In six months, the share of US employees ranking savings and investment as a top spending priority fell from 44% to 24%. Health and wellness spending dropped by the same margin, from 45% to 25%. Those figures, drawn from BenefitHub’s latest employee sentiment survey of more than 25,000 workers, describe something more specific than general financial anxiety. They describe a shift in how employees rank spending categories, one that runs directly through the benefits packages advisors are building and renewing.
BenefitHub is an employee discount and benefits platform, and the survey reflects its commercial context. The April 2026 edition, the second in a series, fielded April 14 to 17, captures a workforce under sustained cost pressure, with 57% of respondents describing their economic outlook as pessimistic, up six points since BenefitHub’s year-end 2025 survey. Nearly half (46%) say their household finances have worsened over the past six months, a five-point increase from the prior survey, and 64% have adopted a more conservative spending stance.
Inflation is the dominant pressure, cited by 79% of respondents as the primary driver of their financial squeeze, far ahead of interest rates and debt at 30%. The behavioral response is a tightening around essentials: groceries are a top spending priority for 91% of respondents, transportation and housing for 59% each. What has fallen away is the discretionary and long-term. Family and childcare dropped from 23% to 12% as a stated priority, and two-thirds of employees have already delayed a major purchase, with 60% unlikely to make one in the next six months.
Financial strain is not confined to lower-wage workers. Employees earning more than $200,000 per year are 56% pessimistic, while workers aged 45 to 54, typically among the higher earners in any workforce, report the highest financial strain of any age group, with 49% saying their situation is worse than six months ago. That cohort is navigating what the report describes as a “midlife squeeze”: peak expenses across education, mortgage debt, and aging-parent care arriving simultaneously.
The fall in savings and health and wellness as spending priorities is not an abstract trend. It is the same population advisors are asking to actively engage with retirement contributions, supplemental health coverage, and financial wellness programs at open enrollment. When financial pressure compresses household priorities to essentials, discretionary benefit participation tends to follow.
WTW’s 2026 Global Benefits Attitudes Survey, which drew on 6,000 full-time employees surveyed from February through May 2026, found that only 36% of US employees feel financially secure, the lowest figure in seven years. Separately, Alight’s 2026 US Employee Mindset study found that 55% of employees with low financial wellbeing are open to other job opportunities, against 32% of those with high financial wellbeing.
That retention gap puts a dollar figure on what disengaged employees ultimately cost, and it arrives at a moment when, as the BenefitHub data shows, the financial conditions eroding engagement are worsening, not stabilizing.
That accountability is filtering up to the employer level. PNC Bank’s 2026 Financial Wellness in the Workplace Report, which surveyed 500 US employers and 1,000 workers, found that 65% of employers now measure the return on investment of their benefits programs, up from 51% a year earlier. That scrutiny is reaching advisors. When employers demand demonstrable utilization data, the declining prioritization of savings and health spending by employees becomes a problem advisors are accountable for explaining, not just designing around.
SecureSave’s 2026 Financial Stress Survey, fielded in June 2026 among 1,028 US workers, found that 38% of workers missed work in the previous six months due to financial challenges. SecureSave provides employer-sponsored emergency savings programs, and the survey reflects that commercial focus. The absenteeism figure nonetheless provides a concrete cost frame for advisors making the case to employers for financial wellness investments.
The practical question the BenefitHub survey raises is not whether employees are stressed, but whether the benefits mix advisors are recommending is calibrated to where employees actually are financially. A workforce where savings and health spending have both fallen 20 percentage points as stated priorities in a single six-month window is not necessarily less interested in those benefits in principle. It may simply be less able to prioritize them against immediate household costs, which changes what communication, timing, and design choices in an enrollment strategy need to address.
