Put simply, Rippling processes payroll, while Compt administers the stipend and LSA programs that feed into payroll.

This is because payroll and HR systems aren’t designed to manage the full lifecycle of these programs.

Rather than replacing Rippling with Compt, many organizations use Rippling and Compt together: Rippling runs payroll and manages employee records, while Compt powers the design, administration, and IRS compliance of stipends and LSAs. 

• The two systems connect through the Rippling App Shop using a secure API integration that automatically synchronizes employee data from Rippling into Compt. 
• The integration is one-directional from Rippling to Compt, meaning employee data flows into Compt while payroll processing remains in Rippling.

According to Compt’s 2026 Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report, flexible benefits programs like LSAs continue to expand as companies consolidate smaller stipends into a single program employees can use across multiple categories.

This guide explains how the two systems fit together, when Rippling users typically add a lifestyle benefits platform like Compt, and what the workflow looks like in practice.

Why companies using Rippling add stipend and LSA software

Rippling is an excellent system for managing:

• Payroll
• HRIS and employee data
• Core HR workflows
• IT and identity management
• Benefits administration

But lifestyle benefits, especially increasingly popular programs like LSAs, introduce operational requirements that payroll systems simply aren’t built to handle. 

For example, running a stipend program typically requires: 

• Flexible benefit category design
• Employee reimbursement workflows
• Receipt validation
• Taxable vs. nontaxable categorization 
• HR and/or manager approvals
• Participation and utilization tracking 
• Payroll-ready exports 

When companies try to manage these processes directly inside payroll tools or spreadsheets, the administrative time investment for HR compounds quickly. 

The natural next step is to onboard a dedicated platform for lifestyle benefits while keeping payroll and employee records inside their existing HR system.

Stop overpaying for underused benefits.

Traditional payroll stipends are paid out 100% regardless of actual use.

With Compt, you only pay for the funds employees spend, saving you thousands while increasing benefits engagement.

Calculate your savings

How Rippling and Compt work together

In most organizations, Rippling and Compt serve different roles in your HR benefits tech stack. 

Rippling: system of record for employee data

• Payroll processing
• Tax withholding
• HR and IT infrastructure

Compt: Flexible LSA and stipend program design

• Lifestyle benefit (stipend and LSA) management
• Expense review and approvals
• Built-in IRS compliance support
• Payroll reporting for reimbursements

The workflow between the two HR benefits software systems typically looks like this: 

1. Employee data syncs from Rippling.

Use the Rippling App Shop to integrate Compt and Rippling and synchronize employee roster data automatically. Once connected, employee records such as name, role, department, and eligibility fields can be mapped directly from Rippling into Compt so employees are automatically added to the appropriate stipend or LSA programs.

2. Employers design lifestyle benefits in Compt.

HR teams create flexible, reimbursement-based programs such as:

• Wellness stipends or wellness wallets
• Professional development accounts
• Tuition reimbursement programs
• Remote work reimbursements (e.g., equipment, cell, internet)
• Family care, caregiving, and fertility benefits
• Company swag stores
• All-inclusive LSAs

You customize the categories, budget, funding cadence, and approval workflows for each program you design, with expert guidance from your dedicated Compt Customer Success Manager.  

3. Your employees submit claims in Compt. 

Employees purchase eligible items and submit receipts through Compt.

For example:

• Gym memberships
• Learning courses
• Childcare support
• Commuter costs
• Home office equipment

Program administrators or department managers review and approve submissions directly in the platform.

4. Compt categorizes expenses for payroll.

Compt determines whether expenses are taxable or nontaxable based on IRS guidelines, your company policy, and the benefit category selected during submission. This is critical because many fringe benefits, including most LSAs, are considered taxable compensation.

5. Payroll runs through Rippling.

Compt generates payroll-ready reports showing:

• Approved reimbursements
• Taxable vs non-taxable amounts
• Employee details required for payroll processing

Teams then include this data in their Rippling payroll run.

This approach keeps payroll calculations inside Rippling while ensuring benefits are administered properly upstream.

How the Rippling + Compt integration is set up

Companies connect Rippling and Compt through the Rippling App Shop integration.

The setup process typically looks like this:

1. Install the Compt app from Rippling’s App Shop.
2. Enable the integration inside Compt’s Company Settings.
3. Connect the existing Rippling account and authorize the data access requested.
4. Select which employees should automatically sync to Compt.
5. Confirm the connection to complete the integration.

Once enabled, employee data automatically syncs from Rippling to Compt so HR teams don’t need to manually maintain their employee list inside the benefits platform. New hires, role changes, and employee terminations update automatically as the systems stay synchronized.

To learn more, read our dedicated HelpScout article, “Integrating Rippling with Compt (Company Administrators).” 

Example workflow: Rippling + Compt

After the integration is active, employee information updates automatically when changes occur in Rippling, such as new hires, role changes, or terminations. A typical benefits workflow might look like this:

1. HR creates a quarterly wellness stipend in Compt.
2. Employees submit gym or fitness expenses.
3. Managers approve the reimbursement.
4. Compt categorizes the expense as taxable.
5. Payroll reports are generated for the next pay run.
6. Finance processes payroll in Rippling with the reimbursement included.

This approach keeps payroll centralized while removing the operational work from HR and Finance teams.

Can Rippling manage stipends or Lifestyle Spending Accounts directly?

Rippling can process stipend reimbursements through payroll, but it is not designed to administer the full lifecycle of stipend or Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA) programs.

Running flexible benefits programs typically requires tools for:

• Defining eligible expense categories
• Collecting receipts and documentation
• Approving reimbursements
• Categorizing taxable vs. nontaxable benefits
• Tracking participation and utilization
• Generating payroll reports

Because of this, many organizations manage stipend and LSA programs in a dedicated lifestyle benefits platform while continuing to run payroll in Rippling.

Compt manages the program administration, while Rippling processes the reimbursements through payroll.

Want to see how it works? Request a demo of Compt. 

Why many Rippling customers choose a reimbursement model for LSAs and stipends 

Most lifestyle benefits platforms fall into two models:

1. Card-based benefits: Employees receive a prepaid card to spend on eligible purchases.
2. Reimbursement-based benefits: Employees submit receipts and are reimbursed through payroll.

Compt uses a reimbursement-first model for a few key reasons:

Reimbursement is better for IRS compliance.

With reimbursement workflows, employers can ensure purchases meet eligibility guidelines before funds are distributed. This reduces the risk of improper spending or tax compliance issues.

Reimbursement allows for stronger Finance and Payroll alignment.

Because reimbursements flow through payroll, taxable benefits are reported correctly and integrated with existing payroll systems.

Reimbursement supports a streamlined global benefits experience.

Many card-based solutions struggle to support international teams. Compt’s reimbursement model shines here because employees in 75+ countries can purchase from any local vendor and receive reimbursement in their own currency. 

Psst … Read Compt’s expert breakdown of these two models, “Employee Debit Cards vs. Reimbursements: An Honest Comparison for HR Leaders.”

Common lifestyle benefits Rippling customers run through Compt

Companies using Rippling often implement Compt for benefits such as:

Wellness stipends or wellness wallets

Employees receive a monthly or quarterly budget for physical, mental, or financial wellness expenses.

Examples include:

• Gym memberships
• Fitness classes
• Therapy apps
• Massage therapy
• Meditation subscriptions
• Healthy groceries and other essentials
• Weight management, including GLP-1–related care
• Fitness trackers, Oura rings, glucose monitors, and other health-specific wearables
• Sleep optimization products
• Financial wellness tools and budgeting apps 

Professional development stipends

Learning budgets help employees fund:

• Certifications and licensing exams  
• Online courses (Coursera, MasterClass, Udemy)  
• Industry conferences  
• Books and research materials  
• AI productivity tools and learning platforms  
• Coding tools and developer environments  
• Language learning apps 
• Executive coaching or leadership training

Some organizations add manager approval workflows for these programs.

Remote work stipends

Distributed teams often reimburse expenses like:

• Home office equipment
• Coworking memberships
• Internet service
• Ergonomic furniture

Family care benefits

LSAs allow employees to apply funds toward:

• Childcare support
• Fertility services
• Elder care expenses

All-inclusive LSAs

Many organizations consolidate multiple small stipends into a single flexible program, or a Lifestyle Spending Account. Instead of running separate wellness, remote work, and learning benefits, they offer one LSA employees can use across several categories.

Some organizations allow LSAs to support broader well-being and engagement with categories inclusive of lifestyle and personal enrichment purchases, such as: 

• Creative hobbies (art supplies, music lessons)
• Cooking classes
• Sports leagues
• Outdoor recreation gear
• Cultural experiences or museum memberships

Being inclusive in your stipend or LSA design significantly increases participation in the benefit because employees can use it in ways that reflect their real lives.

Psst … check out our guide, “What Are LSA-Eligible Expenses? A Practical Guide for HR and Finance,” by Compt’s VP Finance Megan Dunn.

