Nearly half of US employers said financial wellbeing had become a higher priority for their organizations in 2026, yet only 23% of employees have developed a financial plan with an advisor, according to Gallagher's 2026 US Workforce Trends Report: Financial Benchmarks, which drew on responses from 3,717 organizations. The gap between what employers are spending and what employees are actually using points to a design problem more than a resource problem.
The Gallagher report, produced by a benefits consultancy that advises employer clients, found a sharp divide in financial confidence based on whether employees had access to professional guidance. Among those who had developed a financial plan with an advisor, 81% rated their financial situation as good or excellent. Among those without a plan, 50% rated theirs as fair or poor. The split is striking not because the data is surprising, but because it maps almost precisely onto what employers are failing to deliver. Not benefits, but the structured guidance that makes those benefits useful.
The report also found that just 28% of employees believe their current savings strategy will enable them to reach their retirement goals. Among employees aged 55 and older, 30% said retirement planning was their biggest financial stressor, a cohort close enough to retirement that the window for course correction is narrowing.
The Gallagher data points to something advisors working with self-funded employers have been observing for years. Uniform benefit designs serve no one particularly well. An early-career employee carrying student debt and building an emergency fund has little use for the same communications package aimed at a 58-year-old calculating Social Security timing. Most employer benefit programs are built for a hypothetical average employee who doesn't exist in most workforces.
"Personalized support helps employees to both focus on the resources most relevant to their circumstances and make better use of the benefits already available to them," said Michael Clark, senior vice president at Gallagher. That pressure is becoming more concrete as the CAA 2026 raises the bar on fiduciary accountability for plan design and gives plan sponsors new grounds to ask harder questions of their advisors.
The Gallagher survey found that 81% of employers offer self-service tools such as calculators and modeling dashboards, 68% offer one-on-one appointments with financial planners, and 48% provide managed accounts advice. Those figures suggest the infrastructure exists. What the planning gap data suggests is that employees either don't know these resources are available, don't see them as relevant to their specific situation, or both.
The SECURE 2.0 Act (Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement), signed into law in December 2022, gave employers several new mechanisms specifically designed to close the life-stage gap in benefit design. Student loan matching took effect for plan years beginning after December 31, 2023. The provision allows employers to make retirement plan contributions on behalf of employees making qualified student loan payments, giving early-career workers a way to build retirement savings without pausing debt repayment.
Pension-linked emergency savings accounts, meanwhile, give employees a dedicated emergency fund without disrupting their retirement contributions. Enhanced catch-up contributions allow employees aged 60 to 63 to save up to $11,250 in catch-up contributions in 2026, compared with $8,000 for those aged 50 and older generally, though plan sponsors must amend their plans to permit it, with an amendment deadline of December 31.
Adoption of these provisions has been slow. The Gallagher report found that nearly half of employers had implemented no optional SECURE 2.0 provisions or were uncertain whether any had been implemented. Student loan matching, in particular, has seen limited uptake, partly because plan committees have been slow to recognize the scope of the student debt burden in their workforces, and partly because of administrative complexity in implementation.
That adoption gap is where advisors have concrete work to do. Employers who have not reviewed their plan design against their workforce's demographic and financial profile since SECURE 2.0 came into force are likely sitting on unused provisions that could improve both employee financial outcomes and plan engagement metrics employers are increasingly expected to demonstrate to plan committees and fiduciaries. The planning gap is not a product problem. It is a plan design review, benchmarked against the employer's actual workforce demographics and SECURE 2.0 options, that in most cases has not yet been done.
