Top 10 employee benefits, ranked by how many US workers actually have them
- 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.
Lists of top employee benefits are usually ranked by how interesting they are to write about. There is a better ordering available and it is published: the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures what share of US workers have ACCESS to each benefit and what share PARTICIPATE in it, which is the difference between offered and used. Ranking by access tells an employer what is expected of it. Ranking by participation tells it what people actually take. This page explains how to read that ranking, and why the two orderings disagree in a useful way.
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Rank by access to see what is expected
Access is the share of workers whose employer offers the benefit. A benefit with very high access is effectively table stakes: not offering it puts you visibly below the market, and offering it wins nothing. Paid leave, retirement plans and medical care sit at the top of that ordering for most worker groups. The BLS table linked below is the source, it is broken out by industry, establishment size and union status, and your own comparison should use the cut that matches your workforce rather than the headline.
Rank by participation to see what people take
Participation is the share of workers who actually enroll where it is offered. The gap between access and participation is the interesting number: a benefit with high access and low participation is one employers keep buying and employees keep declining, usually because of cost-sharing or because the alternative is better. That gap is the single most useful thing in the published data for an employer deciding what to change.
Use the cut that matches your own workforce
The headline figures cover all civilian workers, which is almost nobody's workforce. The same source breaks access and participation down by establishment size, industry group and full or part-time status, and the differences between those cuts are large. An employer comparing itself to the all-worker average is comparing itself to a population it does not employ.
What this ranking cannot tell you
It cannot tell you what your own people value, because access and participation measure what is offered and taken rather than what is wanted. That is what an internal question answers, and the ordering it produces is regularly different. Use the published ranking to know what is expected of you, and your own people to decide where the discretionary money goes.
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Top 10 employee benefits: common questions
What are the top 10 employee benefits? Ranked by the share of US workers with access, the published data puts paid leave, retirement plans and medical care at the top for most worker groups. The BLS table linked below is the source and the right place to read the current ordering, broken out by the cut that matches your own workforce.
Why rank by access rather than by popularity? Because access tells you what is expected of an employer of your size in your industry, which is the question a benefits budget has to answer first. Popularity lists are written from opinion and change with whoever wrote them.
What does the access-to-participation gap mean? That a benefit is offered and declined. Usually cost-sharing, or a better alternative elsewhere. It is the most actionable figure in the published data, because it identifies money an employer is spending that its own people are choosing not to take.
Do you publish your own ranking? No. The ordering here is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' own measurement of access and participation, cited rather than reproduced, because a ranking of benefits invented by this site would be an opinion with a number on it. This site also publishes no vendor ranking of any kind.
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