When Rippling customers typically add Compt

Rippling customers usually adopt a lifestyle benefits platform when one of the following happens:

• They want to launch a LSA or a wellness wallet/stipend. LSAs require structured categories, expense validation, and payroll reporting.
• Manual stipend tracking becomes too complex. Spreadsheet workflows quickly become difficult to maintain as companies scale.
• Finance needs clearer payroll reporting. Benefits teams need a consistent way to track taxable benefits before payroll runs.
• They want employee data to sync automatically from HRIS to lifestyle benefits programs. As teams grow, manually maintaining employee lists inside stipend programs becomes time-consuming. Integrations automate employee eligibility and onboarding.
• Participation in traditional perks is low. Flexible benefits often achieve higher participation because employees can use them for needs that are relevant to their lives. Learn more in our 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report. 

Why companies using Rippling choose Compt for stipends and LSAs

Companies that run payroll in Rippling often choose Compt when they want to launch flexible lifestyle benefits such as stipends and all-inclusive LSAs without creating administrative headaches for HR, Finance, or Payroll.

Compt is a reimbursement-first lifestyle benefits platform that helps organizations design and manage stipends and Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs) while complementing payroll processing inside their existing systems.

With Compt, teams can:

• Launch wellness stipends, professional development budgets, remote work reimbursements, and all-inclusive LSAs.
• Automatically categorize expenses as taxable or nontaxable based on IRS guidance.
• Provide employees with a simple reimbursement experience that works globally in 75+ countries.
• Generate CSVs and reports that plug cleanly into payroll workflows.
• Track participation and utilization to ensure benefits are actually used.

For organizations already using Rippling as their HR and payroll system, Compt provides the infrastructure needed to run modern lifestyle benefits programs without managing spreadsheets, tracking stipend funding and expenses manually, or leaning on guesswork for important IRS compliance decisions. 

Request a demo to see how Compt works with Rippling to power stipends and LSAs for modern teams.

FAQs: Using Compt with Rippling for stipends and LSAs

The post How Compt Works With Rippling for Stipends and LSAs appeared first on COMPT.

Benepass is best known for a card-first experience: employees swipe the card at a point-of-sale register or online, and the platform approves or declines transactions based on merchant rules. For some teams, that convenience is the point. For others, it’s where the friction begins: card declines at the wrong moment, confusion about what is and isn’t eligible, and edge cases that still end up as questions in HR’s inbox. 

This guide walks through the top Benepass alternatives and competitors for LSAs and employee stipend software in 2026 and helps you choose based on decision criteria such as: 

• Spending model: card-first, reimbursement-first, or hybrid
• Employee experience: flexibility vs. “will this card work here?”
• Finance controls: taxable vs. nontaxable handling, audit trail, payroll exports
• Global reality: multicurrency support and cross-border compliance expectations

Before we get started, let’s ground this evaluation in what high-performing lifestyle benefits programs optimize for in 2026: participation and utilization. Among Compt customers in 2025, activation reached 95% and participation among active users reached 93%, according to our 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report.

That data is specific to Compt, but it reinforces the point: the platform model you choose can directly impact whether employees actually use the benefit.

TL;DR: The fastest way to choose a lifestyle benefits platform

Choose a Benepass-style platform (card-first with integrated pre-tax accounts) if:

• You want a single wallet experience that consolidates pre-tax accounts (like HSA/FSA) and post-tax lifestyle benefits onto a card.
• You prefer real-time transaction approvals at checkout and are comfortable with merchant-category enforcement.
• You’re looking for deeper integration between lifestyle perks and healthcare savings infrastructure.

Choose a reimbursement-first platform like Compt (vendor-agnostic lifestyle benefits) if:

• You want to offer flexible stipends and LSAs that employees can use with any vendor, without point-of-sale declines.
• You want clear, traceable IRS compliance built right in, including receipt-backed substantiation and clear taxable vs. nontaxable classification before payroll runs.
• You want to avoid prefunding large card balances and instead pay only for approved reimbursements.

Throughout this article, we’ll compare Benepass to four alternatives: Compt, Forma, ThrivePass, and Espresa. 

Full disclosure: Compt is our platform. We’ll present each vendor evenly and be direct about tradeoffs so you can make an informed decision.

What Benepass is, and why some teams start exploring alternatives

Benepass is known for its card-first model that combines pre-tax accounts (such as HSAs, FSAs, and commuter benefits) with post-tax stipends and LSAs into a single wallet experience. Employees receive a physical or virtual card and use it to make purchases at checkout, whether in person or online, and transactions are approved or declined in real time based on merchant category rules and employer eligibility policies. 

For many organizations that choose this path, that simplicity is the appeal: employees get one card, one login, and one consolidated view of all their benefits. Bam. Easy-peasy. 

But the very mechanics that make these card-first programs feel convenient also introduce friction as companies scale and/or expand globally. 

Here are the most common reasons teams begin evaluating Benepass alternatives: 

1. Merchant-category enforcement doesn’t always match real-world purchases.

Card-based systems typically approve transactions at the merchant category code (MCC) level, not the item level. That means a purchase at a grocery store is treated the same whether it’s protein powder or a bottle of wine. When you’re trying to align spend tightly to policy intent or distinguish taxable from nontaxable categories, this limitation means HR and Finance teams likely need to spend time manually reviewing edge cases.

2. Prefunding creates cash exposure. 

Card-first programs require employers to prefund benefit allocations. That capital sits in the program until employees spend it. If you have a large employee headcount or high monthly benefits allocation, that translates into significant working capital tied up in advance, rather than paid out only when expenses are approved and processed.

3. Cards cause point-of-sale friction.

Real-time approvals are fast—until they aren’t. Card declines can happen for merchant-code mismatches, insufficient funds, category restrictions, or fraud checks. Even when card declines are rare, they tend to happen in visible moments, which can create a frustrating employee experience.

4. The global experience is inconsistent and varies by region. 

Card-based and marketplace-driven benefit models often work best in the country in which they’re built. As companies expand globally, nuances like currency conversion timing, local merchant acceptance, affiliate partnerships, and postal-code verification can create noticeable friction for international employees.

In Benepass G2 reviews, users outside the U.S. have noted:

• Currency conversion timing that doesn’t align neatly with reimbursement expectations
• Limited affiliate or discount coverage in certain regions
• Merchant or billing address mismatches when using cards internationally

These aren’t universal problems, but they do surface more often in distributed workforces that rely LSA debit cards.

5. Benepass is expanding into pre-tax and HSA infrastructure. 

In 2025, Benepass expanded its HSA investing experience, including low investment minimums and integrated in-app management. This signals a continued push toward becoming a broader pre-tax and financial wellness infrastructure platform, rather than focusing exclusively on flexible LSAs and lifestyle stipends.

For some organizations, that integrated direction is exactly what they want. For those whose primary goal is running flexible LSAs and stipends cleanly, it introduces additional complexity.

How card-first and reimbursement-first platforms compare in 2026 (complete table)

When you evaluate Benepass alternatives, the most important distinction isn’t the brand, but the architecture. Most lifestyle benefits platforms fall into one of three structural models: 

1. Card-first (wallet model)
2. Reimbursement-first (vendor-agnostic model)
3. Hybrid (card + marketplace + reimbursement)

Here’s how they all compare: 

What this means

• Card-first platforms optimize for checkout convenience and consolidated wallet infrastructure, often including pre-tax accounts like HSAs and FSAs.
• Reimbursement-first platforms optimize for vendor flexibility, receipt-level IRS compliance, and predictable cash exposure. They’re often the best choice for minimizing administrative headaches while providing employees with the most choice in how they use their benefits.  
• Hybrid models attempt to combine both, which increases flexibility (and complexity right along with it). 

In practice, reducing friction (like declines, vendor restrictions, and unclear eligibility) tends to increase participation because employees trust they can use the benefit without surprises.

Quick checklist for choosing a Benepass alternative

Before evaluating individual vendors, clarify what matters most to your HR and Finance team:

• Spending model: Do you prefer card-first spending, reimbursement-first flexibility, or a hybrid approach?
• Vendor freedom: Will employees be limited by merchant codes or curated marketplaces, or can they use any vendor that fits policy?
• Tax handling: Can the platform clearly separate taxable vs. nontaxable categories before payroll runs?
• Cash flow exposure: Are you comfortable prefunding balances, or do you want to pay only for approved expenses?
• Global support: If you operate internationally, does the platform support multicurrency reimbursements and localized administration?
• Admin lift: Can HR and Finance run the program without spreadsheets or manual reconciliation?

Once you’re clear on these priorities, the vendor differences become much easier to evaluate.

Let’s dig in.

Alternative #1: Compt — Reimbursement-first, vendor-agnostic lifestyle benefits

What is Compt best for?

Compt is best for organizations that want to run flexible Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs) and stipends without prefunding cards, managing merchant-code restrictions, or manually reconciling taxable vs. nontaxable spend at payroll.

It’s particularly well suited for:

• Distributed or global teams (75+ countries supported)
• HR teams that want minimal monthly admin lift
• Finance teams that require receipt-backed audit trails
• Companies consolidating multiple stipends into one LSA structure
• Employers prioritizing vendor flexibility for their people over marketplace control

Compt does not issue a benefits debit card. Instead, it operates on a reimbursement-first model.

