Are you curious about the top six trends for employee benefits in 2025? Hi, my name is Mark Herschlag, CEO of Cosmo Insurance Agency. Let’s dive right in!
Contact Cosmo Insurance Agency today to keep your employee benefits competitive with these 2025 trends.
1. Student Loan Repayment Programs
Student loan programs are employer-assisted student loan repayment plans, which means you are repaying their loan debt.
How does it help an employer or human resources department?
- It helps employees pay down student loan debt with tax-free direct contributions or matching programs.
- It renews loyalty, eases recruitment as an employer or HR, and reduces employee financial stress.
2. Health and Wellness Benefits
Health and wellness benefits will continue to expand. These may include:
- Fitness programs
- Gym memberships
- Onsite fitness facilities
3. Financial Wellness Benefits
Financial wellness programs and retirement planning include:
- 401(k)s
- IRAs
- EAP programs
An employee assistance program can also include a financial advisor for your employees.
4. Expanded Caregiver and Family Benefits
Expanded caregiver and family benefits are tax-free and can provide coverage to your significant other, your spouse, or a caregiver.
5. Personalized and Flexible Benefit Packages
A personalized and flexible benefit package means not just offering one single option. We want flexibility. We want your employees to feel like they’re actually going on an exchange and can choose whatever option they want.
This is going to be much more trending in 2025. For example, we have ICHRA (Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Account), where your employees will be able to go on the marketplace exchange and shop for their own benefits while they are tax-free and deducted from their paychecks.
6. Streamlined HR Compliance and Payroll
Streamlining HR compliance and payroll is a key trend.
Imagine this: 25 different logins—or even just three different logins—for you as an employee or HR professional. You’ve got to log into your payroll, your benefits portal, your 401(k), or any other portals you use. If it’s your HR portal, we want to streamline it all.
We want HR professionals to have just one login for everything, so they don’t have to log in three different times. This should all be in an HRIS database with one simple login. That will save a lot of time for you as an HR professional or employer—and reduce stress.
How Pre-Tax Benefits Help Employers and Employees
One of the most important factors here is that all of these benefits are pre-tax. This saves both the employer and the employee. Whatever the employer contributes is pre-tax for the employer, meaning a tax deduction. For the employee, it also saves payroll taxes.
Employees often feel annoyed when they’re told their salary is $30,000 per year, but don’t take home the full amount. Pre-tax dollars help employees get closer and closer to walking home with the amount that was promised to them.
The Impact of Employee Benefits Trends on Companies
How are these benefits trends costing or impacting a company like yours?
The good news is that your broker should actually be providing all these services to you at no cost. Why? Because your broker gets paid by the insurance company. That’s their fee—they get paid by the insurance company so they can fully service you as a client and provide all these benefits at no cost.
Brokers should create and provide these benefits for you. Now, adding something like student loan debt assistance or an ICHRA might involve a small fee, but we look forward to reviewing it with all our clients in 2025.
Keep Your Employee Benefits Competitive with Cosmo Insurance Agency
Contact us at Cosmo Insurance Agency to stay ahead of market trends and keep your employee benefits competitive.
