Most workers make their biggest annual financial decision in under an hour. Most are not confident it was enough.
A new survey of nearly 13,000 US workers by BenefitHub, a voluntary benefits marketplace, finds that 77 percent worry about out-of-pocket medical costs. Separately, 73 percent fear losing income if illness or injury keeps them out of work for three months or more. Yet nearly eight in ten spend an hour or less selecting the benefits designed to address exactly those risks. Forty-five percent consult no one during enrollment, and just 28 percent believe their current coverage adequately protects their family’s financial security. Respondents were recruited online and results are self-reported.
The survey arrives as open enrollment windows open across the country. Employees are anxious about financial exposure, but most are not getting the help to make informed decisions about coverage.
The pattern is not new, but it sharpens every year that healthcare costs climb. Selerix, a benefits administration firm, surveyed 622 employed US adults in 2026 and found that 46% feel confident managing benefits decisions independently. Only 23% report that they genuinely understand them. Benefits regret follows from that gap. Thirty-five percent of workers said they regret their most recent enrollment choices, the same figure as the year before.
A mid-year 2026 BenefitHub survey of more than 25,000 employees found that 55% describe their relationship with money as “anxious.” That financial pressure shapes how people approach enrollment. Getting through it becomes the goal, not understanding what they signed up for.
“Our research tells a consistent story: employees are anxious about their financial future, and open enrollment is often when those concerns become real decisions,” said Jeffrey Litvack, CEO of BenefitHub. “The challenge isn’t that workers don’t care about their benefits. It’s that they’re being asked to make complex choices without enough clarity to judge what’s right for them and their families.”
The BenefitHub findings arrive in the same enrollment season as separate research documenting a related gap on the product side. Morning Consult surveyed 1,040 employed adults on behalf of New York Life in September 2026 and found that 49% identified supplemental health insurance as one of the benefits they most want. Yet only 15% knew their employer offered it. Workers who don’t know a benefit exists cannot enroll in it, regardless of how they would rate their confidence.
The Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) found a specific and replicable fix in its August 2026 issue brief, Expanding the Benefits Horizon: Employee Understanding, Enrollment, and Financial Vulnerability. When employees were shown plain-language descriptions of what supplemental health products cover and how they pay out, their interest in enrolling rose markedly. The barrier, EBRI concluded, is explanation, rather than indifference.
If employees skip coverage not because they are resistant but because no one explained what it does, the enrollment window is a communication problem as much as a decision problem.
“Employers invest heavily in benefits, but that investment only pays off when employees understand it,” said Sarah Oliver, executive vice president of voluntary products at BenefitHub. “Simpler comparisons, clear language and guidance available all year, not just for a few weeks each fall, turn a benefits package into real financial protection for working families.”
EBRI research on voluntary benefits enrollment and financial vulnerability, published in August 2026, found that supplemental health products received roughly 9 percent of the average worker’s enrollment review time. That figure sits alongside a separate EBRI finding: in the same study, 45 percent of workers reported spending an hour or less on enrollment decisions. That is lower than BenefitHub’s nearly eight in ten, though both point in the same direction. The gap likely reflects methodology, as BenefitHub surveyed workers through its own platform, which skews toward benefits-active populations.
Awareness of what products cover remained the primary barrier to enrollment in both datasets, rather than price. That is the entry point for brokers and consultants advising employers on year-round communication: explaining what coverage does before the enrollment window opens.
That argument sits alongside a cost case that employers are already making. MetLife’s 2026 US Employee Benefit Trends Study surveyed 2,480 HR leaders and 2,541 full-time employees. It found that 73% of employers consider non-medical benefits the most cost-effective way to support employee wellbeing, and 83% report lower medical costs as a result. According to MetLife’s October 2025 fieldwork, employees who use five or more non-medical benefits are 38 percent more likely to feel holistically healthy than those who do not.
The benefits exist, but employees arrive at enrollment without enough context to use them well. Financial anxiety tends to narrow the capacity to absorb new information precisely when that information matters most.
A worker who enrolls in the wrong plan, or skips a supplemental product they needed, rarely connects the failure to the enrollment process. They connect it to the plan itself. That perception erodes the value of the entire package, regardless of what the employer spent designing it.
What the research consistently points toward is not a better benefits fair or a longer FAQ. It is structured, year-round communication that connects specific products to specific financial risks in plain language, well before the annual window becomes the only chance to act.
