The IRS has picked up where it left off last month with additional retirement plan amendment deadline extensions. As you may recall from our August 5, 2022 blog post, Time Is On My Side: Some Retirement Plan Amendment Deadlines Pushed Back, the IRS recently extended certain SECURE Act, Miner’s Act, and CARES Act amendment deadlines for retirement plans but notably did not extend the deadline for coronavirus-related distributions and loan plan loan relief under the CARES Act. While it is unclear whether those omissions were intentional or an oversight, the IRS has rendered that question moot in IRS Notice 2022-45.

Notice 2022-45 provides that plan sponsors who elected to offer coronavirus-related distributions, loan repayment deferrals, and increases to the maximum loan amount during 2020 under the CARES Act generally now have until December 31, 2025 to amend their plan documents to conform them to the plans’ operations. Before this deadline extension, plans were generally required to be amended by the end of 2022.

The Notice also extends the deadline for amending plans that elected to adopt certain disaster-related relief provisions under the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (CAA). Those provisions concerned disaster-related distributions and loan relief similar to the above CARES Act provisions for major disasters occurring between January 1, 2020 and February 25, 2021. Like the CARES Act deadline extensions, the deadlines to formally adopt the qualified disaster relief amendments were generally extended from December 31, 2022 to December 31, 2025.

With these deadline extensions, plan sponsors will be able to amend their retirement plans at the same time for all SECURE Act, CARES Act, and CAA amendments. Note that the deadline extensions discussed above under the Notice apply to non-governmental qualified plans (e.g., 401(k) plans), 403(b) plans that are not maintained by public schools, and IRAs. Different deadlines apply to governmental plans.