Two more ERISA exemptions: foreign plans and excess benefit plans
Beyond government, church, and workers' compensation plans, ERISA Title I also exempts plans maintained abroad for nonresident aliens and certain unfunded excess benefit plans.
29 U.S.C. section 1003(b) lists five exemptions from ERISA Title I coverage in total. This site has separate guides on the two most common, government plans and church plans, and on the workers' compensation and state disability law exemption. The remaining two are narrow enough that most readers will never need them, but they exist and are worth naming.
The fourth exemption covers a plan maintained outside of the United States primarily for the benefit of people who are substantially all nonresident aliens. This is aimed at a genuinely foreign benefit arrangement, not at a US employer's ordinary group LTD plan simply because some employees happen to work abroad.
The fifth exemption covers an excess benefit plan, as defined elsewhere in the statute, that is unfunded. An excess benefit plan is a narrow category tied to benefits above certain tax-code limits, and the word unfunded is doing real work in the exemption: the same kind of plan, if funded, would not qualify. Neither exemption is likely to apply to a typical employer group long-term disability claim, and this site does not attempt to state the detailed tax-code definition of an excess benefit plan beyond what the statute itself names, since that level of detail was not independently verified this session.
The practical takeaway
For the overwhelming majority of readers with a denied group LTD claim, none of these five exemptions apply, and the plan is an ordinary ERISA-governed plan. These two narrower exemptions are here for completeness and because a plan administrator or an attorney may reference them by name; they are not a reason to assume your own claim falls outside ERISA without checking your specific plan document.