Employee Benefits Statistics: The Numbers That Matter

Most benefits statistics roundups have the same problem: they are compiled from other roundups. This guide takes the other route. Every figure comes from a primary source, named and dated, so you can use it in a budget decision without wondering where it came from.

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. A figure with no traceable source is not evidence. It is a rumor with a decimal point.

That matters more than it sounds. If you are deciding whether a small business can afford health coverage, you are making a real financial decision with those numbers. Where a widely quoted statistic has no traceable origin, I say so rather than repeating it.

The sources are the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for cost and access, KFF for health premiums, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) for employer priorities, and the Urban Institute for firm size. The framing is what each number means for a small business, 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 30.0 percent tells you what benefits cost as a share of what you spend on people.

The 55 versus 88 percent medical access gap tells you why that cost is worth bearing: workers at larger businesses are far more likely to be offered coverage, so skipping it leaves you at a disadvantage in the labor market.

What Benefits Cost Employers

Benefits accounted for 30.0 percent of total compensation for private industry workers in June 2026, or $14.07 of the $46.89 average hourly cost of employing someone.

Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wages and salaries averaged $32.82 per hour worked and accounted for 70.0 percent of employer costs, while benefit costs averaged $14.07 and made up the remaining 30.0 percent. That average blends in part-time workers, whose benefits cost $5.05 per hour worked; full-time workers averaged $17.03 in benefits on $36.97 in wages, a 31.5 percent share. For state and local government workers the benefit share is markedly higher at 38.8 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. In the March 2026 percentile tables, 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. A business employing mostly lower-wage staff faces a very different absolute cost than the national average implies.

Health Insurance Statistics

Health coverage is the largest single benefit expense, at $3.48 per hour worked in private industry in June 2026 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 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 Employer Health Benefits Survey.

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. The cause is risk pooling rather than ungenerous employers: a twenty-person group cannot spread cost the way a two-thousand-person group can, so the same benefit costs the employee more.

Risk pooling is also the strongest argument for looking at alternatives to a traditional group plan before concluding you cannot compete.

Retirement Plan Statistics

Retirement access shows one of the clearest gradients by employer size of any benefit measured, which makes it a clean illustration of the structural disadvantage smaller employers carry.

Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employee Benefits Survey for March 2026, retirement benefits were available to 72 percent of private industry workers, with 70 percent having access to defined contribution plans (401(k)-style accounts) and 14 percent to defined benefit plans (traditional pensions). The establishment-size breakdown runs 59 percent under 100 workers, 85 percent at 100 to 499, and 91 percent at 500 or more.

Read the middle number carefully, because it is the encouraging one. The jump from 59 to 85 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.

The size at which a plan stops feeling administratively impossible has dropped 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.

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.

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 58 percent access rate in leisure and hospitality tells you exactly where you stand with the candidates you are actually competing for.

Part of the 81 percent national access rate for paid sick leave was never a choice anyone made. According to the Congressional Research Service (April 2026), 17 states plus the District of Columbia require private employers to provide paid sick leave, and three more states require paid leave that can be used for any purpose.

In a growing share of the country, then, paid sick leave is mandated rather than voluntary. Benchmarking against the national access rate without checking your own state reads a legal obligation as a competitive choice.

Note also the direction of travel on parental leave, up 7 percentage points in a single year in the SHRM data. Leave around the birth of a child is among the benefits employers are actively adding rather than maintaining, 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 of health, retirement, and leave, access rates fall away quickly, and they fall fastest at the smallest employers. That drop-off is itself useful information about where the competitive bar actually sits. Figures below are Bureau of Labor Statistics data for March 2026 unless marked otherwise.

The childcare row deserves a comment because it is frequently cited as evidence that employers are failing families. Available to only 14 percent of private industry workers and 9 percent at establishments under 100, it is genuinely rare.

Childcare is also a benefit with a wide 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. 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.

What Employers Prioritize

Employer priorities are strikingly stable, which is itself the finding. The order has not changed in four years of surveys. Health, retirement, and leave have each held within a point of where they started, while the third tier has given up four points on flexible working and three each on family care and development.

Per the SHRM 2026 Employee Benefits Survey, which collected 5,472 responses from HR professionals at organizations ranging from two to more than 50,000 employees, health-related benefits have held the top position in each of the four years it reports, with retirement and leave tied for second for the fifth consecutive year.

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.

Health is the baseline, and the second tier is where differentiation lives. Treating a flexible schedule as a substitute for health coverage is a common and expensive misreading of what candidates actually compare.

