What Is a 457(b) Plan? Rules, Limits, and Withdrawals

A 457(b) plan is the retirement account that public employees have and almost nobody writes about. If you work for a city, a county, a school district, a public university, a transit authority or a fire department, there is a good chance one sits on your benefits menu next to a pension and possibly a 403(b), and there is an equally good chance nobody has ever explained what makes it different. It is a deferred compensation plan, which is a formal way of saying that you agree to be paid later instead of now, and the money you defer goes into an investment account in the meantime.

The plan looks so much like a 401(k) that most people assume it is one with a different number on the label. It is not. It lives in its own section of the tax code, and that separate home produces two consequences that matter enormously: what happens when you leave the employer, and whether the money is actually yours in the first place. This explainer walks through both, along with how deferrals work, the two catch-up provisions, the Roth bucket, loans, emergency withdrawals, rollovers and the honest comparison against the workplace plans you already know. Our comparison of the 403(b) and the 401(k) covers the two siblings a public employee is most likely to also be offered, and our overview of retirement account types places all of them side by side. Model what steady deferrals become with the calculator as you read.

What a 457(b) plan actually is

A 457(b) is an eligible deferred compensation plan sponsored by an employer, named after the section of the tax code that authorizes it. The mechanics that touch you are simple. You sign an election telling your employer to send a share of each paycheck into the plan instead of into your bank account. That money is invested in whatever menu the plan offers, it grows without an annual tax bill, and it is taxed as ordinary income when it comes out, unless you used a Roth bucket and the withdrawal qualifies.

What separates it from the plans people know better is not the saving part, which is nearly identical, but the legal framing. A 401(k) is a qualified plan holding your money in trust. A 457(b) is a deferred compensation arrangement, an agreement about when compensation is paid. In the governmental version, protections were layered on top so the money is held for you in trust anyway. In the non-governmental version, that layering never happened, and the arrangement remains what its name says: a promise. Everything distinctive about the plan type traces back to that framing.

Who sponsors a 457(b) plan

Two categories of employer can offer one, and they produce two different animals. The first is a state or local government: states themselves, counties, cities, townships, school districts, public colleges and universities, hospital districts, water and transit authorities, police and fire departments, and the agencies that sit under them. Plans sponsored by these employers are governmental 457(b) plans, and they are usually open broadly, from clerical staff to department heads.

The second is a tax-exempt organization that is not a government, such as a private hospital system, a foundation, a professional association or a charity. Those employers can sponsor a non-governmental 457(b), but the law restricts participation to a select group of management or highly compensated employees. This is why a nurse and a hospital executive at the same employer can have entirely different answers about whether a 457(b) is available to them. You cannot open one on your own, and there is no retail version sold by a brokerage. If you want to know whether you have access, the only reliable source is your benefits office.

Governmental and non-governmental plans are not the same product

Treat the two versions as separate products that happen to share a number. In a governmental 457(b), assets must be held in a trust, custodial account or annuity contract for the exclusive benefit of participants and beneficiaries. That means the balance on your statement is legally set aside for you, in the same way a 401(k) balance is, and the employer cannot reach it.

In a non-governmental 457(b), there is no such requirement, and in practice the assets remain the employer’s general assets. Your account is a bookkeeping entry tracking what the organization owes you. The investment menu may look identical, the statement may look identical, and the balance may grow exactly the same way, but the ownership underneath is different. The two versions also diverge on rollovers, on how much freedom you have over distribution timing, and on whether a Roth bucket is available. Before you defer a dollar, establish which version your plan is, ideally in writing from the plan administrator, because almost every practical answer in this explainer branches on that one fact.

Why the non-governmental version carries creditor risk

This deserves its own section because it is routinely glossed over. If your employer is a tax-exempt organization rather than a government, and it becomes insolvent, the assets backing your 457(b) are available to the organization’s general creditors. You would be an unsecured creditor standing in line with vendors and lenders, not an account holder retrieving your own property. The balance is not protected the way a qualified plan balance is, and no federal insurance covers the shortfall.

Some employers use a rabbi trust, an arrangement that ring-fences the assets against a change of heart by management or a change of control, while deliberately leaving them reachable by creditors, because full protection would trigger immediate taxation and defeat the deferral. A rabbi trust is genuinely useful against one risk and useless against the other. That does not make a non-governmental 457(b) a bad idea. High earners at stable institutions use them sensibly, often after filling every protected account first. It does mean the decision includes a credit judgment about your employer, which is not a judgment most retirement plans ask you to make. Discuss it with a qualified financial professional.

