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There are some articles floating around related to encouraging younger employees to participate in 401(k) Plans while paying down substantial student loan debt, by making an employer contribution (described as a match) to the 401k plan. This is to encourage retirement savings, when younger employees are too saddled with college loan debt to participate in the 401(k) Plan. These have been described variously as an employer contribution conditioned to student loan debt payment, as a flat dollar incentive, or percentage of pay. This appears to be a very different employee benefit from employer provided student loan incentive benefits that "match" student debt payments, which (as far as I know) continue to be taxable to the employee with the student loan debt. My client is interested in this as incentive for attracting millenial employees, and encourage them to pay off debt sooner, so they can afford to make 401(k) contributions. But there is little information out there on this topic. I do not think there is any mechanism to call this a match, if there are actual employee elective deferrals. So I assume this would be incorporated into a plan as a "profit sharing" contribution. I suppose you could create allocation categories with one of them being "participants who are paying college debt", and providing a flat dollar allocation or % of pay allocation only to that group.....and exclude HCEs (in the event there are any in that category). There are companies selling this as an administration service, but it appears that in order to utilize this "service", the participants have to refinance their student loans through the service provider. This gives rise to additional concerns. Has anyone out there designed such a 401k plan provision?