Employee Benefits Reports: How to Benchmark and Improve Your Benefits Strategy

TL;DR: An employee benefits report helps you understand what employers offer, what employees value, and how your package compares. But the real value comes when you use those insights to make changes you can actually implement — with clear eligibility rules, accurate administration, and communication employees can act on.

Maybe you’re here because you’re doing what every smart HR team eventually does: pressure-testing your benefits package against the real world.

You’ve got rising costs, a workforce that isn’t one-size-fits-all, and leaders asking the same question in different fonts: Are our benefits competitive, and are we spending benefits allocations in the right places? An employee benefits report is often where that conversation starts. But it’s rarely where it ends.

Because benchmarking is the easy part. The hard part is turning “we should” into “we did” — without creating a mess in open enrollment, payroll deductions, eligibility logic, carrier feeds, and compliance reporting. 

What is an employee benefits report?

An employee benefits report is a data-driven snapshot of benefits in the market — what employers offer, how benefits are changing, and (often) what employees say they want. Depending on the source, it may include:

• Incidence and prevalence data (e.g., what percentage of workers have access to certain benefits)
• Plan design and cost trends (especially for health coverage)
• Employee sentiment and behavior (what employees value, what stresses them out, what they actually use)

For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes Employee Benefits data through the National Compensation Survey, including estimates for access to and participation in benefit plans. 

“Industry report” vs. “benchmarking report”

Not all employee benefits reports are meant to be used the same way:

An industry trends report helps you understand what’s shifting — costs, expectations, new benefit categories, and the bigger forces shaping decisions (think: financial wellness, trust, workforce health).  

An employee benefits benchmarking report helps you compare:

• What you offer vs. peers (by size, industry, region)
• Where you’re ahead, behind, or simply out of sync with employee needs
• Where changes are likely to have the biggest impact

SHRM, for instance, positions its annual Employee Benefits Survey as a long-running benchmark on the “popularity and prevalence” of employer-offered benefits — and offers a benchmarking tool to slice the data. 

And if your benchmarking lens is specifically health plan costs and employer practices, the Kaiser Family Foundation Employer Health Benefits Survey is one of the most widely cited sources. 

Here’s the key point: a report can tell you what “good” looks like. It can’t make your benefits operate like it. That takes execution — and execution is where many teams hit the wall: limited rule flexibility, messy data handoffs, and a benefits process that works fine on paper… until reality shows up. 

Key sources for employee benefits reports

If you’ve Googled employee benefits report before, you’ve probably noticed the same names showing up over and over — and for good reason. Each source tends to answer a slightly different question, so the trick is knowing what you’re trying to validate before you download the 80-page PDF.

Selerix Employee Benefits Survey is a strong starting point when you want a benefits report that reflects not just what employers offer, but how employees actually experience benefits — the confusion, the confidence (or lack of it), the regret after open enrollment, and the moments where “benefits on paper” don’t match “benefits in real life.” It’s especially useful if you’re trying to improve decision support, communication, and the year-round benefits experience, not just benchmark line items.

BLS Employee Benefits Survey (EBS) is the “what’s actually offered” foundation. If you want neutral, government-published data on benefit access and participation (retirement plans, paid leave, healthcare access, etc.), this is where you start.

SHRM Employee Benefits Survey is great when you want a broad employer-oriented benchmarking view that goes beyond healthcare. It’s often the fastest way to gut-check “Are we normal?” across a wide mix of benefit types.

KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey is the heavyweight for health benefits cost and plan design trends. When leaders are asking why premiums moved, why deductibles are where they are, or how other employers are managing cost-sharing, KFF is the most common reference point.

MetLife Employee Benefit Trends Study is more “how employees feel and behave,” which matters more than people admit. It’s useful when you’re trying to connect benefit design with trust, wellbeing, retention, and the day-to-day experience employees actually have.

Mercer benefits benchmarking tends to show up when teams want deeper segmentation and more enterprise-oriented benchmarking, especially for employers comparing across industries and geographies.

Bank of America Workplace Benefits Report is particularly helpful when you want a practical lens on financial wellness and workplace benefits tied to employee financial behavior.

One quick note: most of these reports are designed to be used as inputs, not answers. You’re not looking for a single “best benefits package.” You’re looking for patterns you can act on — and proof points you can defend when you propose changes internally.

How to use benchmarking reports to improve your benefits strategy

This is where HR teams either get real value from an employee benefits benchmarking report… or end up with a slide deck that feels smart but doesn’t change anything.

The best way to use benchmarking is to treat it like a four-step operating cycle:

Step 1: Compare

Start with a clear baseline that comes from your own data: what you offer today, how it’s structured, and what it costs employees (not just what it costs the company). Then compare against benchmarks that actually match your world, in the industry, workforce composition, size, or the talent market you’re competing in.

This is where teams and their brokers often learn uncomfortable truths, like:

• You offer the benefit, but employee uptake is low (a communication or affordability problem).
• You’re “competitive” on paper, but employees don’t experience it that way (a usability/support problem).
• Your benefits are strong, but your enrollment and eligibility process is messy (an execution problem that erodes trust).

