Healthcare organizations have long competed for clinical talent through benefits packages, but new research suggests the financial pressures those workers are navigating have shifted enough to warrant a harder look at what those packages actually cover.
Transamerica’s Retirement Plan Trends in Healthcare survey, now in its 17th year, gathered responses from 100 healthcare organizations in June 2026, the majority of which employ more than 10,000 workers. When asked about their employees’ most pressing financial concerns, respondents ranked healthcare costs first (cited by 86%), followed by nondiscretionary living expenses (82%) and basic budgeting and money management (78%). Those three concerns ranked above retirement preparedness, emergency savings, and comprehensive financial planning.
Retirement preparedness, which ranked fourth at 73%, is precisely what retirement plan design is built to address. But the top three concerns are immediate and ongoing, the kind that make it harder for employees to engage with longer-term financial tools, including the group benefits that employers are already paying to provide.
Transamerica’s survey offers a useful window into what that stress looks like from the employer side. When asked about their financial wellness offerings, 96% of respondents said they offer health savings accounts (HSAs), and 80% offer personalized financial counseling or coaching. Yet low employee engagement, difficulty communicating complex plan concepts, and the time constraints of healthcare workers’ schedules were recurring frustrations in the survey’s open-ended responses. One respondent noted that the demanding nature of healthcare roles often leaves employees with limited time to focus on the benefits available to them.
That gap between what employers offer and what employees engage with is consistent with wider workforce data. LIMRA’s 2026 Benefits and Employee Attitude Tracker found that employee knowledge of nonmedical benefits, including supplemental health products such as accident, critical illness, and hospital indemnity insurance, tends to be low across the workforce but improves substantially with high-quality benefits education.
Advisors have a specific role in closing that gap. The Transamerica survey found that healthcare organizations’ reliance on professional assistance grew across multiple categories between 2024 and 2026, with the sharpest increases in areas involving direct employee contact and provider accountability rather than purely administrative functions.
The financial wellness dimension is also a talent consideration. Healthcare employers are operating in a labor market where compensation and benefits packages remain central to recruitment and retention, and where competition for clinical staff has not meaningfully eased. PwC’s 2026 Employee Financial Wellness Survey found that 57% of employees report being financially stressed, and that financial stress reduced workplace productivity for 56% of those affected. For healthcare organizations managing demanding shift schedules and high turnover risk, that productivity effect has direct operational consequences.
As cost reduction has become the dominant frame for many employers’ benefits decisions, the risk for advisors is that the conversation narrows to premium benchmarking rather than the broader picture of what employees are experiencing financially and whether the current benefits package is structured to address it. The Transamerica data on healthcare workers’ financial concerns gives advisors a concrete, sector-specific evidence base for a wider conversation about what their healthcare employer clients actually need.
When employees are navigating high healthcare costs, housing expenses, and basic budgeting challenges simultaneously, several benefits questions become more urgent: whether the group health plan is paired with an HSA that employees understand how to use, whether supplemental health products are in place to close out-of-pocket gaps that standard medical coverage leaves open, and whether any financial education exists to help workers engage with what they already have access to.
The survey’s qualitative responses pointed to a consistent theme across organizations of different sizes: employees struggle to understand complex benefits, and many healthcare workers simply do not have the time or bandwidth during a shift to seek out the guidance they need. The question for a healthcare employer is not whether to offer an HSA or a financial counseling program, as most already do, but whether those offerings are reaching workers in a form they can actually act on. Helping a client think through how its financial wellness offering, supplemental coverage, and communications strategy fit together as a package rather than as separate line items is a different conversation than a renewal review, and the Transamerica data makes a reasonable case for why healthcare employers are ready to have it.
