookmarked the old address and ended up somewhere that looked wrong, that is why.

Who owns FreeERISA?

This is worth getting right, because a lot of pages on the internet still have it wrong. FreeERISA is a Judy Diamond Associates product, and Judy Diamond's own site footer reads "© 2026 Touchpoint Markets" — not ALM, which is the attribution you will still see repeated in older write-ups. Source: judydiamond.com footer (observed 2026-09-13). Touchpoint Markets was itself acquired by Arc in July 2025, in a deal whose announced brand portfolio includes BenefitsPRO — the domain FreeERISA now runs on. Source: arc-network.com — Arc Acquires Touchpoint Markets (as published 1 July 2025).

Why does a corporate-ownership footnote matter to you at all? Because it explains the product's logic. FreeERISA is not charity and it was never meant to be a complete tool — it is the free tier of a commercial data business, sized deliberately so that the moment your use gets serious, you are standing in front of a paid product. That is a perfectly legitimate business model. It is just worth naming, because it tells you where the ceiling was placed on purpose.

What does FreeERISA cost?

Registration is free. The published paid tier is called Deluxe Search, described on the product page as adding "more search tools plus access to 5310s and Top Hat filings for just $59.95." The page also states FreeERISA "offers 3 levels of access," and lists Deluxe features including current Form 5500s, Top Hats and 5310 filings, search by company name, state or ZIP, filtering by plan type, total assets and total participants, searching for companies with potential rollovers, and look-up of non-qualified deferred compensation plans. Its tier table checks "500+ searchable data elements" only for Prospector+ (as published, read 2026-10-05).

Source: judydiamond.com/products/freeerisa/ (as published, observed 2026-09-13).

One honest caveat on that number, because we will not pretend to more precision than we have: the billing period is not published. Nothing we could read states whether $59.95 is monthly, annual, or one-time, and the purchase path sits behind a login we did not go through. Verify it in the product before you budget against it — and treat any page that confidently tells you the period without a source the same way you would treat any other unsourced number.

Source: FreeERISA product page (observed 2026-09-13).

Why pay for 5500 data when it is free? The honest answer.

We are going to argue against ourselves for a paragraph, because the objection deserves it. For a large number of real use cases, you should not pay. If a sponsor's name comes up at lunch and you want to read their filing before Monday, FreeERISA does that at zero cost. If you want the underlying government source, the DOL's own EFAST2 Form 5500 Series Search is free and requires no login to search, and the complete annual datasets are downloadable from the DOL Form 5500 Datasets page (observed 2026-09-13). If your volume is a handful of lookups a month, buying software to do that is like buying a forklift to carry groceries.

What you are paying for, when paying is rational, is not access to the data. It is four specific pieces of work you would otherwise do yourself, forever, every time the filings refresh:

• Joining. A Form 5500 is not one document — it is a main form plus schedules with coded fields that do not assemble themselves into one row per plan per year. Somebody does that work, or you do.
• Peer benchmarking. A plan's administrative cost per participant is meaningless until you compare it to genuinely similar plans: same industry, same size band, same filing year. Building those cohorts correctly is the difference between a fee argument that survives a TPA's scrutiny and one that embarrasses you.
• History. Year-over-year movement is where the useful signals live. A search limited to recent filings can show you a plan; it cannot show you a decade of trajectory.
• Ordering. The hardest one, and the one no lookup tool attempts. Out of the 3,000 plans that match your filter, which eleven get Tuesday? Free search hands that question straight back to you.

Notice what all four have in common: none of them is about getting the data. The data is the cheap part. The expensive part is turning it into a decision — and the reason so many advisors bounce between free tools and paid ones is that they benchmarked the two on access when the actual difference is downstream of access entirely.

Where does free stop being enough?

There is a clean line, and it is about volume and repetition rather than sophistication. Free is enough when your lookups are reactive and occasional — a name came up, you check it. Free stops being enough the moment your prospecting becomes systematic: you want every plan in two counties, ranked, with a reason attached to each, refreshed on a schedule you did not have to remember. At that point the free tool has not failed you. You have simply started asking it a question it was never built to answer.