This is also where collecting frequent internal voice-of-employee data matters a lot. If you haven’t collected feedback, your benchmarks will be generic. If you have, you can interpret benchmarks through your people’s actual needs. (This is also a good place to pull in your own survey strategy and link to your own employee benefits feedback as a practical companion resource.)

Step 2: Prioritize

A word of warning. Benchmarking can make everything feel urgent. Don’t fall for it. The goal isn’t to chase every trend. It’s to decide what will actually move outcomes for your workforce: recruitment, retention, wellbeing, productivity, trust, and cost control.

A practical prioritization filter for your organization looks like this:

• Workforce fit: Does this benefit align with who we employ and how they work (hourly vs salaried, remote vs onsite, variable-hour, multi-state)?
  
• Employee impact: Will it reduce stress, increase perceived value, or close a real access gap?
  
• Business impact: Will it improve retention, hiring, attendance, or engagement in a measurable way?
  
• Operational feasibility: Can we administer it cleanly with our current processes, or will it create chaos?

This point… It’s important not to limit benefits strategy by platform constraints.l. If your system can’t support the eligibility rules, contribution approach, or classes you need, you’ll either water down the strategy or recreate it manually outside the platform. That’s not strategy — that’s debt.

If you want a related lens on what employees respond to once benefits are in place, you can also connect this to benefits engagement and customization.

Step 3: Plan

Once you know what matters, build a phased roadmap that’s realistic and doesn’t assume your team can absorb unlimited change. A solid plan usually includes:

• What changes now vs what changes later: Keep year-one changes simple enough to execute cleanly, and queue bigger changes for a second phase.
  
• Who is affected and how: Which employee groups gain access, lose access, or have contribution changes?
  
• What must be true operationally: eligibility rules, payroll deductions, carrier feeds, communications cadence, and support coverage.
  
• What success looks like: adoption targets, reduced regret/confusion, fewer HR tickets, improved OE completion behaviors, fewer corrections.

This is also the moment to anticipate compliance collisions. Changes to eligibility classes, hours-based rules, or waiting periods can touch ACA tracking, COBRA events, and audit defensibility. Planning well means designing a benefits operating model that can hold up 52 weeks a year.

Step 4: Execute

Execution is where good intentions go to die, usually because benefits changes are treated like a one-time launch instead of a managed process.

A clean execution playbook typically covers:

• System configuration that matches the strategy
  Your platform should be able to support the real structure of your workforce: multiple classes, complex eligibility rules or contribution strategies, variable-hour logic, acquisitions, EIN complexity, and retro changes without collapsing into workarounds.
  
• Communication that drives action
  Most benefits communication fails for predictable reasons: it’s too generic, too dense, badly timed, or delivered in channels people ignore. The best execution isn’t “more communication.” It’s clearer communication at the moments employees are ready to decide — using language that helps them feel confident, not pressured.
  
• Support that feels available
  When employees feel like they’re on their own, they guess. When they guess, they regret. And sometimes they leave. Build support into the experience: decision tools, live help, and a clear path for exceptions and edge cases.
  
• Measurement after enrollment
  Don’t stop at launching benefits. Look at adoption, usage, and friction. If you want to connect benefits changes to drive retention outcomes in a way leaders care about, you can also anchor this to broader talent goals like hiring and retention.

Moving beyond the report: streamlining benefits management with software

An employee benefits report can tell you what’s happening in the market. But it won’t help you manage the daily realities that determine whether your benefits strategy actually works:

• Eligibility changes after Jan 1
• Life events with paperwork and deadlines
• Carrier feeds that need to be correct the first time
• Payroll deductions that need to reconcile
• ACA measurement and reporting that has to be defensible
• Year round two-way communication that keeps in touch with employee needs

This is where benefits administration software and related support becomes the mechanism that turns insight into execution.

A purpose-built platform supported by a tenured, dedicated team helps you do three things that HRIS benefits modules often struggle to do at scale:

1. Flex without improvising. Your benefits strategy should reflect your workforce — not your system’s limitations. Software should support nuanced rule logic, organizational complexity, and contribution approaches without forcing simplification.
   
2. Make compliance operational. ACA and related compliance moments aren’t an annual task. They’re a year-round measurement and documentation problem, and they require audit trails, exception handling, and reporting logic you can stand behind.
   
3. Reduce invisible work. The biggest cost in benefits administration is often the work no one budgets for: manual reconciliation, chasing data across systems, answering the same questions repeatedly, issuing corrections, and cleaning up after enrollment. Streamlining that work is where teams get time back — and where employees feel the difference.

The bottom line

You’re looking for information on an employee benefits report, so you’re already trying to do the right thing: benchmark intelligently, stay competitive, and build a benefits experience your workforce can actually use.

The move that separates high-performing benefits teams is what happens next: turning benchmarks into a plan, and turning the plan into a benefits operation that runs cleanly during open enrollment and the other 11 months of the year.

If you’re ready to move from benchmarking to execution, Selerix can help you run benefits and ACA with the flexibility, auditability, and support needed to make improvements stick.

Want to see what that looks like in practice? Explore Selerix benefits administration and ACA compliance solutions — and turn benefits insights into a process your team (and your employees) can trust.