Vanguard manages three times more target-date money than T. Rowe Price inside large 401(k) plans: $916 billion against $291 billion. Its mutual funds are the largest single target-date funds of all, with the Vanguard Target Retirement 2030, 2035 and 2040 funds each holding more than $31 billion across about 9,300 plans.

Among collective trusts, though, the largest individual target-date funds are T. Rowe's.

Why

The reason is structural. Vanguard splits its trust assets across several separate trusts (Trust I, Trust II, Trust Select) with different pricing tiers, so no single Vanguard trust reaches T. Rowe's size. T. Rowe concentrates each vintage in one trust.

How we can tell

Plans name the same fund in many different ways on their filings: each of the T. Rowe trusts above appears under 6 to 8 different spellings. Because CITs don't have the SEC identifiers mutual funds do, we identify each trust by the EIN and plan number it files under on Schedule D, then add up every holding of it. Grouping by name alone splits these funds into many smaller pieces, which is why this ranking is hard to find elsewhere.

About the data

Figures cover 401(k) plans with more than 100 participants that list their holdings on Schedule H of Form 5500, for plan year 2024 (52,763 plans). Dollars are the plans' holdings in mutual funds, collective investment trusts (CITs) and pooled separate accounts on the Schedule of Assets Held.

Every plan, fund and manager behind these numbers is in Axiomatic Plan Intelligence. For more information, email us at info@axiomaticdata.com.

Updated November 2026 with figures from the latest complete plan year (2024). The original LinkedIn post used an earlier version of our data, so some numbers differ.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.