That architectural difference drives the experience for both your people and your HR and Finance team. 

How Compt works

With Compt, your employees can use their lifestyle benefits with any vendor that fits your employer-defined categories. They simply select the appropriate LSA or stipend category, upload their receipt, fill in a few quick details, and submit.

If your employee’s purchase:

• Fits policy
• Falls within their available stipend balance
• Matches your category rules   

Then it moves through approvals and you can easily export it before you run payroll. 

Here’s how it works from the administrative point of view: 

Key differentiators from Benepass

1. No prefunding

As we’ve noted, card-first programs require allocated funds to sit in an account before they’re spent.

Compt does not hold employer funds. You pay only for approved reimbursements when payroll runs. Any unused allocations remain with the employer, which means you actually save money on lifestyle benefits you offer that your employees opt not to use. 

For large teams or large monthly benefits allocations, this materially reduces your working capital exposure. 

2. Receipt-level tax classification 

Each stipend category is configured with tax treatment (taxable or nontaxable). Employees see this classification at submission, which improves their ability to make decisions about their spending rooted in their own personal finances.

An example: With my quarterly Compt LSA, I have 20 categories available, and I always choose “student loan repayment” because it’s nontaxable. There are other dedicated stipends for wellness and office equipment with which I can be reimbursed for purchases in taxable categories, so why increase my taxable income here when I have other options?  

With Compt, because every expense is receipt-backed:

• Taxable vs. nontaxable spend is separated before payroll export.
• Audit trails include timestamps, approvals, and documentation.
• Payroll files are formatted by tax treatment and easily exportable.

This eliminates the need for manual reconciliation at the end of the year. 

3. Global, multicurrency reimbursements

Compt supports employees in 75+ countries. Within the Compt platform, employees see balances in their local currency, reimbursements are processed in their local currency, and Finance still receives centralized reporting. 

Employees are also free to make local purchases from vendors they’re familiar with instead of being locked into a pre-approved vendor list for which there may be no options close to home. 

For distributed teams, this avoids the friction of card acceptance limits, billing address mismatches, and currency conversion timing issues. It’s also simple to create user groups and define currencies and policies by each, so if an employee moves to another country, it’s easy to move them to the related group. 

4. Configurable, flexible stipends and LSAs

Compt admins can create:

• Recurring stipends (monthly, quarterly, annual)
• One-time stipends or spot bonuses
• Consolidated, all-inclusive LSAs
• Role- or location-based eligibility groups

And remember those 20 LSA categories I mentioned above? Your options include, but are not limited to:

• Health and wellness
• Professional development
• Family care
• Remote work
• Commuter benefits
• Charitable giving
• Company swag
• Rewards and recognition
• Employee discounts
• Pets
• A full 28 stipend categories to design into your benefits structure 

And one of the coolest parts? Eligibility syncs with your HRIS integrations to automate new hire inclusion and terminations.

5. Approval and reporting workflow

Compt admins have access to:

• Bulk approval queues
• Status tracking (Open, In Review, Approved, Processed)
• Payroll exports grouped by tax treatment
• Audit-ready reports with receipt documentation
• Real-time dashboards showing participation and utilization

According to our 2025 benchmark data, 99% of submitted expenses on the Compt platform were approved in the first half of the year, which reflects overall category clarity and employee understanding. 

What you trade off by choosing Compt

There’s no way around it: Reimbursement-first models require employees to upload receipts.

For most teams using Compt, this takes minutes and employees don’t mind. That said, we recognize that eliminating receipt submission is a priority for some organizations. We’re not for everyone!

This single tradeoff is the core difference between reimbursement-first and card-first models.

Online ratings

Compt is rated 4.8 out of 5 stars on G2.

When Compt is a strong fit

Choose Compt if:

• You want vendor flexibility without merchant-code restrictions.
• You want clear IRS-aligned reporting before payroll runs.
• You want to avoid prefunding card balances.
• You operate globally and need multicurrency reimbursements.
• You want to consolidate stipends into a single LSA.

If your priority is consolidating pre-tax accounts (HSA/FSA) and post-tax stipends into a single wallet-style debit card, a card-first platform like Benepass may be better aligned.

Alternative #2: Espresa — Engagement platform with built-in lifestyle benefits

What is Espresa best for?

Espresa is ideal for organizations looking to combine Lifestyle Spending Accounts with broader employee engagement tools like challenges and community groups inside a single platform.

Espresa positions itself as a “culture and total well-being” platform that includes LSAs alongside employee resource groups (ERGs), social recognition, well-being challenges, and rewards programs.

Rather than focusing on stipend and reimbursement infrastructure and creating a world-class experience there, Espresa embeds lifestyle benefits within a larger engagement suite. This option is considered a hybrid model because it features an LSA debit card, curated vendor marketplace (with no markups), and reimbursement within a broad engagement ecosystem.

Espresa’s strengths

• Integrated recognition, challenges, and community features
• Marketplace-style redemption options alongside reimbursements
• Consolidated engagement reporting across programs
• Zero-markup marketplace positioning for rewards

For teams that want lifestyle benefits tightly connected to culture programming, this unified structure can simplify your approach and the employee experience. 

Tradeoffs to consider with Espresa

• Broad engagement platforms introduce unnecessary administrative complexity if your primary goal is running LSAs cleanly and at scale.
• Marketplace-driven elements limit vendor flexibility compared to fully vendor-agnostic reimbursement models.
• Card-based components may encounter declines at POS checkout. 
• Teams focused on moving away from spreadsheets to built-in tax classification and payroll automation will likely find the engagement features more expansive than necessary.

When Espresa makes sense

Espresa is an option when your priority is building a culture and engagement hub that includes lifestyle benefits as one component of a larger strategy next to wellness challenges and ERG support.

Alternative #3: ThrivePass — Lifecycle benefits platform with LSA capabilities

What is ThrivePass best for?

ThrivePass is a broader benefits administration suite that may be ideal for organizations that want lifestyle spending-style benefits alongside broader benefit administration services, such as COBRA and pre-tax accounts.

ThrivePass positions itself as a “lifecycle benefits” platform. In addition to lifestyle spending accounts and stipends, it supports programs like COBRA administration, commuter benefits, tuition reimbursement, and other compliance-heavy offerings.

ThrivePass’s strengths 

• Benefits suite that goes beyond LSAs
• COBRA administration expertise and transition tools
• Attractive to PEOs and midmarket companies managing complex benefit transitions
• Ability to consolidate multiple adjacent programs into one vendor

If your goal is reducing vendor count across several benefit types, not just lifestyle benefits such as stipends and LSAs, then ThrivePass can simplify procurement and contracting.

Tradeoffs to consider 

• If your primary goal is running flexible LSAs efficiently, then broader suites like ThrivePass introduce complexity.
• The employee experience varies depending on which modules are activated.
• Reimbursement timelines and workflow friction are sometimes cited in online reviews when multiple programs intersect.
• Administrative workflows may require more onboarding compared to stipend-first platforms.

When ThrivePass makes sense

Consider ThrivePass when your organization wants to bundle lifestyle benefits with other compliance-driven programs like COBRA administration.

Alternative #4: Forma — Hybrid global wallet with marketplace and reimbursement options

What is Forma best for?

Forma is typically evaluated by larger or global organizations that want multiple ways for employees to spend benefits, including a debit card, reimbursements, and a curated vendor marketplace, within a single configurable wallet system.

It operates as a hybrid model (card + marketplace + reimbursement), supports employees in 110+ countries, and is often positioned as an enterprise-ready lifestyle benefits platform that also includes pre-tax accounts like HSAs, FSAs, HRAs, and commuter benefits.

Forma’s strengths

• Multiple spending methods (card, marketplace, reimbursement)
• Extensive global coverage (110+ countries)
• Configurable “wallets” and pooled funds
• Support for both pre-tax and post-tax benefit types
• May be attractive to larger enterprises with complex benefit structures

For organizations that want optionality and are comfortable managing several spending paths at once, this flexibility can be appealing.

Tradeoffs to consider

• Card-based components still rely on merchant-category enforcement and may result in checkout declines depending on merchant coding and eligibility rules.
• Marketplace models limit vendor flexibility compared to fully vendor-agnostic reimbursement programs.
• Managing multiple spending methods introduces administrative complexity.
• Employees often need guidance on when to use the card, submit a claim, or shop within the marketplace.

Hybrid models offer flexibility, but they also require extremely clear governance and communication. Your lifestyle benefits can be excellent and still fail if employees can’t figure out how to use them or frequently experience frustration when they try. 

When Forma makes sense

Consider Forma if you want global coverage, a marketplace experience, and multiple spending methods in a single platform, particularly in more complex enterprise environments.

Which Benepass alternative is right for your team?

• Choose Compt if you want vendor-agnostic LSAs, reimbursement-first spending, predictable cash flow, and payroll-ready tax handling without prefunded cards.
• Choose Espresa if you’re looking for a broader culture and engagement platform that includes lifestyle benefits alongside community programs and well-being challenges.
• Choose ThrivePass if your goal is consolidating lifestyle benefits with compliance-heavy programs like COBRA or pre-tax accounts under one vendor.
• Choose Forma if you want multiple spending methods (card, marketplace, and reimbursements) and are comfortable managing a complicated hybrid model across a larger or global workforce.

