Employee Benefits Statistics: The Numbers That Matter

Most benefits statistics roundups have the same problem: they are compiled from other roundups. A number gets published by a vendor, quoted by a second vendor, cited by a third, and by the fourth hop nobody can tell you what survey it came from or what year it describes.

That matters more than it sounds. If you are deciding whether a fifteen-person business can afford health coverage, you are making a real financial decision with those numbers. A figure with no traceable source is not evidence. It is a rumor with a decimal point.

Everything below comes from a primary source, named and dated: the Bureau of Labor Statistics for cost and access, KFF for health premiums, SHRM for employer priorities, and the Urban Institute for the firm-size comparison. If you want the underlying concepts rather than the numbers, the employee benefits guide covers what each category actually is. Where a widely quoted statistic has no traceable origin, I say so rather than repeating it. And the framing throughout is what the number means for an employer with five to fifty people, because that is who I build FirstHR for and because almost every other page on this topic quietly assumes an HR department.

Ten Numbers Worth Knowing

If you read nothing else, these ten figures describe the current state of employee benefits in the United States, each traceable to a named source.

Two of those figures do most of the work in the rest of this guide. The 30.1 percent tells you what benefits cost as a share of what you spend on people. The 55 versus 88 percent tells you why that cost is worth bearing, because it quantifies the disadvantage you carry in the labor market if you skip it.

What Benefits Cost Employers

Benefits accounted for 30.1 percent of total compensation for private industry workers in March 2026, or $14.01 of the $46.60 average hourly cost of employing someone.

Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wages and salaries averaged $32.60 per hour worked and accounted for 69.9 percent of employer costs, while benefit costs averaged $14.01 and made up the remaining 30.1 percent. For state and local government workers the benefit share is markedly higher at 38.5 percent, which is why public-sector comparisons mislead private employers who see them quoted without context.

The wage-percentile detail is the part small employers should look at hardest, because averages conceal it. Employer costs for benefits ranged from $3.18 per hour at the 10th wage percentile to $29.31 at the 90th. Benefits are not a flat surcharge on payroll; they scale steeply with what you pay, which means a business employing mostly lower-wage staff faces a very different absolute cost than the national average implies. The mechanics of translating this into a per-employee figure sit in the cost of benefits per employee guide.

Health Insurance Statistics

Health coverage is the largest single benefit expense and the one where small employers face the worst terms, which the averages tend to obscure.

The two small-firm rows are the ones that should stop you. A worker at a company with 10 to 199 employees pays an average of $8,889 toward family coverage, roughly 43 percent more than the $6,227 paid by a worker at a larger firm, per the KFF 2025 survey. And more than one in four covered workers at those smaller firms are in plans requiring $12,000 or more of their own money for family coverage.

That is not a story about small employers being ungenerous. It is a story about risk pooling: a twenty-person group cannot spread cost the way a two-thousand-person group can, so the same benefit costs the employee more. It is also the strongest argument for looking at alternatives to a traditional group plan before concluding you cannot compete, which the startup health insurance guide and the comparison of ICHRA and QSEHRA both address.

Retirement Plan Statistics

Retirement access shows the sharpest and cleanest gradient by employer size of any benefit measured, which makes it the clearest illustration of the structural disadvantage smaller employers carry.

Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employee Benefits Survey for March 2025, retirement benefits were available to 72 percent of private industry workers, with 70 percent having access to defined contribution plans and 14 percent to defined benefit plans. The establishment-size breakdown runs 59 percent under 100 workers, 86 percent at 100 to 499, and 90 percent at 500 or more.

Read the middle number carefully, because it is the encouraging one. The jump from 59 to 86 percent happens between "under 100" and "100 to 499", not between small and enormous. Employers do not need to be large to close most of this gap; they need to be past the point where a plan feels administratively impossible. That threshold has moved down substantially in the last few years, both because of federal tax credits and because state mandates now require action in a growing number of places, which is covered in the guide to states with mandatory retirement plans.

Paid Leave Statistics

Paid leave is the benefit where small employers come closest to parity, largely because it costs nothing to set up and scales with the business rather than requiring a vendor relationship.

Worth separating from the voluntary picture: some leave is not optional at all. What you are legally required to provide, as distinct from what the market expects, is covered in the statutory benefits guide.

The industry spread in the second row is worth more than the national average for benchmarking purposes. If you run a restaurant, comparing your sick leave policy against the all-industry figure tells you almost nothing; comparing it against the roughly 55 percent access rate in leisure and hospitality tells you exactly where you stand with the candidates you are actually competing for. The mechanics of designing the policy itself are in the PTO guide.

Note also the direction of travel on parental leave, up 7 percentage points in a single year in the SHRM data. Among benefits that employers are actively adding rather than maintaining, leave for new parents is currently moving fastest, which matters if you are trying to work out where a limited benefits budget buys the most competitive advantage.

Everything Else

Beyond the big three, access rates fall away quickly, and the drop-off is itself useful information about where the competitive bar actually sits.