How money goes into a 457(b)

Contributions are salary deferrals. You elect a percentage or a dollar amount per pay period, payroll withholds it, and the plan invests it. Because you are deferring compensation you have not yet received, the election generally has to be in place before the period it applies to, which is why a decision made in December usually cannot apply to income already earned that year. This timing rule is stricter in a 457(b) than most participants expect, and it is the reason benefits offices push enrollment windows so hard.

Pre-tax deferrals reduce your taxable income for the year, which is the immediate benefit people notice on their pay stub. The reduction is not the full amount of the deferral in take-home terms, because your paycheck falls by the deferral and rises by the tax you no longer owe on it. Payroll systems handle that automatically. What no system handles is deciding how much to defer, which is a budgeting question rather than a tax one. Our walkthrough on how much to contribute to a workplace plan works through that decision in a form that transfers directly.

Why this explainer prints no contribution limit

Every 457(b) article you find will tell you a number. That number was correct on the day it was published and quietly wrong afterward, because the annual deferral limit, the catch-up amounts and the compensation figures behind them are adjusted by the IRS from year to year. A stale limit is worse than no limit, because a reader who defers to last year’s ceiling can end up under-contributing without knowing it, and a reader who assumes an old number is current can plan a whole year around it.

So this explainer states the mechanism and sends you to the source. There is an annual cap on what you can defer. There are two catch-up provisions that can raise it in specific circumstances. Your own room may be reduced by amounts already deferred elsewhere, or expanded by unused room from earlier years. Where arithmetic below needs a ceiling, it uses a clearly labelled placeholder written as L rather than a fake figure. Look up the current L on the IRS website or ask your plan administrator, who is required to know it, and confirm anything unusual with a qualified tax professional.

The separate limit that makes a 457(b) unusual

Here is the feature that experienced public employees guard closely. Deferrals into 401(k) and 403(b) plans share one personal annual ceiling. Move between employers, hold two jobs, run a side business with a solo plan: the deferrals still draw on the same bucket, which is why our explainer on the Solo 401(k) warns self-employed savers about double counting. A 457(b) sits outside that bucket. Its limit is generally counted on its own.

The practical effect is that someone offered both a 403(b) and a governmental 457(b), which is common in school districts and public universities, can often defer an amount up to L into each plan in the same year. That is roughly double the sheltered room, available to a mid-career teacher or administrator without a second income. Very few workers have this option, and many who do never learn about it because the 457(b) is presented as an alternative to the 403(b) rather than an addition to it. Confirm the current limits and your own eligibility with your plan administrator before planning around the stacking.

The two catch-up provisions

A 457(b) can offer two ways to defer above the standard ceiling, and they work differently. The first is the age-based catch-up familiar from other workplace plans, an extra amount available once you reach a specified age. It is standard in governmental plans and generally unavailable in non-governmental ones.

The second is distinctive to the plan type and is usually called the special or final three-year catch-up. In the three years before the normal retirement age specified in the plan document, a participant may be allowed to defer more than the regular ceiling, commonly described as up to double it, but limited by how much room they left unused in earlier years of eligibility. It exists to let someone who could not afford to contribute early in a public service career make up ground before retiring. The two catch-ups generally cannot be used in the same year, so a participant eligible for both takes whichever is larger. Both depend on plan terms, on the normal retirement age your plan defines, and on a calculation of your unused room that the plan administrator performs. Ask them to run it.

Roth contributions inside a 457(b)

Many governmental 457(b) plans now include a designated Roth bucket. Deferrals into it come from after-tax pay, so there is no deduction today, and qualified withdrawals later come out tax-free. The two buckets share the same annual ceiling, so choosing Roth changes the tax character of your deferral rather than its size. Whether the option exists is a plan-document question, which means two neighboring school districts can give different answers.

The choice between pre-tax and Roth turns on the comparison between your tax rate now and your expected rate when you withdraw, a comparison our Roth and traditional IRA explainer works through in detail. Two wrinkles are specific to a 457(b). A public employee expecting a pension may face a higher retirement tax rate than a private-sector worker does, which tilts the analysis toward Roth. And someone planning to spend the balance in the gap years right after leaving may prefer pre-tax dollars precisely because their income in those years is low. Non-governmental plans generally do not offer Roth at all.