Why HR and Finance teams choose Compt after evaluating Benepass alternatives

When teams move away from Benepass-style card programs, it’s usually for three reasons: prefunding exposure, merchant-code friction, or tax reconciliation headaches.

Compt solves those issues by removing the card entirely.

With a reimbursement-first model, you:

• Pay only for approved expenses — no prefunded balances.
• Get receipt-backed, payroll-ready tax classification
• Give employees vendor freedom without checkout declines.
• Run LSAs globally with multicurrency reimbursements.
• Manage approvals, reporting, and exports in one streamlined system that can handle stipends, LSAs, recognition and rewards, business expense management, company swag, and even employee discounts. 

Compt is also less expensive and more cost-effective than Benepass, per recent calls our team has had with companies evaluating both Benepass and Compt in 2026. 

Ultimately, the right choice depends on what you’re optimizing for. If your priority is a consolidated wallet that combines pre-tax and post-tax benefits on a debit card, a card-first platform like Benepass may be the right fit. But if you’re focused on simplifying administration, minimizing prefunding exposure, and running reimbursement-first LSAs with clean, payroll-ready tax handling, a more focused stipend-first platform will likely offer a more streamlined experience.

Compt was built by a three-time CFO and a two-time COO specifically for teams looking for flexible, vendor-agnostic lifestyle benefits with predictable cash flow and receipt-backed IRS compliance. 

If you’re evaluating Benepass alternatives, request a Compt demo to see how tax-compliant, reimbursement-first lifestyle benefits work in practice.

FAQ: Benepass alternatives for stipends and LSAs

The post Top 4 Benepass Alternatives for Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs) in 2026 appeared first on COMPT.

Mercer found that most employers are already changing their health plans amid the highest cost increase per-employee since 2010. Even with those changes, costs will still rise 6.5% on average. And “average” is the keyword; we’ve heard far higher numbers from our customers and other organizations.

That leads companies to the benefits that aren’t legally required, like wellness perks.

The problem with slashing these is that when you do, morale dips, retention follows, and backfilling roles costs way more than whatever you would’ve saved. And if you’ve been running stipends through payroll, it’ll feel like a pay cut to employees.

Finance knows this on some level, but they’re rational decision-makers at the end of the day. They need predictable and defensible benefits spend, and fragmented point solutions don’t offer that. Plus, they create hidden cost layers (like minimum seat requirements regardless of usage).

My recommendation is simple: Instead of defending every vendor and line item, consolidate your sprawling, underutilized perks into something lean and flexible. Done right, you come out ahead on job satisfaction while giving Finance the budget predictability they’re begging for.

Today’s guide shows you which budget-friendly employee benefits help you accomplish that, plus the best way to implement them.

Why you can’t slash all your benefits (even if Finance really wants to)

Your benefits strategy matters because it’s directly tied to retention. From a Finance perspective, that impacts the P&L in four areas:

• Time-to-fill
• Cost per hire
• Productivity ramp
• Replacement cost exposure

SHRM estimates the cost of employee turnover at 50% to 200% of their annual salary, so even marginal retention improvements materially change your cost forecast.

But personalization and flexibility are what matter. Most employers know this, which is why so many fall into the trap of offering 10 different benefits for 10 different needs — a gym membership here, a meditation app there, maybe fertility support, pet insurance …

When you do this, you end up with a bunch of underutilized categories. And if you’re not running them on a reimbursement model, you’ve committed the budget upfront to vendors regardless of whether people actually use them.

So the real waste isn’t in the benefits themselves, but in how they’re structured. That’s precisely why consolidation is the right answer.

8 budget-friendly benefits worth offering (or keeping)

First, let’s talk about the high-impact benefits that cost next to nothing but have an outsized impact on your team, culture, and bottom line.

1. Flexible schedules / async work

Cost: $0

Flexible scheduling lets employees shift their work hours to accommodate childcare pickups, avoiding rush hour, medical appointments, and other instances where life gets in the way.

It’s ideal for knowledge workers, creative roles, and anyone not in a customer-facing or coverage-dependent position. It’s harder to implement for retail, healthcare, and manufacturing, though shift flexibility can still apply.

2. Remote or hybrid options

Cost: $0 (potentially negative cost if you downsize office space)

Remote work means employees can do their job from anywhere. Home, a coffee shop, even another country with some policies (though that last one is less common for compliance reasons). Hybrid splits the difference with a set number of in-office days per week.

98% of employees say they’d like to work remotely at least some of the time, and there’s a tremendous financial upside to doing so: the typical company can save more than $11,000 per half-time telecommuter. That’s a whole salary for every seven-or-so employees.

3. Rewards and recognition programs

Cost: Low ($0 if purely nonmonetary/e-thanks; minimal if you add small rewards)

Rewards and recognition programs let employees publicly acknowledge each other’s contributions. Peer-to-peer shoutouts in Slack or Teams are the best starting point, but you might also layer in a points-based system or peer/manager-nominated spot bonuses.

When you have a culture of recognition, everything ties back to a company value. If someone takes ownership, supports a teammate, or pushes the boundaries, affirming it turns those abstract ideals into repeatable behavior.

Recognition is universal, but works especially well in larger orgs where contributions get lost more easily, and in remote environments where visibility is limited.

Pro tip: Eligible Compt lifestyle benefits programs include rewards and recognition, so there’s no extra fee!

4. Office perks with high visibility

Cost: Low to moderate (depends on team size + what you offer)

Certain low-cost employee benefits make the office feel like somewhere people want to be rather than somewhere they have to be. And because people see or use them constantly, the perceived value outweighs their actual cost.

A few examples:

• Free food or a meal stipend
• Quality coffee (not the sad Keurig situation)
• Stocked fridges with grab-and-go options
• Comfy furniture in your lounge area
• Dog-friendly policies

Obviously, this isn’t relevant if your team’s fully remote, but there are plenty of ways to translate office benefits to remote and hybrid employees.

5. Professional development budgets

Cost: Low to moderate (with tax advantages)

According to research from Gallup, companies with development programs see 11% higher profitability and retain employees at 2x the rate of those that don’t. The premise is simple: people stick around when they feel like they’re building toward something.

A few perks in this category:

• Tuition reimbursement or student loan repayment assistance
• Certification reimbursements for job-relevant credentials
• Conference and workshop attendance
• In-house mentorship programs
• Learning platform subscriptions

Some of these don’t sound like “budget-friendly” employee benefits, but remember that you don’t have to cover everything; employees appreciate the contribution even if it’s not 100%.

Plus, job-specific education and tuition/loan repayment are nontaxable up to IRS limits. And only around four in 10 will use it, so in a reimbursement-based model like Compt, your actual spend stays lower than the headline number.

6. Mental health resources / EAP access

Cost: Low (EAPs typically run $12 to $40 per employee per year)

EAPs give your team access to confidential counseling, mental health support, and crisis resources through a third-party provider. Most also cover things like financial counseling, legal advice, and family support services. It’s a broad safety net for relatively little spend.

The ROI here is hard to quantify but real. Mental health issues drive absenteeism, presenteeism, and turnover. When someone actually needs support, your EAP can be the difference between them pushing through a rough patch or burning out entirely.

7. Additional PTO

Cost: $0

More time off costs you nothing in direct spend. The real cost is productivity loss, but even that’s (generally) overstated. Burned-out employees aren’t productive, and research indicates that every 10 hours of vacation time used improves year-end performance ratings by 8%.

A few options:

• Adding a few floating holidays per year
• Summer Fridays or half-day Fridays
• Bonus PTO for tenure milestones
• Unlimited PTO (though this backfires if people feel guilty taking it)
• Mental health days with no questions asked

The benefit here is that PTO is universally valued, and it improves your employees’ productivity long-term. Just be careful with unlimited PTO — it generally leads to people taking less.

8. Commuter benefits

Cost: Low (and tax-advantaged)

Commuter benefits allow you to set aside up to $340 per employee per month pre-tax for qualifying commute expenses. Most transit and parking passes cost significantly less than that, but the emotional sting of “paying to go to work” makes it feel bigger than its actual dollar value.

You don’t need to cover Uber or Lyft (it’s expensive and fully taxable anyway). Stick to what the IRS lets you write off: public transit, vanpooling, and qualified parking.

Consolidating your lifestyle benefits with a Lifestyle Spending Account

A Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA) is an employer-funded account that employees can use toward a broad range of pre-approved lifestyle expenses.

According to our 2026 Lifestyle Benefits Benchmarking Report, 64% of Compt users now offer one to cover employees’ health and wellness, office equipment, cell and internet, professional development, family care, food, and commuter expenses (and more).

• Finance loves LSAs because: You set the budget up front, and the fixed per-employee cost makes forecasting dead simple. One platform replaces a dozen point-solution contracts and you only pay when employees actually use the benefit.
• Employees prefer them because: Traditional perks favor certain demographics (on-site gym = useless if you’re remote). With the LSA’s flexibility, a 25-year-old can use it for a climbing gym membership while a new parent could put it toward backup childcare.