The childcare row deserves a comment because it is frequently cited as evidence that employers are failing families. Available to only 13 percent of private industry workers and 8 percent at establishments under 100, it is genuinely rare. But it is also the benefit with the largest gap between how often it is discussed and how often it is offered, which means a small employer who does offer something here is differentiated in a way that a marginally better health plan would never achieve.

The last row is the newest signal in the data. Employer-sponsored AI tool subscriptions climbed 17 percentage points in a single year to reach 33 percent of employers. Whether that counts as a benefit or as equipment is arguable, and the fact that it is being tracked in a benefits survey at all tells you something about how the category is expanding. Where these sit relative to traditional offerings is covered in the employee perks guide and the voluntary benefits guide.

What Employers Prioritize

Employer priorities are strikingly stable, which is itself the finding. The ranking has barely moved in four years despite a great deal of commentary suggesting otherwise.

Per SHRM's employee benefits research, drawn from surveys of thousands of HR professionals at organizations ranging from two to more than 50,000 employees, health-related benefits have held the top position consistently, with retirement and leave tied for second for several consecutive years.

The practical read for a small employer is a sequencing instruction. If your budget covers one benefit category properly, the consensus across thousands of employers is that it should be health. If it covers two, add retirement or leave depending on your workforce. The second tier is where differentiation lives, not where the baseline sits, and treating a flexible schedule as a substitute for the first tier is a common and expensive misreading of what candidates actually compare.

The Small Business Gap

This is the section that matters most if you employ fewer than fifty people, and it is the one most benefits statistics pages skip entirely by addressing a generic employer.

Per Urban Institute analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, workers at businesses with 50 or fewer full-time equivalent employees have lower access to every benefit measured. Medical care runs 55 percent against 88 percent at businesses with 100 or more. Retirement plans run 54 percent against 85 percent. Dental sits at 27 percent against 59 percent, meaning access to dental or vision is roughly 54 percent lower at micro and small businesses.

The gap does not stop at access. Take-up lags too: among workers who are offered medical coverage, 58 percent at micro and small businesses actually enroll, against 67 percent at medium and large ones. Interestingly, take-up for dental and vision is nearly identical across sizes, at 74 against 75 percent and 72 against 77 percent respectively.

What Actually Closes the Gap

The statistics above describe a structural disadvantage, but two of the mechanisms behind it have changed materially in the last few years, and the numbers have not fully caught up.

Retirement plan startup costs are largely covered by tax credits now. Under the SECURE 2.0 Act, employers with 50 or fewer employees can claim a credit of 100 percent of qualified plan startup costs, capped at $5,000 per year for the first three years, calculated as $250 per eligible non-highly-compensated employee. Employers with 51 to 100 employees claim 50 percent. There is a separate credit for employer contributions of up to $1,000 per eligible employee, phasing down over five years. That is a genuine change to the arithmetic behind the 54 percent access figure.

Health coverage no longer requires a group plan. Reimbursement arrangements let a small employer contribute tax-free toward individual coverage rather than sponsoring a group plan and absorbing its risk pool problem. A qualified small employer HRA is designed specifically for businesses under 50 employees. It is not right for everyone, and it does not fix everything, but it is a route that did not exist when many of the assumptions behind these access statistics were formed.

Neither mechanism eliminates the gap. Both mean the gap is smaller than it was, and that a business looking at the 55 percent medical access figure and concluding the matter is settled is working from an outdated model of what is available.

Statistics to Treat With Caution

Four figures appear across ranking pages on this topic without traceable primary sources. I am flagging them rather than repeating them, because using an unsourced number to justify a budget decision is how a rumor becomes a plan.

The general test is simple and worth applying to anything you find, including this page: can you name the survey, its sample, and its date? For every figure above I have named all three. If a statistic cannot survive that question, it may still be true, but it is not evidence, and it should not be the reason you spend money.

Using These Numbers Without Misusing Them

Four cautions about applying national statistics to a specific small business, each of which I have seen lead someone to the wrong conclusion.

Averages hide the wage gradient. Benefit costs ranged from $3.18 per hour at the 10th wage percentile to $29.31 at the 90th. If your workforce sits at one end of that range, the national average describes nobody at your company.

Access is not participation. BLS counts an employee as having access if the benefit is available, whether or not they take it. A 72 percent access figure and a participation figure are answering different questions, and vendors quote whichever supports their argument.

Establishment size is not company size. BLS reports many breakdowns by establishment, meaning a single physical location. A fifty-person company operating from one office and a fifty-person location within a large chain land in the same bucket despite having nothing in common.

National medians do not describe your labor market. The comparison that determines whether you win a candidate is against the specific employers bidding for that person, not against the country. This is the error I made and the one worth guarding against hardest.

One further use for these figures worth naming: benefit cost belongs in your total cost of employment, not in a separate mental category. The 30.1 percent share is why a salary figure understates what a hire costs, and the arithmetic behind that sits in the total compensation guide alongside the wider labor cost picture.

Benchmarking Your Own Package

Six questions to convert these statistics into a decision about your own business.

None of this requires an HR department. It requires knowing which figures apply to a business your size and checking your own numbers against them once a year. How to build the package these statistics describe is covered in the small business employee benefits guide, and the operational side of running it sits in the benefits administration guide.

Frequently Asked Questions