Protecting Prudent Investment of Retirement Savings Act

What this does

This bill rewrites the fiduciary duty rules for retirement plans under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. It requires plan fiduciaries to make investment decisions based solely on pecuniary factors, meaning factors expected to have a material effect on risk or return. A fiduciary may not sacrifice return or take on added risk to promote non-pecuniary goals, and may use a non-pecuniary factor only as a tie-breaker when pecuniary factors alone cannot distinguish between investment options, and only with documentation. The bill separately requires fiduciaries to select service providers without regard to race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It adds proxy-voting rules directing that a fiduciary act solely in the plan's economic interest, need not vote every proxy, and may adopt a safe-harbor policy that declines to vote when the plan's stake in an issuer is below 5 percent. It also requires that before a participant invests through a brokerage window, an arrangement not selected or monitored by a plan fiduciary, the participant receive and acknowledge a notice each time, including a projected-balance illustration at 4, 6, and 8 percent returns, and it orders a GAO study comparing brokerage-window returns to other plan options. The three substantive rule changes take effect on staggered dates between 2026 and 2027.