December 24, 2015
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How common is it for a startup to pay health insurance premiums for dependents?

Speaking from my experience with clients, it is very common, pretty much expected, that employer contributions for health insurance would extend to dependents. As a caveat to this post, understand that my clientele primarily are in the high-tech startup space and the competition for talent is very high. Maybe this pertains to your business maybe not.

If a company is not contributing to dependents health insurance, consider these rough numbers. Say you want to place a high level group medical program for your company and the monthly cost for an individual participant is $500. Rough numbers would dictate about a 2x multiple on cost for couples or single parents and approximately a 3.5x multiple for a family plan. Those those numbers would be $1k/month and $1,750/month. Now let’s say you wanted to contribute 100% of the cost for an employee, 0% dependent coverage. If you are a single employee with no kids, Huzzah, 100% employer paid health insurance, awesome benefit, can’t do better. But what if you are married? That employer contribution just went down to 50%. Have a family? That contribution is down to about 30%.

I went through something similar with a company that had three single employees (no kids) and a married employee and wanted to only contribute to the employee medical coverage, no dependent contribution. The first thing I asked was do you think you are doing right by everyone? If you are recruiting and you put this package in front of a potential hire that has a family, do you think you will land the hire? Good luck with that. Needless to say we discussed a more equitable strategy that not only did right by the entire employee base but also would not put the company at a disadvantage in recruitment.

There are different ways I’ve seen to mitigate the issue. I’ve seen companies set a contribution for an employee and set a smaller percentage for dependents (100% employee, 50% dependents). I’ve seen companies stagger different contribution amounts based on tiering (100/85/70 contributions on ind/couple/family). What I rarely see, and I mean just once, was $0 contribution to a dependents health insurance coverage.

As mentioned, my take is a little industry specific where that industry has a lot of competition for talent. I get the funding issue, if you are not funded, how do you pay for it? If you are funded though, take the issue of equitable treatment, recruitment and retention into account. If you grow, inevitably people get married and have kids.

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