Employer contributions and vesting

Employer money in a 457(b) is less common than in a 401(k), because most public employers direct their retirement spending into the pension instead. Where an employer does contribute, the amount counts toward the same annual ceiling as your own deferrals rather than sitting on top of it, which is the opposite of how a 401(k) treats employer money. That is an important structural difference: an employer contribution to a 457(b) crowds out your own room instead of adding to it.

Vesting follows the plan document. Your own deferrals are always yours. Employer contributions may carry a schedule requiring years of service before they are fully yours, and leaving early can forfeit the unvested portion. Because the pension usually carries its own and much longer vesting schedule, public employees often face two separate vesting clocks running at once, and they rarely line up. If you are weighing whether to leave a public employer, get both schedules in writing before you set a date. Our explainer on what a pension is covers how the other clock works.

What steady deferrals build

Since this explainer will not print a contribution limit, the useful arithmetic is what a deferral you choose actually becomes. The chart below traces an illustrative deferral of $500 a month at an illustrative 6 percent annual return, compounded monthly, over four holding periods. The deferral amount is a personal choice rather than a statutory figure, so nothing here depends on a limit. Every number is a teaching illustration and no return is promised.

Read the shape rather than the numbers. The deferral is flat, so the extra balance in later years comes from growth on money contributed earlier, which is why the bars accelerate rather than climbing in a straight line. Across the 20-year case, roughly $120,000 of the illustrative $231,000 is deferrals and the rest is growth. Our explainer on compound interest unpacks the mechanism. Put your own deferral into the calculator and watch what changes when you move the horizon rather than the amount.

The withdrawal rule that defines the plan type

Now the quirk. In a 401(k) or a 403(b), taking money out before the usual retirement ages generally triggers an additional tax on top of ordinary income tax, subject to a list of exceptions our explainer on 401(k) withdrawal rules sets out. A governmental 457(b) is widely described as not being subject to that extra layer once you separate from service, whatever your age at the time.

Say plainly what this does and does not mean. It does not make the money tax-free. Pre-tax dollars coming out of a 457(b) are ordinary income in the year you take them, withholding applies, and a large withdrawal can push you into a higher bracket exactly as it would from any pre-tax account. What it removes is the extra penalty layer, and that removal is why the plan is prized by people who retire from public service before the ages that govern other accounts. It also means a 457(b) balance is unusually flexible, which cuts both ways: money that is easy to reach is also easy to spend. Confirm how the treatment applies to you with a qualified tax professional before relying on it.

Withdrawals while you are still working

A 457(b) is much stricter than most plans while you remain employed. In-service access is generally limited to narrow circumstances written into the plan document, and there is no general right to take your money out because you would like to. The common in-service routes are an unforeseeable emergency distribution, a small-balance cashout available to participants with a low balance who have not deferred recently, and, in plans that offer them, a loan.

This tightness is the mirror image of the separation-from-service flexibility. The plan type gives you unusual freedom the moment you leave and unusual restriction while you stay. Participants who expect the flexibility to apply throughout are the ones who get surprised, particularly when they have routed a large share of savings into the plan and then face a cash need mid-career. That is a strong argument for keeping an emergency fund outside the plan regardless of how good the deferral looks, a case our emergency fund walkthrough makes in detail. Ask your plan administrator exactly which in-service routes your plan allows.

Unforeseeable emergency distributions

The 457(b) hardship route has a name of its own, the unforeseeable emergency distribution, and its standard is genuinely stricter than the hardship rules in a 401(k). It is meant for a severe financial hardship arising from a sudden and unexpected event affecting you, your spouse, your beneficiary or a dependent, and the amount is limited to what the emergency actually requires plus the taxes on the distribution.

The exclusions are what catch people. Foreseeable expenses generally do not qualify no matter how large they feel, and the classic examples of things that usually fail the test are buying a home and paying college tuition, both of which are planned expenses by definition. Plans also typically require you to exhaust other resources first, including stopping deferrals and taking a plan loan if one is available. The plan administrator decides, applying the plan document, so two employers can reach different conclusions on similar facts. If you think you may qualify, ask for the plan’s written procedure rather than guessing.

Loans from a 457(b)

Some governmental 457(b) plans permit participant loans and many do not. Where a loan is available, the shape is familiar from 401(k) loans: you borrow a portion of your vested balance, repay it with interest to your own account on a set schedule, usually through payroll deduction, and the loan is not a taxable distribution as long as it stays current. Non-governmental plans generally do not offer loans.

