Originally Posted by higney85

the long answer is to call the R&I guys and walk through the flow of dollars. You can also see the latest R&I comm for the max amounts for 2026.

here’s the short version. Every dollar you make from flight pay/flight advance and PS gets 18% allocated to the 401k. Company dollars always go first. Catchup dollars are always only your dollars and are a separate category. You can put catchup in any time regardless of how much the company has contributed. Back to the 18%… the company will be putting in the money until the 401k hits $72,000 OR your income hits $360,000. The max the company get get into the 401k for 2026 is $64,800. That’s 360k @ 18%. So if you wait and want to put in money later in the year you would only be able to get $7,200 in there. To limit MBCBP you have to limit your contributions (so $7,200). If you want to get your full personal contributions in, you need to be aggressively putting in money at the beginning of the year because once the 401k hits $72,000, all company contributions go to the MBCBP.

feel free to send a dart or check out the R&I docs in comply for “where’s my money” and “delta savings plan strategies”. A good bit of time was spent on trying to make those easy to understand for those who don’t speak 401/415/414 IRC.