Target-date funds have won the DC lineup

Target-date funds now dominate the defined contribution menu, and the evidence from Vanguard's new report, “Trends in Defined Contribution Lineups and Participant Behavior,” is decisive: 61% of participants in Vanguard-recordkept plans held a single target-date fund in 2025, up from 46% in 2016. The report, which covers Vanguard's recordkeeping book from 2022 through 2025 and was first reported by PLANADVISER, documents how thoroughly the product owns the accumulation phase; the spending side of retirement remains the open question.

Jeffrey Clark, Vanguard's head of defined contribution research, credits automatic enrollment: plans that offer it see 94% of workers saving, and just about all of those plans use target-date funds. The resulting simplicity shows up in the account data, where participants used an average of 2.2 investment options in 2025, down from 2.7 in 2016, and 66% held exactly one fund. Clark calls it a fix for choice overload, and he expects it to hold.

The shift reaches well beyond Vanguard's book: the PLANSPONSOR DC Plan Benchmarking Survey, a sibling publication under ISS STOOX, found 88.4% of surveyed plans offer target-date funds and 66.3% of sponsors use one as the default for automatically enrolled participants. Auto-enrollment is now standard in large plans, with 74.9% of plans above $1 billion in assets and 72.5% of plans between $200 million and $1 billion using it.

The target-date default wins early; the unresolved fight is what happens late, when a $250,000 balance has to last through retirement. A target-date fund is an accumulation vehicle, and the last mile of retirement is a spending problem that one line on the menu does not solve.