The costs are the same ones that apply to any plan loan. The borrowed money is out of the market while you repay it, so you give up whatever it would have earned, and repayment comes from after-tax pay. The sharper risk is separation. If you leave the employer with a loan outstanding, the balance typically has to be repaid on a short timetable, and an unpaid balance is generally treated as a distribution with tax consequences. Given that separation is the event a 457(b) participant is most likely to be planning for, a plan loan and an anticipated retirement date sit awkwardly together. Confirm your plan’s loan terms in writing.

Using a 457(b) as a bridge

The separation-from-service treatment produces a specific and very practical use. Public employees often become eligible to retire earlier than private-sector workers do, because pension formulas reward long service, and someone who started at 25 can hit a full service milestone well before any of the ages that govern retirement accounts. The problem is the gap. The pension may not start immediately at the level they want, and Social Security starts later still, as our full retirement age explainer sets out.

A governmental 457(b) fills that gap better than any other account they hold, because it is the one balance that can be tapped after separation without the extra penalty layer. That is why financial planners working with police officers, firefighters and teachers so often treat the 457(b) as the bridge account and the 403(b) or IRA as the long-term account. The sequencing question of which account to spend first is worth its own read, and our withdrawal order explainer covers the general framework. The specific answer depends on your pension start date and your tax picture, so build it with a qualified professional.

An illustrative bridge year

Make the bridge concrete. Consider an illustrative public employee who leaves at 58 with a pension that begins at 62 and Social Security later still. She needs an illustrative $60,000 in her first year out. Neither the pension nor Social Security contributes anything to that year, so the money comes from three places she controls. The stacked bar shows the split, and every figure is a teaching illustration.

The shape is what matters. The 457(b) does the heavy lifting precisely because it is reachable, while the taxable account supplies dollars that are already taxed and can be blended in to manage the year’s taxable income. Our taxable and retirement account comparison explains why holding both gives you that lever. Run your own version in the calculator, changing the draw and the number of bridge years to see how quickly the balance depletes.

Taxes when the money comes out

Pre-tax deferrals and their growth come out as ordinary income. There is no capital gains treatment inside a workplace plan, so a balance built by decades of market growth is taxed at income rates when withdrawn, not at the lower rates a taxable brokerage account might produce. Plans generally apply mandatory withholding on eligible rollover distributions paid to you, which means the check is smaller than the amount you requested and the difference shows up as a credit at filing time.

Roth dollars behave differently: qualified withdrawals of Roth contributions and their earnings come out tax-free, subject to the plan’s own qualification requirements. State tax treatment adds another layer, and several states treat public retirement income differently from private, which can matter a great deal to someone who retires across a state line. None of that can be settled generically. Ask your plan administrator how withholding will be applied and ask a qualified tax professional to model the withdrawal year before you take a large distribution.

Rollovers out of a governmental 457(b)

A governmental 457(b) is generally portable. The balance can usually move by direct rollover into an IRA, a 401(k) or a 403(b) that accepts it, and the plan can generally accept rollovers in from those accounts as well. The mechanics of a direct trustee-to-trustee transfer, and the reason to avoid taking a check yourself, are the same ones our 401(k) rollover walkthrough covers step by step, and our explainer on leaving a job with a 401(k) covers the parallel decision.

The catch is specific to this plan type and easy to miss. Money that leaves a governmental 457(b) for an IRA or another plan type is commonly described as adopting the receiving account’s withdrawal rules, which means the separation-from-service advantage does not travel with it. Consolidating for tidiness can therefore cost you the exact feature that made the account valuable. Plans that accept incoming rollovers also often track those dollars in a separate source so the rules stay straight. If you plan to spend from the balance before the ages that govern IRAs, think hard before rolling it out, and confirm the treatment with a qualified tax professional.

What happens to a non-governmental 457(b) when you leave

The non-governmental version behaves less like an account you own and more like a payout schedule you agreed to. Distribution timing is typically elected in advance, sometimes at enrollment, and the plan document controls what happens on separation. Many plans pay the balance out on a fixed schedule beginning shortly after you leave, and some pay a lump sum, which can land an entire deferred career in a single tax year at the worst possible moment.

Changing that election later is usually constrained by rules designed to prevent participants from moving money around for tax convenience, so a decision made years earlier can bind you. Portability is limited too: the balance generally cannot be rolled to an IRA, and a transfer is usually only possible to another non-governmental 457(b) willing to accept it, which in practice is rare. Anyone deferring into a non-governmental plan should read the distribution election as carefully as the investment menu, because it is doing more work. Ask the plan administrator for the current election form and a plain description of the default.