It’s a budget-friendly employee benefit because $100 to $200 per month is enough to make it meaningful. When someone uses their stipend to cover a $150 certification or fitness membership, that’s real money back in their pocket.

For Payroll, it’s operationally cleaner than taxable payroll stipends and prepaid debit cards because it enforces eligibility and tax logic at the transaction level, logs receipts and metadata in one system, and maps spend directly to the right categories for payroll and GL reporting.

And because you’re collapsing a mess of wellness, learning, and stipend vendors into one predictable budget line, there’s less to reconcile. So back-office admin is faster and costs less.

Finance teams love all that, but they’ll still need to see the hard numbers. Getting an LSA approved ultimately comes down to speaking their language. 

How to get CFO approval for lifestyle stipends

CFOs don’t care that employees “really love” a benefit; they care about cost predictability, risk reduction, and measurable ROI.

Pro tip: Compt typically takes 2 to 4 weeks to implement, with just ~30 minutes per month of ongoing admin.

Which benefits categories see the highest ROI?

Some benefits categories drive consistently high engagement across the board. Others serve valuable purposes, but for a narrower slice of your workforce.

In our benchmarking data, participation skews heavily toward benefits tied to recurring, everyday needs:

• All-inclusive LSAs: 93%
• Cell and internet: 88%
• Wellness: 85%
• Office equipment: 84%

Meanwhile, categories like out-of-state care (14%) and charitable giving (49%) see lower participation because they support specific life circumstances or personal values.

How to identify your highest-leverage categories

The categories that’ll drive the most ROI for your org depend on who actually works there. Four questions to pressure-test:

• What’s your workforce composition? Younger employees might lean toward fitness and student loan help. Parents care about family care and flexibility.
• Where are employees already spending? Survey them asking what they’re paying for out-of-pocket that they wish were covered.
• What’s unused or underutilized right now? If a benefit has <50% participation, that’s a candidate for cutting or folding into a broader LSA.
• What aligns with your EVP? Even if you’re offering an LSA, you can maximize engagement by prioritizing these categories in your benefits communications.

Which metrics help finance prove benefits ROI?

When you’re replacing point-solution perks with a single lifestyle benefits wallet, there are four types of metrics your Finance team will want to see vs. their pre-implementation baseline:

• Utilization and engagement: Overall participation, category-level utilization within the LSA, and claim frequency (one-time use vs. recurring engagement).
• Cost efficiency: Cost per employee, vendor reduction, admin hours saved, taxable vs. nontaxable coding accuracy, and reduction in payroll adjustments or gross-up expenses.
• Employee sentiment: Benefits satisfaction scores (via pulse and annual engagement surveys), eNPS movement, and qualitative feedback from reviews and exit interviews.
• Retention and turnover: Voluntary turnover rate, retention rate among high performers, exit interview mentions of benefits, and offer acceptance rates (if the LSA is a recruiting lever).

Pro tip: Use Compt’s team engagement, LSA usage, and spend details reports to measure the ROI of your LSA.

Implement a budget-friendly employee benefits program with Compt.

We built Compt for exactly this use case. You’ll get:

• One platform, not ten vendors
• Capped, predictable spend
• A reimbursement-based model
• Built-in tax compliance
• Real-time reporting

So if you’re staring down the next budget cycle and trying to figure out how to keep employees happy without overspending, this is what’ll get you there.

Ready to bring budget-friendly employee benefits to your people? Request a Compt demo today.

FAQs: Budget-friendly lifestyle stipends, LSAs, and ROI

The post Budget-Friendly Employee Benefits: What to Keep and What to Consolidate appeared first on COMPT.

Those two realities are reshaping how HR and Finance leaders think about benefits. Company budgets are under pressure, and employees are navigating very real financial strain.

That tension is why so many organizations are reevaluating alternatives to cash stipends. In practice, “cash stipends” often mean gift cards or funds issued through payroll, whether as flat allowances or bonuses. They’re easy to distribute, but they’re hard to measure, difficult to align to benefit goals, and nearly impossible to optimize once they blend into general compensation.

The issue isn’t whether employees value the money. It’s that payroll-issued cash has a fixed ceiling. A $100 payout buys $100 of goods at retail price. It offsets cost, but it doesn’t change the math.

The question for HR and Finance leaders is how to structure or redesign employee financial support so every dollar works harder than its face value.

What are alternatives to cash stipends for employees?

Let’s start with the basics. 

Flexible stipends and Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs) have become the most common alternative to cash stipends in payroll because they replace unrestricted cash with a defined, reimbursement-first framework. 

In 2025, 64% of employers included in Compt’s benchmark data offered an all-inclusive LSA, up 9% from the prior year.

The appeal goes beyond flexibility and consolidation to accountability. A structured stipend allows employers to define eligible categories, set funding cadence, and measure participation in a way payroll allowances simply can’t. When offered through a flexible stipend platform like Compt, stipends and LSAs also account for all the nuance and complexity required for IRS compliance.

The shift from distributed cash to structured reimbursement is the first real evolution in how employers deliver financial support.

Stop overpaying for underused benefits.

Traditional payroll stipends are paid out 100% regardless of actual use.

With Compt, you only pay for the funds employees spend, saving you thousands while increasing benefits engagement.

Calculate your savings

Are gift cards or cash bonuses effective employee benefits?

Cash and gift cards are rarely unwelcome. But they don’t produce sustained engagement and a measurable outcome beyond “we issued the money.”

What’s interesting is what happens after you introduce structure. Does engagement actually improve? Do employees consistently use the funds that are allocated?

In our 2025 customer data, as reported in the 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report, engagement on flexible benefits programs is notably high:

• 95% of invited employees activated their benefits.
• 93% of active users participated by submitting at least one expense. 
• All-inclusive LSAs reached 89% utilization, meaning 89% of issued funds were actually spent within program cadence.

That last number matters. Utilization reflects whether allocated funds are actually being spent in the way the program intended. The fact that all-inclusive LSAs approach 90% utilization shows that a well-designed, flexible structure can achieve both broad participation and efficient use of dollars.

That said, even strong utilization has its limits. If purchases are consistently made at full retail price, the purchasing power of your benefit is capped. The structure may perform well, yet the underlying economics stay static.

That’s where the conversation shifts from structure to purchasing power.

How can companies make employee benefits budgets go further?

Once structure and engagement are in place, the next question is economic: can the dollars themselves do more work?

To answer that, it helps to look at how employees are actually spending their benefits. The 2025 benchmark data shows two meaningful patterns:

• Nearly 1 in 10 stipend dollars was spent at grocery retailers. 
• 70% of total stipend spend flowed to local, regional, independent, or niche vendors; the remaining 30% flowed to only 10 distinct vendors, including Amazon and Walmart.

This tells us something important. Employees are not using benefits as occasional perks. They are using them to support recurring expenses. Groceries. Fitness. Internet plans. Childcare costs. Car maintenance. The benefit is landing where real financial pressure exists.

That behavioral shift reframes the opportunity. When stipends are used for essentials, their relevance increases, but their economic effect is still constrained by market pricing. Even a well-designed program can’t stretch dollars beyond what retail allows.

Maximizing a benefits budget, then, isn’t about issuing more money. It’s about increasing the effective value of the money already issued.

If a $100 stipend is used at full price, it offsets $100. If that same purchase includes a 25% discount, the effective purchasing power rises to $125 without increasing employer spend. The allocation stays fixed. The impact expands.

This is where embedded employee discounts become strategically relevant. Not as a standalone perk, and not as a separate portal competing for attention, but as a multiplier layered into an existing reimbursement-first structure.

When discounts are integrated directly into the same benefits hub employees already use, savings become discoverable at the moment of purchase. Employees can redeem a negotiated offer and, when eligible, submit the discounted expense for reimbursement. The savings stack with the stipend rather than replacing it.

For HR and Finance, nothing about the core program becomes more complex. Funding cadence, tax handling, and reporting remain centralized in the same platform. And because Employee Discounts (Compt + PerkSpot) are included with eligible Compt plans, you’re not adding another vendor or line item to the budget. 

The program’s cost stays stable while its purchasing power increases. At that point, the conversation shifts from replacing cash with structure to enhancing structure with purchasing power.

See how it works with Compt stipends and LSAs:

What is the difference between a stipend and a perk marketplace?

Increasing purchasing power within a structured program doesn’t happen in a vacuum. In practice, it often forces a design decision: should value come from restricting where employees can spend, or from expanding what their dollars can accomplish?

That’s where the distinction between reimbursement-first stipends and curated perk marketplaces becomes relevant.

A perk marketplace typically centers around a defined catalog of vendors with pre-negotiated deals. Employees browse within that ecosystem and savings are applied at checkout. The value is visible, and the environment is controlled.

Reimbursement-first stipends operate differently. Instead of limiting employees to a curated list, they allow spending wherever it makes sense within defined stipend categories. You preserve flexibility, and the program adapts to real-life behavior rather than redirecting it.

