John Hancock 401(k) Fees: How to Find Them, Calculate Them, and Spot the Hidden Costs

If your small business sponsors a 401(k) plan, you wear two hats — fiduciary and participant. As a fiduciary, ERISA requires you to protect your employees’ savings from excessive fees. As a participant, those same fees can quietly erode your own retirement, often more than anyone else’s, since business owners typically hold the largest account balances. In other words, high fees put both your team’s future and your own at risk.

Under Department of Labor (DOL) rules, 401(k) providers must give plan fiduciaries a 408(b)(2) fee disclosure to help them evaluate whether their plan’s costs are reasonable. But not all providers make these disclosures easy to understand. John Hancock is an example — their fees are scattered across multiple documents, making them difficult to find and nearly impossible to total.

In this guide, we’ll walk you step by step through how to calculate the full cost of a John Hancock 401(k) plan using their DOL-mandated fee disclosures. To make things concrete, we’ll use a real-world example: a John Hancock plan with 82 participants and $1,768,998.18 in assets. By the end, you’ll see exactly how Hancock’s pricing works, what this plan really costs, and how those fees compare to more transparent providers.

Step 1 – Understand Your 401(k) Fees and Why They Matter

Every 401(k) plan comes with two main types of costs:

• • Administration Fees: The costs of running the plan — recordkeeping, compliance testing, participant statements, and customer service.
    • Direct fees: Shown clearly on invoices, disclosures, or statements, often as flat dollar amounts or per-participant charges.
    • Indirect fees: Less visible, typically paid through revenue sharing (a portion of a fund’s expense ratio rebated to the provider) or annuity wraps. Participants cover them through higher investment costs.
  • Investment Expenses: The expense ratios of mutual funds or other plan investments. These directly reduce participant returns and sometimes include hidden revenue sharing payments.

Why Keeping 401(k) Fees in Check Matters

• • For employees (participants): Even a 1% higher annual fee can drain six figures from a retirement account over a career.
  • For employers (fiduciaries): ERISA requires you to monitor fees and keep them reasonable. Excessive fees can trigger personal liability.

Bottom line: reasonable fees help employees retire richer and keep employers out of trouble.

Step 2 – Create an “All-In” Fee Spreadsheet

To make sense of your plan’s costs, we recommend combining administration fees and investment expenses into a single total – or “all-in” fee. In our view, there is no other way to compare John Hancock’s pricing to competing providers or industry averages on an apples-to-apples-basis.

To help, we’ve created a spreadsheet with all the columns and formulas you’ll need. Just gather your plan’s data and enter it in.

Doing this for John Hancock can be a bit of a pain, but not to worry – we’ll show you everything you need to do in the following steps. 

Step 3 – Gather All the Necessary Documents

Under DOL, rules, John Hancock must provide an ERISA 408(b)(2) fee disclosure to plan fiduciaries. This document is supposed to help you judge whether fees are reasonable. Unfortunately, Hancock spreads fee data across a patchwork of documents:

• • Recordkeeping Agreement: Lists services and administration fees (direct and indirect).
  • Supplemental Information Guides & Updates: Show investment expenses, revenue sharing, and wrap charges.
  • Asset Summary: Lists the current balances of your plan’s investments.
  • TPA Invoices (if applicable): Direct charges from a third-party administrator.

This isn’t transparency — it’s a scavenger hunt. Only by digging through all of these documents can you begin to assemble a complete picture of costs.

Step 4 - Enter Fund Balances into the Calculation Spreadsheet

1. Locate the current balance for each of your plan’s investment options. This information can be found in the Total Value column of the Asset Summary.

2. For all investment funds with a balance, enter the fund name and balance into the Calculation Spreadsheet

Step 5 – Enter Fund Expenses into the Calculation Spreadsheet

1. Locate the current expenses for each of your plan's investment options. This information can be found in the Updates to 408(b)(2) Disclosure Information. This document includes expense ratios (Expense Ratio column), revenue sharing (Revenue From Underlying Fund column), and annuity wrap (Revenue From Sub-Account column). Hancock offsets its wrap fee by the revenue sharing, so the revenue sharing and wrap charges usually net out.

2. Enter the expense ratio for the investment funds with a balance into the Calculation Spreadsheet.

Step 6 – Enter Hancock’s Fees into the Calculation Spreadsheet

1. Locate the administration fees charged by John Hancock. They can be found in the Plan Costs section of their Recordkeeping Agreement.

In our sample plan, Hancock charges a 1.42% indirect fee, broken down as follows:

2. Enter the indirect administration fees charged by John Hancock into the Calculation Spreadsheet. There are no direct fees charged by John Hancock in our sample plan.

Step 7 – Enter Other Direct Fees into the Calculation Spreadsheet

1. Locate the direct fees charged by other plan service providers. In our sample plan, Ascensus is the third-party administrator (TPA). Ascensus is paid a 0.05% of assets fee from John Hancock but also charges the following direct fees according to an invoice.

2. Enter direct administration fees charged by Ascensus into the Calculation Spreadsheet.

Step 8 – Calculate Your Plan’s All-In 401(k) Fee

At this point, your plan’s total cost – or “all-in” fee – should be calculated. We found our 82-participant John Hancock plan with $1,768,998.18 in assets had a $31,729.49 all-in fee.

Step 9 – Compare Your Fees

In our most recent fee study, nine of the ten most expensive 401(k) providers were insurance companies. Their heavy reliance on variable annuities often tacks 1% or more onto fund costs.

By comparison, a plan with no hidden fees can be dramatically cheaper. In our John Hancock example, a comparable Employee Fiduciary plan would cost just $5,761.74 — a savings of 81.84%. Put another way, Hancock’s plan was more than five times as expensive.

Don’t Let Excessive 401(k) Fees Drain Your Plan!

By now, you should have a clear picture of how John Hancock charges fees — and how quickly they can become excessive as assets grow. Even if your plan looks “reasonable” today, indirect costs like revenue sharing and annuity wraps will only increase over time.

As a fiduciary, you can’t afford that risk. The best solution? Choose a provider with flat, fully transparent fees. That way, you protect your employees’ retirement savings and your own, while fulfilling your fiduciary duties with confidence.

At Employee Fiduciary, our fees are fully transparent— with no revenue sharing, no annuity wraps, and no scavenger hunts. That’s the kind of simplicity and transparency small business owners deserve.