Required minimum distributions

A 457(b) is subject to required minimum distributions in the same general way other pre-tax workplace plans are. Once you reach the age set by law, a minimum amount must come out each year, calculated from the prior year-end balance and a life expectancy factor, and failing to take it carries a penalty. Our explainer on required minimum distributions sets out the mechanism and the aggregation rules, which differ between IRAs and workplace plans in a way that trips people up.

Two points are worth flagging here. The age has been moved by legislation more than once in recent years, and it now varies by birth year, which is precisely why no age appears in this explainer. And the treatment of designated Roth balances inside workplace plans has also changed, so guidance written a few years ago may be wrong on that point. Anyone approaching the relevant age should confirm both the current age and the current Roth treatment with the IRS or a qualified tax professional rather than relying on remembered rules.

Investment menus, fees and annuity products

The investment lineup in a 457(b) is set by the plan sponsor, and quality varies more than in the private sector. Large state plans often run genuinely excellent menus with institutional pricing that a retail investor could not access. Smaller districts and agencies sometimes offer menus built around insurance products with layered fees, a pattern our 403(b) comparison discusses in the same context, since the two plan types are frequently sold through the same channels.

The practical move is to find the fee disclosure and read three things: the expense ratio of each fund you might use, any administrative or recordkeeping charge expressed as a percentage of assets, and any product-level charge such as a mortality and expense fee on an annuity contract. A low-cost index option and a target-date series are the usual anchors, and our target-date fund explainer covers how the glide path works. Where the menu is genuinely poor, the fee drag has to be weighed against the tax deferral, which is a real trade-off rather than an obvious answer.

How a 457(b) compares with a 401(k) and a 403(b)

Set side by side, the three plans are more alike than different in how you fund them and more different than alike in how you leave them. All three take salary deferrals, all three shelter growth, all three usually offer a Roth bucket, and all three are subject to required distributions eventually. The divergence starts at the exit. A 401(k) and a 403(b) share one deferral ceiling and one set of early-withdrawal consequences. A 457(b) has its own ceiling and, in the governmental version, its own gentler treatment on separation.

Two smaller differences matter in practice. Employer money adds to your room in a 401(k) and consumes it in a 457(b). And in-service access is generally easier in a 401(k) than in a 457(b), which reverses the usual assumption that the government plan is the restrictive one. Our 401(k) and IRA comparison covers the other pairing a public employee is likely to be weighing, since an IRA is usually available alongside whatever the employer offers.

Which plan to fund first when you have both

Where a public employer offers both a 403(b) and a governmental 457(b), the ordering question follows from what the money is for. Money you might spend in the years right after leaving public service belongs in the 457(b), because that is the account with the friendlier separation treatment. Money you will not touch until the standard retirement ages can go to either, and the tiebreakers become the investment menu and the fees rather than the tax code.

If either plan carries an employer contribution, capture it first, since a match is a return no menu can beat. Beyond that, a reasonable default is to fund the 457(b) to the extent of your expected bridge need and then direct additional savings to the 403(b) or an IRA. That is a framework, not a recommendation, and it changes if your plan is non-governmental, if your employer’s credit is a concern, or if the 457(b) menu is expensive. Our catch-up walkthrough covers what to do when the numbers are behind. Build the actual ordering with a qualified professional.

Common mistakes with a 457(b)

Four errors show up repeatedly. The first is assuming the plan is a 401(k) with a different label, which leads people to expect in-service flexibility that is not there and to miss the separate limit that is. The second is deferring into a non-governmental plan without ever asking which version it is, so the creditor exposure is discovered years later or never.

The third is rolling a governmental balance into an IRA reflexively at retirement, tidying the paperwork and discarding the separation-from-service treatment in the same motion, sometimes months before it would have been used. The fourth is treating the special three-year catch-up as an on-demand feature rather than a calculated one: it depends on unused room the plan administrator has to compute, on the normal retirement age the plan document defines, and on a three-year window that closes. Each of these is avoidable by asking two questions, which version is this plan and what does the plan document say, before acting.