The 2025 benchmark data illustrates why that distinction matters:

• Employees directed spending across 64,000+ unique vendors globally.
• 78% of total stipend spend was taxable, reflecting high participation across broadly applicable, real-life categories over narrow, tax-advantaged programs

Employees’ needs are not confined to a fixed catalog. They are local, variable, and often highly specific. Grocery stores, independent fitness studios, regional childcare providers, and specialty retailers are not often represented in curated marketplaces, yet they’re where dollars actually flow.

Marketplaces and reimbursement models are often framed as opposites. One offers savings but limits choice. The other offers flexibility but historically lacked a built-in savings layer.

Combining flexibility with embedded savings removes that tradeoff.

When embedded employee discounts are layered into a reimbursement-first platform, employees retain the freedom to spend in alignment with their lives and passions, all while gaining access to negotiated savings when relevant. Discounts become additive, not restrictive, and extend the structure’s efficiency without reshaping it.

The result is a more economically efficient version of the system you already operate.

Why Compt is a smarter alternative to cash stipends

If you’re already running stipends or are actively evaluating alternatives to cash stipends, the real opportunity goes beyond replacing payroll allowances. You can design a program that delivers measurable engagement and greater purchasing power within your existing benefits budget.

Compt combines reimbursement-first flexibility with embedded Employee Discounts, powered by PerkSpot, so employees can stretch their stipends further without being confined to a curated marketplace. Discounts live inside the same benefits hub employees already use, and eligible purchases can still be reimbursed within policy.

Because Employee Discounts are included with eligible Compt plans, you’re consolidating flexible employee stipends and savings in one global platform, with centralized reporting and built-in compliance controls.

Whether you’re replacing payroll-issued stipends or refining an existing LSA program, Compt transforms structured benefits into a real purchasing-power advantage.

Request a demo to see how Compt replaces payroll stipends with structured benefits that deliver more value per dollar.

FAQs: Alternatives to cash stipends

Editor’s note: Compt software supports the categorization and proper reporting of benefits according to IRS guidelines, helping businesses maintain compliance. However, Compt cannot provide tax advice, and users should consult their own tax, legal, and accounting advisors when necessary.

The post Alternatives to Cash Stipends: How to Make $100 in Benefits Go Further appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Theresa Fesinstine

Theresa Fesinstine is a 25-year HR executive and founder of peoplepower.ai, a leading education platform helping HR leaders confidently adopt and apply AI at work. She is the author of People Powered by AI: A Playbook for HR Leaders Ready to Shape the Future of Work, a practical guide to integrating ethical, strategic, and human-centered AI into People and Culture teams.

She also writes People Power Pulse, a LinkedIn newsletter followed by 6,000+ HR professionals, and serves as an adjunct professor at The City College of New York, teaching AI in Business and HR Management.

Across her work as an educator, advisor, and keynote speaker, Theresa is guided by one question: how do we build a future of work that is people-first and AI-forward? She helps HR teams navigate transformation with clarity, confidence, and a commitment to culture.

Connect with Theresa on LinkedIn.

There is a shift happening in the workplace, but it is not showing up neatly in engagement scores or quarterly dashboards. It is quieter than that, more personal, and often harder to name. You can feel it in the growing gap between what people experience outside of work and what they are still expected to tolerate once they log in.

It shows up in small moments that, taken alone, might seem insignificant. A team member growing impatient with the slow cadence of internal approvals. A high performer wondering why they are still manually searching for development opportunities when consumer platforms seem to anticipate their needs without being asked. A new hire, already frustrated that getting a simple answer from HR requires navigating three tools, two time zones, and a lot of guesswork.

What sits underneath these moments is not laziness or entitlement, and it is not a lack of effort from HR teams. It is something more structural. Employee expectations are no longer shaped primarily by work itself. They are being shaped by the technologies people live with every day, and increasingly, by AI-enabled systems that quietly redefine what feels reasonable.

In my work advising HR and People teams navigating AI adoption, I see this gap emerge not from resistance, but from uncertainty about how to lead with care.

The expectation gap most organizations misread

In conversations with HR and People leaders, I often hear a familiar skepticism. It usually sounds measured and well-intentioned. “We’re not sure our people are ready for this.” Or, “We don’t want to depersonalize the employee experience.”

Those concerns make sense on the surface, but they are built on a false premise. Employees are not encountering AI for the first time at work. They are already using it daily. At home. On their phones. Increasingly, in their workflows, whether or not their organization has formally acknowledged it.

What employees are asking for is not unrestricted technology or blind adoption. They are asking for clarity and care. They want to understand how AI is being used, where it fits, and how it supports them rather than quietly evaluating them. When organizations hesitate, it is often framed as protection. But when that hesitation turns into gatekeeping, it creates a different risk. People start experimenting on their own, without shared guardrails, and the organization loses the opportunity to design trust intentionally.

The idea that AI will dehumanize HR also misses what is actually happening. AI does not remove humanity from people systems. It exposes where humanity has been stretched too thin or deprioritized. If the employee experience already feels fragmented, slow, or transactional, AI will not cause that problem; it will make it more visible. It will raise the standard for what “support” looks like, and it will surface where HR is carrying more load than it should without the infrastructure to match.

So the question is not whether AI belongs in HR and EX. The more honest question is this: How do we design empathy at scale, inside systems that were never built to deliver it?

What quiet AI adoption actually looks like inside real organizations

The most meaningful AI-enabled changes rarely look like transformation programs. They look like relief: Less manual work. Fewer dead ends. Faster access to answers. Earlier signals. Better conversations.

At peoplepower.ai, we have had the privilege of walking alongside HR and EX teams as they explore what responsible adoption can actually look like, in the messiness of real organizations.

In one midsize company, we helped reimagine their engagement analysis process using natural language processing. What once took six weeks of spreadsheet wrangling and manual theme coding now takes hours. That time was not just saved; it was redeployed into higher-value employee focused work, including listening circles, manager enablement, and deeper cultural diagnostics. The win was not efficiency. The win was capacity, and what that capacity made possible.

In another case, a global client used predictive tools to surface early burnout signals within a customer care team. The important detail is what happened next. They did not issue a blanket mandate or roll out another generic well-being campaign. They equipped managers with context, training, and language so they could respond in a way that felt human rather than performative. What followed was not just a reduction in burnout indicators. It was an increase in trust, because employees felt seen earlier and supported more consistently.

These are not flashy AI stories that depend on novelty. They are real examples of teams exploring what is possible with care, enabled by technology and expressed through humans. That is the pattern worth paying attention to.

How HR leaders can respond without losing the plot

One of the biggest risks right now is that HR gets pulled into the wrong kind of urgency. The market wants strategies, platforms, and roadmaps. Vendors want use cases. Leaders want quick wins. Meanwhile, employees want something simpler and harder at the same time. They want work to feel less frustrating. They want support to feel more accessible. They want systems to feel like they were designed for humans.

HR teams do not need another AI strategy deck. We need grounded, human-first actions that help HR teams move forward without creating fear, confusion, or unintended harm.

Final thought: The future is being built in the background.

Most organizations that will lead the next decade of employee experience will not do it through big headlines or massive overhauls. They will do it in the quiet redesign of how care is delivered at work. They will notice where employees lose time. They will fix the handoffs that create frustration. They will build systems that surface answers and signals sooner. They will equip managers to respond like humans, not policy enforcers.

They will also be honest about what AI is doing, what it is not doing, and where accountability sits. Because trust does not come from pretending technology is neutral. It comes from clarity, consistency, and the willingness to center dignity as much as efficiency.

At the end of the day, AI will not define the future of employee experience. People will. The leaders who hold both the technology and humanity with intention are the ones designing workplaces worth staying for.

The post The Future of Employee Experience: How AI Is Quietly Rewriting What Workers Expect appeared first on COMPT.

Not in theory, and not in a slide deck — but in how lifestyle benefits like stipends and Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs) are actually used once programs are live and employees begin submitting expenses.

That’s exactly where the Compt 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report comes in.

Available today, the report provides employee benefits benchmarks based on full-year 2025 data from Compt customers across industries, company sizes, and geographies. It shows how employers structured and funded their lifestyle benefits and how employees actually spent and submitted against them.

This isn’t a predictions piece. It’s a snapshot of real decisions and outcomes, offering a practical view of what’s working for HR and Finance leaders at a time when every employee benefit feels expensive.

What does this year’s employee benefits benchmark data reveal?

The defining shift in 2025 was discipline.

That discipline showed up less in what employers offered and more in how lifestyle benefits were structured, funded, and delivered. 

Across the data, Compt customers made pragmatic design decisions: consolidating scattered perks into all-inclusive LSAs, choosing funding cadences aligned to how and when employees actually use their benefits, embedding strong categories like wellness inside broader programs, and anchoring benefits in everyday needs that scale across roles, locations, and worker types.

The result is benefits design that balances employee impact with cost control — without adding complexity.

Our 2026 benchmarks show exactly how that plays out in practice:

• 64% of employers now operate lifestyle benefits through an all-inclusive LSA, confirming consolidation as the default operating model.
• Quarterly funding reached 85% utilization, compared to 52% for monthly and 65% for annual programs, reflecting differences in use patterns rather than performance.
• Wellness stipend utilization reached 86% inside an LSA, compared to 62% as a standalone stipend.
• Nearly 1 in 10 stipend dollars was spent at grocery retailers.
• 20% of professional development expenses were AI-related.