And the reason ordering matters so much is arithmetic, not philosophy. According to Steven Wilkinson in 401(k) Specialist, roughly nine hours of cold calling produces one appointment a week. According to Sharon Pivirotto of 401kbestpractices.com, "90% or more of all plans you're introduced to won't have a need," with a sales cycle around nine months in the small market and up to two years for larger plans. If your list is unordered, you pay that 90% one dial at a time — and the free lookup, however good, cannot help you there.

Hold those two facts together and the shape of the problem is unmistakable. Sponsors are moving constantly. Nine out of ten of your conversations reach sponsors who are not. Both can only be true at once if the switches are happening without you in the room — which is a sequencing failure, not an effort failure, and no amount of free lookup volume fixes it.

What FreeERISA genuinely does well

Credit where it belongs, and it belongs in several places. It has been running since 1999 — twenty-seven years is a long time to keep a free public utility alive in a niche this specialized. It claims 625,000 registered users, which is real distribution. It asks only for a free registration rather than a credit card. And its published Deluxe tier surfaces 5310 filings and Top Hat filings, which many competing products do not expose at all — genuinely useful if you work with plan terminations or non-qualified deferred compensation arrangements. Source: judydiamond.com/products/freeerisa/ (observed 2026-09-13). For an advisor who needs one filing, once, it is the fastest zero-dollar answer available.

FreeERISA vs. FiduciarySignal

Full disclosure — the right column is ours. These are not really competitors so much as different tools from different shelves, and the table is meant to make that obvious rather than to declare a winner.

Source: FreeERISA product page (observed 2026-09-13).

What the right column actually is: two tools on the same public record. The 401(k) Report Card grades any plan from its own Form 5500 — administrative cost against comparable peers, participation, red flags, provider roster — in plain English you can use on a call. The Change Predictor ranks every plan in a territory by the odds of a winnable provider change — trustee, custodian, recordkeeper or administrator — before it happens. The engine is the Pre-Switch Signal Stack: 25 distinct switch signals, eleven of them live feeds refreshed weekly, layered on a model trained on 8.9 million filings across ten years and back-tested against the next year's Form 5500 filings. We do not publish the signal list — every cue we print is a cue a copycat ships next quarter — but the verdict and the reasoning arrive on every flagged plan, along with talking points and a merge-ready outreach email built from that plan's own filing.

The limit, said the same way we say it to customers: it is a work-the-top-of-the-list tool. Calibrated likelihoods, never certainty, strongest at the top of the ranking. Built on public DOL EFAST2 data; not affiliated with the Department of Labor.

Which should you use?

Use FreeERISA if you look plans up occasionally, want zero spend, or need 5310 or Top Hat filings that most tools do not surface. Nothing on this page argues against that, and an advisor who pays for software they use twice a month has made a worse decision than one who uses a free tool well.

Use FiduciarySignal if you are running a territory rather than answering questions — if what you need is every plan in your counties ranked by likelihood with a reason attached, refreshed weekly, on pricing you can read before you talk to anyone. Bottom line: free data was never the advantage anybody thought it was, precisely because it is free for the advisor across town too. The advantage is knowing which of those free names is worth a Tuesday.

Not sure which side of that line you are on? There is a free way to find out. Drop your ZIP on the free signal page and it pulls one live switch signal from your area: a real plan, the sponsor, the location, and why the window is open, unlocked with your name and email and no card. Compare it to what FreeERISA shows you for the same plan. If the reason reads like something you would act on, the ranked version of your whole territory is the paid product. If not, you have lost a minute. Either way you decided with your own eyes rather than ours. The wider set of free options is compared in free 401(k) prospecting tools.

Related guides

• Judy Diamond Associates: Prospector, Pricing, and a Fair Comparison
• Form 5500 Prospecting: What a Plan's Filing Tells You — and What It Can't
• Form 5500 Search: The Free Tools, Step by Step