Benefits administration companies: how benefit administration companies are priced, and what to ask before you sign
- Benefits cost per employee a year
- $11,900
- Per employee a month
- $991.67
- As a percent of base salary
- 19.2
The numbers on this page come from the inputs you enter and the method stated: 3,600 seconds to an hour, 52 weeks to a year, twelve months to a year, and nothing else. No industry shrinkage figure, no occupancy benchmark and no assumption about your attrition; every one of those is yours to enter.
A benefits administration company runs the machinery of a package somebody else designed: it takes enrollment, decides eligibility, sends the carrier what the carrier needs, handles the leavers, and produces the filings the year ends with. This page is for the employer who already knows roughly what the package will contain and now has to decide who operates it, at what price, and where the work stops being theirs. It covers what the service actually includes, the three shapes the price comes in, the four questions that separate a real administrator from a portal, and the parts that stay on your desk whatever you sign.
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Separate the design from the operation
Two different purchases hide under one word. Designing the package, choosing the carriers and negotiating the renewal is brokerage. Operating it, enrollment through to reporting, is administration. Plenty of firms sell both and price them as one, which is fine until you want to change one and not the other. Ask for the two priced separately before you agree a bundle, because that is the only way to know what the operating half costs you.
Price it per employee per month, whatever the proposal says
Administration is quoted three ways: a rate per employee per month, a rate per plan or per participant, or no rate at all because it is paid out of commission on the plans the same firm placed. Reduce whichever you are given to one figure per enrolled employee per month and put it beside the package cost per employee the free worksheet works out. Administration that costs a tenth of the package it administers is a different conversation from one that costs a fiftieth, and you cannot see which you have until both are per head.
Ask what happens on the four bad days
A new hire who misses the enrollment window. A leaver whose coverage should have ended last month and did not. A carrier feed that silently stopped. A dependent added after a birth outside the open window. Ask who notices each of those, how, and within how long, and ask for the answer as a process rather than as a reassurance. The firms that answer precisely are the ones that have built the checks; the firms that answer warmly are selling you a portal and a phone number.
Keep the eligibility rule and the headcount on your own record
Whoever administers the package, the question of who is eligible is a fact about your own plan: which roles, at what hours, after what waiting period. That rule and the headcount it applies to belong on the plan record you keep, because it is the thing you will be asked to evidence and the thing that has to survive a change of administrator. An employer whose only copy of its own eligibility rule is inside a vendor's portal has outsourced a fact about itself.
Will it do what you need for Benefits administration companies?
Tell us how your team plans its staffing today and where the number gets argued; a person who has built one answers.
Benefits administration companies: common questions
Is a benefits administration company the same as a broker? Not necessarily, and the difference matters at renewal. A broker is paid to place and negotiate the plans; an administrator is paid to operate them. Many firms do both, and when administration is paid out of placement commission you are not seeing its price. Ask for the two quoted separately.
How do benefit administration companies usually charge? Per employee per month is the most common and the easiest to compare. Per participant per plan is next, and reads cheaper until somebody enrols in four things. The third shape is administration folded into commission, which has a price you can only see by asking what the commission is.
What should stay with us rather than the administrator? The plan design decisions, the eligibility rule, the headcount the rule applies to, and the record of what each role was budgeted to cost. Those are facts about your own organization and your own plan, and they have to outlive any one supplier.
Does Orgplanly administer benefits? No. It keeps the plan the package is budgeted inside, so the cost per employee sits beside the headcount and the roles it was planned for, and the free worksheet works that figure from your own numbers. It publishes no ranking of administrators and sells no insurance.
Orgplanly Pro
Keeping what you make
The worksheet answered today's question. Pro keeps the answer: the plan you just worked saved against the team it belongs to, re-opened at the next review instead of rebuilt, branded and exported for the budget meeting.
- Download the finished checklist or intake form as a file the client accepts
- The paperwork goes out clean, without the Kickoffo watermark
- Re-use the checklist for the next client instead of rebuilding it
- Your firm's logo on every checklist and form you send
- Export every client's onboarding at once when the account review or the buyer asks
- Send the plan for review from the record, not a spreadsheet
- Not part of Orgplanly today; your billing stays where it is
- Not part of Orgplanly today; your ledger stays where it is
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