These patterns held across roles, worker types, and locations. Data from hourly and salaried employees on U.S.-based and international teams shows that when benefits are designed around everyday needs and personal choice — including space for small joys — they scale without requiring separate programs or differentiated rules.

Employees are now using lifestyle benefits to manage real life.

In 2025, employees directed stipend spending across 64,000+ unique vendors globally, with 70% of that spend flowing to local, regional, niche, or independent businesses. At the same time, familiar names like Amazon, Walmart, Costco, and Kroger remained prominent as grocery and household spending increased in response to economic pressure.

When employees are given flexibility, they direct their benefits toward the expenses that matter most in daily life — where financial pressure and practical support intersect.

As a result, lifestyle benefits are increasingly used to create stability, helping employees cover food, wellness needs, connectivity, work equipment, and other essentials that support their ability to stay grounded and productive, while still leaving room for everyday purchases that make life feel more manageable (and fun). 

For many leaders, this raises a practical planning question: Which everyday expenses are your benefits actually helping employees absorb?

Professional development is evolving into an always-on tool stack.

The report also highlights a clear evolution in professional development. 

We’ve talked a lot about AI stipends in the last year, and in 2025, 20% of all professional development expenses were AI-related. These were primarily online tools and productivity software rather than courses, certifications, or conferences. Employees are learning by doing and experimenting with tools they can apply immediately in their day-to-day work.

This marks a shift away from episodic learning and toward continuous upskilling that fits in naturally as roles (and the world) evolve. 

For organizations reviewing their benefits mix, this invites a broader reflection: Is your professional development program structured for how learning actually happens now?

Go beyond curiosity with real, actionable benchmarks and advice.

The 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report is designed to support real decisions that HR and Finance face every day.

Inside the full report, you’ll find benchmarks and context to help you navigate:

• Program consolidation and simplification
• Funding cadence and utilization expectations
• Participation benchmarks across employee types
• Global parity and international program design
• Taxable and nontaxable benefit strategy
• Benefits for hourly vs. salaried workers

Every insight connects data to practical implications, making it easier to explain not just what you’re proposing, but why it works.

Download the Compt 2026 Employee Benefits Benchmark Report.

The 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report is available now, and it’s free to download.

If you’re benchmarking an existing program, validating decisions already in motion, or planning refinements for the year ahead, these employee benefits benchmarks are designed to help you move forward with clarity and confidence.

Ready to see how your programs compare? Download your copy of the 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report.

If you want help applying these benchmarks to your own lifestyle benefits program goals, request a Compt demo to talk through next steps in real time. 

The post The 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report Is Available Now appeared first on COMPT.

In 2025, the answers were sharper and more direct. Not because leaders lack intent — they don’t. Across hundreds of conversations, the commitment to employees is steady and sincere.

What’s changed is the level of constraint.

Budgets are tighter. Healthcare costs continue to rise. Teams are putting real effort into doing more with less. And many of the systems companies rely on to deliver benefits weren’t built for the level of complexity today’s workforce demands.

I’ve seen that the organizations making progress aren’t chasing new perks. They’re simplifying. Consolidating. And rebuilding benefits programs around what employees actually use, supported by infrastructure that doesn’t add more work to already stretched teams.

Our 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report, grounded in real spending data from January through December 2025, shows how this shift is playing out across industries, company sizes, and geographies (including internationally). 

Below are the changes I expect to define the year ahead, backed by observations from my conversations with leaders that expand on what our peers should be paying attention to now.

1. Companies will consolidate perks and redirect budget into flexible LSAs.

When budgets were looser, it was easier to tolerate a patchwork of point solutions — each one solving a narrow problem, each one adding incremental overhead for HR and Finance.

That tolerance is fading.

In 2026, the companies moving forward will be the ones that stop trying to maintain everything at once. They’ll retire underused perks and redirect that spend into Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs) that give employees meaningful choice without creating additional administrative work.

This isn’t about reducing support. It’s about preserving it in a way that scales. A single, flexible structure can replace multiple disconnected programs, reduce vendor sprawl, and allow employees to decide what support looks like in their own lives.

The data is clear: when programs are simpler and more flexible, participation and utilization rise — and benefits dollars go further.

2. AI enablement will become a core workforce capability.

AI isn’t a future-facing conversation anymore. It’s already reshaping how work gets done.

Employees aren’t waiting for formal training programs to catch up. They’re using professional development stipends to access AI tools, courses, and subscriptions on their own — because that’s where learning is actually happening.

I don’t love hype cycles. But I do believe in practical capability building. In 2026, companies that treat AI skill development as optional will struggle to keep pace. The ones that move faster will recognize AI enablement as foundational infrastructure, not a fringe benefit — something that supports productivity and long-term relevance.

Flexible professional development stipends, especially those that explicitly support AI tools and learning, are becoming one of the most effective ways to meet this need without forcing rigid programs employees don’t engage with.

3. Support for families and caregivers will expand across life stages.

Cost pressure is reshaping how employees experience work — and where benefits need to show up.

Across our data, employees are directing more of their lifestyle benefit dollars toward everyday realities: groceries, transportation, childcare, elder care, and other family and household expenses that have become harder to absorb.

We also expect broader employer support for life-stage and specialized health needs, including fertility care, menopause support, and out-of-pocket medical costs that traditional benefits may leave behind (think: GLP-1s for weight loss).

What matters most here is flexibility. Employees don’t move through life stages on a schedule, and point solutions rarely capture the full picture. LSAs and targeted stipends allow companies to offer support without making assumptions or forcing employees into narrow definitions of need.

4. Hybrid work, RTO policies, and global hiring will continue to reshape benefits design.

As expectations around where work happens keep shifting, employee needs shift with them.

Some days require a commute. Some require privacy. Some require better equipment. For many companies, their people’s day-to-day reality is a mix (not a fixed policy line). And that reality doesn’t always align with leadership’s assumptions about what work should look like.

At the same time, companies are rethinking how they build their teams. Growing friction around work-sponsored visas and cross-border mobility is pushing more organizations to hire globally rather than concentrate talent in a single market. As teams become more geographically distributed by design, differences in work norms, cost structures, and support expectations become harder to standardize.

Stipends remain one of the few benefit tools that can absorb this variability without requiring employers to design separate programs for every scenario. In 2026, more companies will rely on flexible benefits to support how work actually happens, across locations and life circumstances, rather than trying to enforce uniformity where it no longer fits.

5. Operational readiness will determine whether LSAs succeed.

Interest in LSAs isn’t the barrier anymore.

Execution is.

Too many programs struggle not because they’re poorly designed, but because they rely on manual workflows, disconnected systems, or tools that weren’t built to handle stipends at scale. HR teams don’t lack expertise — they lack bandwidth.

And in a market like this, the status quo often feels safer than a change that could create more work or unexpected tax issues with someone’s name attached to them.

The companies that succeed with flexible benefits in 2026 will be the ones that pair thoughtful program design with infrastructure that removes friction — especially platforms that integrate directly with payroll and handle compliance automatically.

At this point, the question isn’t whether LSAs work. It’s whether your systems can support them.

What this means for 2026

This is the year when good intentions won’t be enough.

Programs that look impressive but go unused won’t survive budget scrutiny. Perks added for the sake of keeping up won’t hold attention. And complexity without payoff will continue to slow teams down.

One final note: be cautious of anyone promising clean, universal benefits ROI. There are too many variables. What you can measure — and what Finance will respect — is participation, utilization, and whether a program reduces friction for the teams running it. That’s impact. And it’s measurable.

The organizations that make progress in 2026 will be the ones that:

• Consolidate what’s underperforming.
• Invest in benefits employees consistently use.
• Build systems that make flexibility operational, not aspirational.

Our 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report breaks down exactly how companies are structuring, funding, and managing these programs today — grounded in real employee behavior, not assumptions, to help you lead with clarity and build with confidence.

If you want data you can actually act on, I invite you to download the report today.

And if you’re ready to speak with the Compt team, go ahead and request a demo. 

The post What HR and Finance Leaders Are Getting Right — and Wrong — About Benefits in 2026 appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Holly Hazelton

Holly Hazelton is a people-focused content and communications leader with more than 10 years of experience supporting HR, benefits, coaching, and people analytics audiences. She has shaped employee experience narratives and content strategies for Workhuman, Crunchr, and AceUp, helping leaders create workplaces where people feel seen, supported, and connected. She also founded a global ERG for working parents, reflecting her belief that human-centered storytelling drives stronger performance and belonging.

Connect with Holly on LinkedIn.

Across organizations, HR, Finance, and Total Rewards leaders continue to face a persistent question: how to evaluate the ROI of employee benefits in a way that feels credible to the business.

When these leaders talk candidly about employee benefits ROI, two important truths surface. First, ROI looks different across companies. Some teams prioritize cost control, others prioritize growth — and each requires a different lens. Second, tying benefits to exact dollar returns is inherently difficult. As one Director of Total Rewards put it, benefits ROI often feels like “fuzzy math,” especially when it’s framed as a precise dollar-for-dollar return.

