2025 EBRI Financial Wellbeing Employer Survey: Focusing on the Bottom Line Continues

Summary

The eighth annual Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) Financial Wellbeing Employer Survey (FWES) found that firms continue to focus on their employees’ day-to-day finances. Firms have long been concerned with helping their workers prepare for retirement, although in recent years, their focus has expanded to include other areas. Now, top areas to address with financial wellness initiatives include helping workers cope with financial-related stress, better budget and manage their money, deal with high costs of living and daily living expenses, and weather health care costs.

However, employers are buffeted by several challenges. Benefits decision makers cite difficulties in integrating standalone benefits into a holistic financial wellness program, as well as costs and data privacy concerns. Employers may also struggle with complexity in choosing and implementing financial wellbeing programs. Additionally, while employers still broadly agree that their financial wellbeing initiatives help improve workers’ mental, emotional, and social wellbeing, a greater share than before believe that the impact is none or small rather than large.

Still, benefits decision makers have reason for optimism. Most believe that their budgets will continue to increase in the short term and that their company’s efforts to improve employee wellbeing across physical, financial, emotional, and social dimensions are either excellent or very good, indicating that financial wellbeing benefits will remain an important component of their benefit offerings.

• Top Issues, Areas of Focus, and Challenges — Companies’ top issues to address with their financial wellness initiatives were financial-related stress, budgeting and money management, retirement preparedness, high costs of living and daily living expenses, and health care costs. For top focus areas, firms were most likely to cite basic financing issues, such as budgeting and building savings, as well as investments and retirement planning. Top challenges to offering these programs included employee access to services, integrating standalone benefits into an all-encompassing financial wellness program, and costs to the employer. Employers also cited data privacy concerns and complexity in both choosing and implementing financial wellness benefits.
• Measuring Success — The top factor in measuring financial wellness initiatives’ success was improved overall worker satisfaction, followed by increased employee productivity. Meanwhile, reducing health care claims and costs were not commonly cited as top factors in measuring financial wellness initiative success.
• Cost/Benefit Analysis — Just over three-quarters of benefits decision makers responded that their firm had developed a cost/benefit analysis of their financial wellness offerings. When asked the factors these cost/benefit analyses were based on, respondents most commonly reported basing their calculations on improved productivity/performance and improved employee financial wellbeing. Improving absenteeism/tardiness and reducing medical or mental health claims were less commonly cited in formulating cost/benefit analyses evaluating firms’ financial wellness offerings.
• Emergency Savings — Loans from an employer-sponsored retirement plan were the most common form of emergency fund or employee hardship assistance. Roughly four in 10 responded that their firm offered an emergency savings vehicle or account through payroll deduction. Meanwhile, $1,000 penalty-free withdrawals from retirement accounts — allowed through recently-passed legislation — was the emergency savings benefit offered the least commonly (35 percent).
• More Personalized Offerings — Different employee populations within firms may have different needs and require different strategies to improve their financial wellbeing. Firms most commonly reported that they offered different types of solutions to accommodate different age groups. Providing messages in various languages and tailoring messaging based on job location, such as workers in different states or remote vs. on-site workers, were also commonly cited. On the other hand, firms were less likely to respond that they tailored messaging or offered different types of solutions for desk-based vs. non-desk-based employees.
• Specific Steps Taken to Understand Employee Needs — Benefits decision makers were asked to describe their efforts to understand the different needs of their workers. Respondents commonly cited examining existing data, such as retirement deferrals, balances, and loans, as well as health-related data, such as medical claims, health risk assessments, and biometric screening data. Creating a financial wellbeing score, conducting financial wellness needs assessments, analyzing other quantitative employee data, and creating business/employee resource groups were less commonly cited.

Companies are increasingly focused on the impact of financial wellbeing programs on worker productivity. This may be tied to the fact that an overwhelming majority of benefits decision makers expected their budgets for financial wellness programs to increase in the short term. In addition to surveying employees and analyzing existing retirement and health care data, three-quarters of companies have explicitly developed a cost/benefit analysis to provide some measure of the success of these benefits.

The continued evolution of financial wellness programs is a crucial question going into 2025, particularly with companies still in the process of implementing emergency savings benefits made possible by recent legislation. As financial wellbeing programs grow in value to employees and are used for attraction and retention, the expectation that they will be provided will only increase. At the same time, the specter of a recession could turn the tide as employers seek to cut costs, especially given the additional resources that are being used for these programs. Nonetheless, financial wellbeing programs appear well-positioned to continue to be mainstay benefit offerings. Benefits decision makers widely believe their companies have a responsibility to help workers be financially, physically, socially, and emotionally well, and they also express optimism in their firms’ efforts to improve these dimensions of worker wellbeing.