Employers are cutting benefits budgets at the exact moment their broker relationships risk being reduced to a straight price negotiation, and buried inside nearly every client's existing 401(k) plan is a feature that offers a rare alternative pitch: cheap to add, already approved by regulators, and aimed directly at the productivity problem employers are currently underfunding.
Fifty-four percent of employers now rank cost reduction as their top benefits priority for 2026, up from 38% a year earlier, according to Lockton's 2026 National Benefits Survey of 1,705 plan sponsors.
That shift is playing out while SHRM's latest Civility Index shows 27% of workers say affordability worries contributed to rude or disrespectful behavior they witnessed at work this year, with the index itself reaching its highest reading since tracking began.
That combination puts pressure on the advisory side of the relationship. When cost is the only variable a client is optimizing for, the conversation tends to narrow to plan pricing rather than plan design.
Congress created a feature aimed at exactly this problem in the SECURE 2.0 Act. The Pension-Linked Emergency Savings Account, or PLESA, lets non-highly compensated employees save up to $2,500 inside their existing retirement plan on a Roth basis, with employer matching, and withdraw it penalty-free for emergencies. It has been available to plan sponsors since the 2024 plan year.
Adoption has been close to nonexistent. Plan Sponsor Council of America survey data found only 1.3% of plan sponsors had added a PLESA as of 2024, with 14% considering one and 84.7% not considering it at all.
A Senate committee has advanced legislation, the Emergency Savings Enhancement Act, that would raise the contribution cap to $5,000 and remove restrictions that currently exclude higher earners.
One industry commentator writing on retirement plan design has described the current version of the feature as "clunky," and argued the bill's intent is to make it simpler to administer.
It's also worth noting the feature isn't entirely without friction on the employer side: some plan sponsors have flagged potential added administrative fees tied to compliance, which is likely a factor in the low adoption rate.
The underlying need is well documented and gives any pitch around PLESA a number to stand on. The Federal Reserve's 2025 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, released in May 2026, found 63% of adults could cover a hypothetical $400 emergency expense with cash or its equivalent, a figure that has been flat across 2024 and 2025 after falling from a high of 68% in 2021.
TELUS Health's second-quarter Mental Health Index puts a productivity number next to that savings gap.
Fifteen percent of US workers say financial stress is directly hurting their work performance, 3% have missed work entirely because of it, and workers with no emergency fund, 23% of the workforce, are three times more likely to report a productivity decline than those with some savings behind them.
An additional 10% report difficulty concentrating at work because of financial stress.
“For the large majority of US workers, survival has eclipsed long-term planning. Fifteen percent of workers report that personal financial stress is directly hurting their work productivity, while three percent have missed work entirely due to financial strain," said Paula Allen, global leader of research and insights at TELUS Health.
Workers who report constant anxiety about money score 43.0 on the Index, placing them in the distressed range, and financially insecure workers score 25.9 points lower than financially secure workers, 52.3 against 78.2, which gives a broader sense of how far the gap runs beyond the emergency-savings figure alone.
Confusion about retirement benefits gives brokers a second opening. Forty-six percent of workers contributing to a workplace retirement plan say they don't have a strong understanding of how it works, and those who understand nothing at all score 22.5 points lower on TELUS's Index than those who understand it well, 54.2 against 76.7.
The Hartford's 2026 Future of Benefits Study found a parallel pattern across benefits generally, with 43% of workers saying they are never confident they picked the right options during enrollment.
Forty-nine percent of TELUS respondents want more employer-provided resources on retirement, pensions or savings plans, with retirement and long-term savings the most requested topic at 29%, investing at 21% and workplace pension guidance at 20%.
Segmenting that demand matters for how any recommendation gets pitched. Workers under 40 are three times more likely than those over 50 to link financial stress to falling productivity, working parents are twice as likely, and managers face a 60% higher risk than staff without direct reports.
Twenty-seven percent of the workforce provides care or financial support to adult children, aging parents or other relatives; within that group, 34% report damage to their finances, 27% to their mental health, and 13% report a decrease in work productivity.
Disclosure adds a related, harder-to-solve layer. Only 49% of workers say they would feel comfortable telling a manager about a mental health issue, and those who would not score 11.5 points lower on the Index, 63.1 against 74.6.
Barriers to seeking help for substance use include embarrassment at 23%, cost at 22%, confidentiality concerns at 20% and fear of workplace fallout at 18%, and 24% of workers say they prefer to handle such issues on their own.
The Index puts the current US workforce score at 70.1 for the second quarter, with 23% of workers at high risk, 42% at moderate risk and 35% at low risk.
Anxiety, at 63.5, and isolation, at 66.4, remain the weakest sub-scores, a pattern that has held for six consecutive years.
The data comes from an online survey of 5,000 employed US adults conducted between June 5 and 18, 2026, weighted to the age, gender, industry and geographic distribution of the US population.
Set against 1.3% PLESA adoption and a Senate bill under consideration, the opening is narrow but real: a documented cost problem, a client base already asking for retirement guidance, and a regulatory tool that has barely been pitched to anyone.