A worked example: one city employee’s bridge

Take an illustrative employee named Dana who works for a city and leaves at 58 after a long career. She deferred an illustrative $500 a month into the governmental 457(b) for 20 years, so her illustrative balance is about $231,000, matching the third bar in the chart above. Her pension begins at 62. She needs an illustrative $60,000 a year, and she covers it exactly as the stacked bar shows: $36,000 from the 457(b), $12,000 from a taxable account, $12,000 from part-time work.

Follow the balance over the four bridge years, growing at an illustrative 6 percent with each $36,000 taken at the start of the year. It goes to roughly $207,000, then $181,000, then $154,000, and stands at about $125,000 when the pension starts. She then reduces the draw sharply. The point is not the precision, which is illustrative, but the structure: the 457(b) was the only balance she could tap at 58 without the extra penalty layer, and it carried her to the pension. Change the pension start date by two years and the whole plan changes. Dana is invented and her figures are teaching numbers.

Using a calculator with a 457(b)

A calculator answers two questions here and refuses a third. It can tell you what a deferral you choose becomes over a horizon you choose, which is the accumulation question, and it can tell you how long a balance survives a draw you specify, which is the bridge question. Both are pure arithmetic on inputs you supply, and both are useful precisely because they are insensitive to the rules that change every year. The calculator on this page runs the compounding side, and it is worth running twice, once at your current deferral and once at the deferral you are considering, because the gap between the two is the real decision.

What it cannot tell you is your contribution ceiling. That depends on the current IRS limit, on which catch-up you qualify for, on unused room from earlier years, on whether employer contributions consume part of your space, and on which version of the plan you are in. Those inputs come from your plan administrator and from current IRS materials. Our retirement number walkthrough covers the larger target that the deferral is serving.

The bottom line

A 457(b) is the deferred compensation plan of public service and of a narrow group at tax-exempt employers, and it is worth understanding on its own terms rather than as a 401(k) variant. Fund it and the mechanics feel familiar: a payroll deferral, an investment menu, tax-sheltered growth, often a Roth bucket. Leave the employer and the differences arrive at once. A governmental plan is widely described as escaping the extra early-distribution tax that applies to other workplace plans, which makes it the natural bridge from an early public-service retirement to a pension or Social Security, though ordinary income tax on pre-tax dollars still applies and rolling the balance to an IRA is commonly described as giving that advantage up. A non-governmental plan is a different proposition: the assets stay the employer’s, general creditors can reach them, distribution timing is elected in advance and portability is minimal, so the plan carries a credit judgment about your employer alongside the investment one. No contribution limit, catch-up figure or threshold appears anywhere in this explainer, because those reset annually and a stale number is worse than none, so look up the current figures with the IRS or ask your plan administrator, who is required to know them. Then confirm your own situation with a qualified tax professional, and put your deferral into the calculator to see what steady funding builds.

This explainer is educational only and is not tax, legal, investment or financial advice, and it does not replace reading your own plan document or speaking with someone who knows your circumstances. The $500 monthly deferral, the 6 percent assumed return, the $82,000, $145,000, $231,000 and $347,000 balances, the $60,000 bridge year and its $36,000, $12,000 and $12,000 components, and Dana and every figure attached to her were chosen as round teaching numbers to keep the arithmetic legible. They are projections of nothing, no return is promised, and investing involves risk including the possible loss of principal. No annual contribution limit, catch-up amount, age threshold, penalty rate or income figure set by law appears anywhere in this explainer, and that omission is deliberate, because those figures are adjusted regularly and several of them change every year. The letter L stands in for whatever the current deferral ceiling happens to be. Whether the age-based catch-up or the special pre-retirement catch-up is available to you, how much unused room you have, whether your plan offers Roth deferrals, loans or in-service access, what your plan defines as its normal retirement age, and what happens to your balance when you separate are all determined by your plan document and by current law rather than by anything written here. The distinction between a governmental and a non-governmental 457(b) changes nearly every answer, including whether the assets are legally yours, so establish which version you have in writing before you act on any of this. Before enrolling, changing a deferral election, requesting an emergency distribution, taking a plan loan, choosing a distribution schedule, rolling a balance anywhere or planning a bridge to a pension, confirm the current rules with the IRS, ask your plan administrator, and consult a qualified professional such as a tax advisor and a fee-only fiduciary planner.

Edited by Hamza Hai, MBA · Editor

Hamza Hai is the editor of SumLoft. She holds an MBA and reviews the site's articles against our editorial standards, checking that every figure is labelled for what it is, that nothing is presented as verified fact without a source the reader can check, and that the writing stays useful to a non-specialist.

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