ICHRA works for some workforces and costs others more. Your census tells you which.
An individual coverage HRA replaces a group plan with a fixed allowance employees spend on individual market coverage. Whether that is cheaper, fairer and still competitive depends on where your people live, how old they are and who they cover, so we price it on your own census, rating area by rating area, before anyone recommends it. For a side-by-side of ICHRA, group and level-funded coverage, read our free ICHRA vs. group health guide.
The group premium is one number. The ICHRA answer is a different number for every employee.
Individual market premiums vary by age and by rating area, and group rates blend both away. We rebuild your current plan’s cost employee by employee, then build the ICHRA equivalent on the same footing.
Premiums by Home Address
Individual coverage is priced where the employee lives, not where you are headquartered. We price the plans actually available in each employee’s rating area, because a workforce split between metro and rural counties can face very different markets under the same allowance.
Age Curve Exposure
Group rates blend older and younger employees into one price. Individual rates do not, so older employees face higher premiums and younger ones lower. We show who comes out ahead and who falls behind, which is where your retention risk sits.
Allowance Design Options
Allowances can vary by class, by family size and, within limits, by age. We model flat, age-banded and family-tiered designs against your budget, so you see what each costs and which employees each one leaves short. ICHRA allowance design drives both cost and fairness.
Total Employer Spend
The comparison is not premium against allowance. It includes the platform that verifies coverage, how employees pay any premium above the allowance, and any group coverage you keep for other classes. We put every line on the page. Total spend is the real ICHRA comparison.
For a large employer, affordability is measured against a plan you do not buy.
If the employer mandate applies to you, an ICHRA counts as an affordable offer only when the lowest-cost silver premium for self-only coverage, less the allowance, stays within the IRS affordability percentage, which is 9.96% for 2026 plan years. The test runs employee by employee.
Why It Varies by Employee
The lowest-cost silver premium rises with age and changes by county. An allowance that is affordable for a younger employee in one county can fail for an older employee in another, which is why we test every row of the census rather than the average.
Where Safe Harbors Help
The IRS lets you measure against the employee’s primary worksite instead of home address, and lets calendar-year plans use the prior January’s silver premiums. We model with and without these, so you know which assumption your answer depends on. Safe harbors matter.
What an Unaffordable Offer Means
An employee with an unaffordable allowance can decline it and seek a premium tax credit, and that is where employer shared responsibility exposure begins. Whether a specific design creates exposure is settled with your counsel. ICHRA affordability testing is essential for applicable large employers weighing an individual coverage HRA.
A clean census does more for this analysis than any national benchmark.
National ICHRA averages describe someone else’s workforce. We need yours.
The Census
Date of birth, home zip code, coverage tier and dependents for every eligible employee. Home address is the field most often missing or out of date, and it moves the answer more than any other, so we check it first.
The Current Plan
Plan designs, contributions by tier and the renewal. We need what employees pay today, because the question employees ask is not whether the company saved money but whether their own cost went up. Current employee costs anchor the ICHRA analysis, because they are what each employee will compare the new allowance against.
Your Reason for Asking
Some employers want budget certainty, some want one way to cover employees in several states, some want out of a small group renewal that keeps climbing. We weigh the model against your reason, which is why the answer is sometimes to keep the group plan.
What employers ask before they model ICHRA.
Is ICHRA always cheaper than a group plan?
No. It gives you a fixed, predictable spend, which is a different thing. For an older workforce or a county with thin individual options, employees can pay more for less, and we show that before you decide. ICHRA offers predictability, not guaranteed savings.
Can we keep the group plan for some employees?
Yes, by offering each to different classes, never both to the same class. Doing that brings minimum class size rules into play, which is why fit analysis and class design are done together. Class design and fit analysis go hand in hand.
What about employees who want to keep their doctors?
Individual market networks can be narrower than the group network employees know. We check whether the providers your employees actually use are in the plans they could buy, because that is what they will judge the change on. Network checks protect employees during an ICHRA move.
Send us your renewal.
We’ll tell you whether it looks competitive, where we see opportunity, and the five questions we’d put to your carrier. No cost, and no obligation to move anything.
The renewal letter
Your current plan summary
Contribution split by tier
Enrolled counts by tier
Four documents — two more if your group is 50 or more. Nothing else; every extra one is a reason to postpone.
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