Carta's platform data shows equity is not a retirement plan

The record

On 10 September 2026, Carta published “State of Employee Equity and 401(k) Plans”, a report produced with retirement-plan provider Vestwell. The report states that close to half of all U.S. companies on the Carta platform do not offer a 401(k) plan to employees, and that the likelihood of offering one rises with company size: 39 percent of companies with fewer than 25 employees offer a plan, versus about 60 percent of companies with more than 500 employees. It also reports that 26.1 percent of employees with access to a 401(k) exercise some or all of their vested stock options, compared with 22.8 percent of employees without one, and that a median employee earning at least $200,000 who holds a 401(k) accumulates more than $100,000 in that account after four years.

What the documents establish

This is Carta's own customer data, not a survey of the broader private-company market. Carta's Data Desk states that its published figures draw from more than 50,000 startups and over 1,700,000 security holders using its cap-table and equity-management platform, aggregated and anonymized, and that companies which have contractually opted out of such studies are excluded. That sourcing distinguishes this compensation and benefits report from Carta's separate round-benchmarking and valuation data, which measures financing terms rather than employee outcomes, and which this site's sibling covers on its own ground. The report also states, separately from its own headline figures, that more than 70 percent of vested option grants industry-wide are never exercised, a point it uses to frame the value of a parallel, liquid retirement vehicle.

The operating read

Equity and a 401(k) plan solve different problems: one is concentrated, illiquid and contingent on a future exit; the other is diversified, liquid at retirement and independent of the employer's fate. Editorially, a founder deciding whether to add a 401(k) plan should treat Carta's option-exercise correlation as suggestive of employee behavior on its platform, not as proof that adding a plan causes higher exercise rates, since the report describes an association among its own customers rather than a controlled comparison.

What to check before you decide

Before using a platform-sourced benefits report to set compensation or benefits policy, check the following.

• Does the reported sample reflect companies at a similar stage and headcount to your own, given that plan adoption varies sharply by company size?
• Does the report distinguish an association in its own data from a causal claim about what adding a benefit would do?
• Is the underlying dataset limited to one platform's customers, and does that customer base skew toward a particular sector or funding stage?

Carta's report is a genuine, dated primary document about its own platform; the policy decision it can responsibly inform is narrower than the industry-wide framing might suggest.