...Am I still 100% vested in my 401K after being laid off?

Vesting is a type of security feature for companies to retain talented and hardworking employees for the longer term. 401k Vesting is the amount of time you MUST work for a company to fully accrue your 401k savings and not forfeit them (if you quit your job prematurely). Thus, when you are "fully vested", this means you have accrued your 401k retirement savings fully and can rollover into an IRA incase you quit working for the company.

If you are the only one making contributions towards a 401k plan (and not your employer together), then you have full 100% vesting. However if your employer matches your 401k contributions by say 25% (meaning if you contribute $10000 a year into your 401k, your employer would therefore contribute 25% of $10,000 = $2500), then you are required to perform 5 years of work for your employer before you have 100% vesting of 401k retirement funds.

Vesting with my current employer works like this:

After 1 year 20% vested
After 2 years 40% vested
After 3 years 60% vested
After 4 years 80% vested
After 5 years 100% vested

I’ve worked with my current employer for almost 6 years, a really great company. Well things got slow and I was laid off for 6 months. I recently started back with the same company and had a question about my 401K.

It was about vesting. An employee must work here for 5 years to become fully vested. Since I was laid off I wanted to know if I would still be fully vested since I had already worked here more than 5 years or would the vesting period start over.

I asked out HR director, who straightened out the issue simply:

“You maintain your vesting percentage until you are gone more the 5 years.”

So that’s that. :)