Your SCI Match Rate Goes Up With Service. Most People Never Find Out Which Tier They Are In.

SCI's 401(k) is not a flat match. The company matches a percentage of what you contribute up to 6% of your pretax annual compensation, and that percentage steps up with your service: 75% in your first five years, 100% from six to ten, and 125% at eleven years and beyond.

Read that last tier again. At 125%, SCI is putting in more than you are. Contribute 6% of your pay and the company adds 7.5% of your pay on top. There are not many places in a working life where that trade is on offer.

This is the quiet reason long-career people in this profession end up with balances that surprise them. Two associates contributing the identical dollar amount can be getting materially different deals depending on where they sit in the schedule, and it is also why contributing below the 6% cap costs a twenty-year veteran considerably more than it costs someone in their second year.

These figures are not estimates or industry averages. They are read from SCI's own Form 11-K for the plan year ended 31 December 2025, filed with the SEC in June 2026, and the same structure appears in the filings going back to 2017.

What this assumes ↓

The SCI plan allows a self-directed brokerage account, a Schwab Personal Choice Retirement Account, or PCRA, which lets you invest beyond the standard fund menu while the money stays inside the 401(k). Charles Schwab Trust Bank is the custodian, and Schwab Retirement Plan Services is the plan's recordkeeper.

It is not a new or experimental feature. It has been disclosed in SCI's filings continuously since at least 2017. At the end of 2025 there was $66.4 million sitting in self-directed accounts across the plan, up from $53.6 million a year earlier, a 23.7% increase in twelve months, against total plan investments of $1.92 billion. So roughly 3.5% of the plan's money is in it, which tells you both that it is real and that it is barely used.

That is the honest framing. It is not right for everyone and the standard fund menu is genuinely fine for a great many people. Opening a brokerage window because it exists is not a strategy. But it is worth knowing the option is there before you decide it is not for you, and most people in this plan have never been told it exists at all.

Two things the public filings do not tell us: whether the PCRA window restricts what you can hold inside it, and what it costs at the participant level. Both are in your summary plan description and your annual fee disclosure.

Your own contributions and any rollovers you have brought in are always fully yours. The company's money works differently: nothing vests until you complete three years of service, at which point 100% of it vests at once. There is no graded schedule easing you into it.

That is a cliff in the literal sense, and it matters most to anyone weighing a move within their first three years. Leaving at two years and eleven months forfeits every dollar the company has contributed and everything it has earned.

This is not hypothetical at the plan level. Forfeitures are used to offset future company contributions, and in 2025 alone $2.83 million of forfeited money was applied that way, with a further $3.19 million sitting available at year end. That is real money that belonged to people who left before their third anniversary.

SCI common stock held inside the plan was worth about $168 million at the end of 2025, roughly 9% of plan assets. If you have been contributing for a long time, some of that is likely yours.

Effective 1 September 2024 the plan was amended to designate the SCI common stock fund as an employee stock ownership plan under §4975(e)(7). One practical consequence is that net unrealised appreciation becomes a live option at distribution: instead of rolling employer stock into an IRA and taxing everything as ordinary income later, you may be able to take the shares in kind, pay ordinary income tax only on their original cost basis, and have the appreciation taxed at long-term capital gains rates when you eventually sell.

Whether that is worth doing depends on the spread between your basis and the current value, your tax bracket now versus later, and how concentrated you already are in one employer. It is genuinely valuable in the right circumstances and actively harmful in the wrong ones, and it is irreversible once done. What it should not be is a decision you discover after the paperwork is filed.

The moment that matters most usually is not your last birthday at work. It is the day you separate. That is when the balance becomes portable and every option opens simultaneously: leave it in the plan if it is above the plan's threshold, roll it to an IRA, roll it into a new employer's plan, or take it in cash.

Each carries different tax and cost consequences, and cashing out is almost always the most expensive of the four. Getting the sequence right matters more than most people expect, and it is easy to default into whichever option requires the least paperwork on a week when you have other things on your mind.

If you are holding SCI stock, the net unrealised appreciation election above has to be considered before the money moves, not after. The same is true of the PCRA balance if you have one. Rollover mistakes in both areas are expensive and hard to undo.

In-service withdrawals are available from age 59½, and hardship withdrawals before that. The details of the in-service rollover-out provision are not in the public filings, so check your plan documents.

Eligibility begins after two months of service, from age 18, with automatic enrolment at 4% of pretax pay. You can defer up to 50% of pretax pay, and Roth contributions have been available since July 2014.

One boundary matters: the plan covers US non-union employees. Collectively bargained employees who have retirement benefits under their agreement are excluded from it. If you are covered by a bargaining agreement, your retirement benefit is a different arrangement and nothing on this page describes it.

If you work for a Dignity Memorial location, you are almost certainly inside this plan, Dignity Memorial is SCI's consumer-facing brand, and the funeral homes and cemeteries operating under it are SCI locations. The plan name on your statement will read SCI 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan.