Introducing Percentage-Based Contribution Benchmarking

Employer contributions are the quiet driver of benefits competitiveness. Plan design gets the attention, but what employers actually pay often matters more to employees. And until now, benchmarking contributions has been harder than it should be.

That's changing.

The Problem with Dollar Benchmarks

Historically, most contribution benchmarking has focused on dollar amounts. What's the median employer contribution for employee-only coverage? What about family tier?

Dollar amounts are useful, but they miss context. A $500 monthly contribution means something very different depending on the underlying premium. An employer covering $500 of a $600 premium is generous. An employer covering $500 of a $1,200 premium is not.

To really understand contribution competitiveness, you need percentages.

Coming Soon: Percentage-Based Contribution Benchmarking

We're expanding our contribution benchmarking to include percentage-of-premium analysis. You can now see not just what employers contribute in dollars, but what share of total premium cost they're covering.

This unlocks better comparisons:

• Apples to apples across geographies. A Texas employer and a California employer have very different premium baselines. Percentage benchmarking normalizes for that.
• Meaningful tier comparisons. The gap between employee-only and family contributions becomes clearer when expressed as percentages rather than raw dollars.
• Industry context that makes sense. Seeing that tech employers cover a higher percentage than retail employers tells a cleaner story than dollar comparisons that conflate generosity with premium differences.

What You Can Benchmark

Percentage-based benchmarking is coming soon across:

• All coverage tiers (employee-only, employee + spouse, employee + children, family)
• Industry segments
• Geographic regions
• Employer size bands
• Plan types (PPO, HDHP, HMO)

Filter to your peer group and see where your contribution strategy stands—in terms that actually reflect competitiveness.

Coming Later This Year: Contribution Modeling

Benchmarking tells you where you stand. But the next question is always: what should we do about it?

We're building contribution modeling tools that integrate directly with our benchmarking analytics. Model different contribution scenarios—adjust percentages by tier, shift between fixed dollar and percentage-based approaches, change plan incentives—and see in real time how those changes affect your competitive positioning.

What does it look like if we move from 75% to 80% on employee-only? How does our ranking shift if we flatten the tier gap? What's the cost impact of matching the 60th percentile in our industry?

Contribution modeling will bring these questions from spreadsheet exercises into the platform, connected to live benchmark data.

Look for it later in 2025.

The Contribution Conversation

Contributions deserve more attention than they typically get. Employees notice. Candidates compare offers. And in a competitive labor market, the difference between covering 70% and 80% of family premiums can be the difference between winning and losing talent.

Now you have the data to have that conversation with precision.