What Benefits Employees Value Most

Health coverage is the benefit employees value most, and the clearest measure of it is not a satisfaction score but how many people stay in a job to keep it. Gallup research fielded between October and December 2025 found 24 percent of workers with employer-sponsored insurance staying in roles they wanted to leave for fear of losing coverage, up 8 points since 2021.

The breakdowns are the useful part for a small employer. Job lock runs 44 percent among workers carrying medical debt against 21 percent among those without it, and 30 percent among women against 20 percent among men. Employer rankings and employee behavior agree on health coverage.

Benefit Trends and Where the Category Is Heading

The benefit trends worth acting on are the ones with measurable movement behind them. The table below collects a selection of the year-over-year moves in the SHRM 2026 survey, in both directions, including the parental leave and AI figures noted earlier. It is a different list from the one the commentary would predict.

The health plan rows describe the future of employee benefits more honestly than any forecast does. Coverage is not being cut. It is being rebought: prescription drugs carved out of the medical plan, more employers carrying the risk themselves, and fully insured arrangements slipping. That is cost pressure changing how coverage is purchased rather than whether it exists.

Pharmacy is where the pressure lands hardest. SHRM reports third-party pharmacy management programs up 5 points, which is employers looking for somewhere outside the medical plan to put specialty drug cost. The survey ties the 10-point fall in contraceptive coverage to Affordable Care Act provisions that expired at the end of 2025.

The cost backdrop supports that reading. Family premiums rose 26 percent over five years against 28.6 percent wage growth and 23.5 percent inflation, per the KFF 2025 survey. Premiums are tracking wages rather than outrunning them, which is why the movement shows up in plan design instead of in employers dropping coverage outright.

For a small business, the practical filter is whether a trend is even available at your size. Leave expansion and coaching are. Self-insurance, in my view, is not, because a single bad claims year lands entirely on you. Chasing the wrong half of that table is an expensive way to look current.

The Small Business Gap

This is the section that matters most if you run a small business, and it is the one most benefits statistics pages skip entirely by addressing a generic employer.

Per Urban Institute analysis (February 2026) of 2024 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.

Defined contribution retirement plans run 54 percent against 85 percent, and dental sits at 27 percent against 59 percent, less than half the rate at larger 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. Take-up for dental and vision, by contrast, is much closer 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 100 percent of qualified plan startup costs for the first three years.

The yearly cap is the lesser of $5,000 or $250 per eligible employee who is not highly compensated, and never less than $500. Employers with 51 to 100 employees claim 50 percent.

A second credit sits on top of that one. Per IRS guidance, employers with up to 50 employees can also claim their own contributions, up to $1,000 per participant, at 100 percent in the first two years and then 75, 50, and 25 percent. That is a genuine change to the arithmetic behind the 54 percent access figure.

Health coverage no longer requires a group plan either. Reimbursement arrangements let a small employer contribute tax-free toward individual coverage rather than sponsoring a group plan and absorbing the cost of a small risk pool. It is not right for everyone, but it is a route that did not exist when many of the assumptions behind these access statistics were formed.

The qualified small employer HRA is the version built for this size. Per HealthCare.gov, it is open to an employer with fewer than 50 full-time equivalent employees that offers no group health plan, and 2026 reimbursements are capped at $6,450 for self-only coverage and $13,100 for family coverage.

Neither mechanism eliminates the gap, but both shrink it. A business that reads the 55 percent medical access figure and concludes it cannot compete 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 passing them along, 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 survey figure above I have named the survey and its date, and each of those surveys publishes its sample and method.

A statistic that cannot survive that question 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 in March 2026. 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. Medical care reached 71 percent access but only 46 percent participation in March 2026, and vendors quote whichever of those two 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.

Benchmarking Your Own Package

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

Answering those questions in your head is not the same as answering them on paper. The worksheet below puts the figures from this guide in one column and leaves the next one blank for yours, so the gap is a number you can look at rather than an impression. The second sheet is the one that will teach you the most: a running record of what the competing offer contained every time you lose someone.

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.

Which Employee Benefits Report to Benchmark Against

No single employee benefits report answers every question, which is why benchmarking exercises so often end up comparing two figures that were never comparable. Five sources do the work between them, and each one owns a different question.

The trap in any benchmarking report is that "small" means something different in each of them. The BLS establishment cut is under 100 workers, the KFF firm cut starts at 10 to 199, and the Urban Institute cut is 50 or fewer full-time equivalents. Comparing your business against the wrong one of those will flatter or alarm you for no reason.

One more change is worth knowing before you cite KFF at a small size. Beginning with the 2025 round, the survey no longer includes firms with 3 to 9 employees. If your business sits in that range, the smallest published cut now describes employers meaningfully larger than you. Whichever report you use, write the size cut next to every figure you copy into the worksheet.

Frequently Asked Questions