This guide offers a practical framework for measuring the aspects of employee benefits ROI that are both credible and defensible, grounded in candid conversations the Compt team had with five HR and Total Rewards leaders who navigate these tradeoffs every day.

It is designed specifically for HR and Total Rewards leaders who need to make a clear, Finance-ready case for discretionary perks and lifestyle benefits. No complex tools, advanced modeling, or speculative assumptions required.

Executive summary: Measuring employee benefits ROI

When evaluating employee benefits ROI, focus on:

• Cost efficiency: Reduce vendors and unused spend
• Participation and utilization: Prove employees actually use the benefit
• Operational simplification: Save HR and Payroll teams time and headaches
• Directional business impact: Monitor retention and absenteeism trends

Finance leaders prefer trend data and measurable efficiency over speculative ROI claims.

What is employee benefits ROI?

Employee benefits ROI refers to the measurable business value generated relative to the cost of a benefits program, including cost savings, operational efficiency, participation, and directional workforce outcomes.

For HR practitioners and people leaders, employee benefits play a central role in how supported employees feel at work. According to Gartner, only 45% of employees believe their organization cares about their personal well-being. That means more than half of employees feel burned out, disengaged, or disconnected from company leadership.

The right well-being benefits influence outcomes like retention, productivity, and absenteeism, but those impacts rarely show up as clean line items on a balance sheet. The challenge, then, is translating those outcomes into an ROI story Finance can evaluate with confidence.

How to assess ROI on employee benefits programs

At its core, ROI helps assess whether the money invested in a program appears to deliver business value relative to its cost. HR teams can calculate ROI in two ways: anticipated or actual ROI.

Your basic ROI formula should look like this: 

ROI = (Total benefits – total investment) / total investment × 100

This formula is commonly used across HR initiatives, including benefits programs, but it’s best framed as a directional tool rather than a precise calculation. For this guide, we’ll focus on how to use it to measure employee benefits ROI on stipends and Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs).

What do CFOs care about when it comes to employee perks and benefits?

When CFOs evaluate employee perks and discretionary benefits, they typically focus on five core questions:

1. Cost control: Is spend predictable and defensible?
2. Waste reduction: Are we paying for benefits employees actually use?
3. Operational efficiency: Does this reduce unnecessary vendors, manual processing, or administrative headaches and overhead?
4. Risk exposure: Are tax handling and compliance clear and consistent?
5. Competitive positioning: Does this help us attract and retain talent without escalating costs?

Unlike HR, CFOs rarely evaluate benefits based on sentiment alone. They want to see structured reporting, participation data, utilization rates, and evidence that the program is either replacing existing costs or reducing future risk (such as turnover).

This is why participation, utilization, and vendor consolidation often matter more in ROI conversations than abstract engagement scores.

6 ways to measure the ROI of LSAs and stipends

Wondering which metrics help finance prove ROI when you replace point-solution perks with a single lifestyle benefits wallet?

These six metrics reflect the most practical ways HR and Finance teams assess employee benefits ROI on discretionary perks and lifestyle benefits, ordered from the most concrete and easiest to defend to more directional signals that add context over time.

1. Cost efficiency

Cost efficiency is the most straightforward way to talk about employee benefits ROI with Finance because it aligns well with what they already care about: reducing waste and improving budget predictability.

Look for signs that your lifestyle benefits program helps you:

• Reduce waste from unused perks, breakage, one-off swag purchases, or “set it and forget it” benefits
• Retire underused tools or overlapping vendor programs; consolidate invoices
• Improve budget visibility and forecasting
• Free up HR time for higher-impact work by reducing manual processing and tax guesswork

For many CFOs, predictability matters more than raw cost reduction. A stable, forecastable benefits line item is often preferable to volatile discretionary spend.

You can also quantify time savings from streamlined processes. For example, if your team spends hours each month tracking which benefits are taxable vs. nontaxable, log that time, multiply it by your internal hourly cost, and track the reduction after centralizing administration. That becomes a concrete, defensible ROI input.

What this may look like in practice: 

• Replace 5-12 perk vendors with one clean stipend budget.
• Result: Fewer invoices. One payroll integration. One set of policy rules.
  • CFO summary: Consolidation reduces administrative burden, saves us time, and improves budget predictability.

According to Compt’s 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report, small companies (fewer than 100 employees) invest an average of $1,675 per employee on stipends. That’s more than double what large enterprises spend. This means cost efficiency is even more important for smaller teams.

Once you’ve framed efficiency, the next most CFO-friendly ROI argument is risk: What happens if your benefits fall behind the market?

2. Competitive positioning and benefits FOMO

Competitive positioning is one of the clearest ways to frame employee benefits ROI. If your benefits don’t meet market expectations, the cost shows up fast: roles become harder to fill, fewer candidates accept offers, and you experience higher attrition from previously dedicated employees. 

Beyond this, nothing activates the executive team’s emotional brain more than hearing competitors are outcompeting them, and it often results in swift approvals for your request.

Start by identifying the employers you compete with for the same talent, then compare their benefits offerings against your own package. If they offer benefits that you don’t, pressure-test whether your employees (and candidates) actually care about those perks.

Competitive benchmarks show what candidates expect, while your own employees reveal what truly makes a difference for them.

These patterns also explain why flexible, multicategory benefits like stipends and LSAs tend to outperform narrow, vendor-based perks: they help you stay competitive without constantly adding another tool.

Once you’ve established that a benefit is competitive, Finance will ask the next obvious question: Are employees actually using it?

3. Participation rates

Participation rate reflects how many employees use a benefit in a given time period. It’s often the simplest way to show whether a program is reaching your workforce at all.

To calculate participation, divide the number of employees who used the benefit during a specific period by your total number of employees.

For example:

• 500 employees
• 50 use the benefit each month 
• 50 / 500 = 10% participation

Depending on the benefit you’re reviewing, 10% might be great — but it also might be low. For a benefit like tuition reimbursement, that may be high enough. However, for programs focused on wellness initiatives, it would be considered low. It’s important to keep the specific fringe benefit’s goal in mind, as well as look for industry benchmarks to know if/where there is room for improvement.

Here’s what this may look like before and after LSA launch:

• Participation rate: 32% before LSA launch →  91%+ (Compt benchmark) after. 
• Higher adoption across all demographics and departments.
  • CFO summary: High participation indicates the benefit is relevant and not wasted spend.

Tools to measure participation:

• A simple spreadsheet
• HRIS reimbursement data
• Industry benchmarks for similar employers
• Compt’s Current Team Engagement YTD report, which shows the percentage of employees who have used their stipend at least once this year

Participation tells you who is using the benefit. Utilization tells you whether the money you allocated is actually being spent.

4. Utilization rates 

Utilization rates are most useful for stipends and LSAs because employee spending amounts are fixed. Utilization shows how much of your allocated benefits budget employees actually use.

• Participation = how many employees engage with a benefit
• Utilization = how much of the allocated dollars are actually spent

A simple utilization formula looks like this:

Utilization rate = actual amount spent / total amount available

Example:

• $150,000 allocated for an annual wellness stipend (500 employees × $300 per year)
• $98,000 reimbursed to employees
• $98,000 / $150,000 = 65% utilization

This means employees used 65% of the dollars the company set aside for wellness.

Utilization can also be seasonal or situational. You might find that:

• Wellness categories are consistently used more than narrower perks like tuition reimbursement because they support a wider range of employees.
• Caregiving or family support categories see higher usage during specific seasons.
• Food or commuter categories rise during return-to-office periods.
  • CFO summary: Category spend shows what employees value and how benefits support real-life needs.

Where to find utilization data:

• Manual category tagging
• HRIS exports
• Compt’s Stipend Usage Month Over Month report, which provides a quick snapshot of trends

Once you have participation and utilization, Finance will usually ask for the harder question: what business outcomes do these benefits influence?

5. Business outcomes

Beyond sentiment and usage data, Finance typically looks for signals tied to business performance. Lifestyle benefits can influence outcomes such as absenteeism, retention and turnover, productivity, and performance indicators, but it is important to treat these as directional, not purely attributable.

Start by pulling business metrics you likely already track, including:

• Absenteeism trends
• Turnover and retention rates
• Performance and pulse survey results
• One-on-one manager feedback and recurring performance review themes
• Team-level productivity indicators your organization already uses

The goal is not to claim a single benefit caused a specific outcome. Instead, connect the dots between usage, employee feedback, and directional movement in the metrics that matter to your business.

Directional patterns HR teams sometimes observe:

• Customer Support turnover: 18% before launch → 12% after launch. 
• Engineering turnover: 9% before launch → 6% after launch.
• Greatest improvements among caregivers and early career talent (demographic insights).
  • CFO summary: If retention improves among high-cost roles, replacement costs may decrease over time.*

*While these are great numbers to have available, keep in mind that some CFOs might consider them fuzzy math. Factors that can impact turnover vary widely, from improved manager training to greater clarity on company goals to the company simply performing better.

That said, even when benefits influence these outcomes, Finance still needs to understand whether the program is efficient relative to its cost. This is why participation, utilization, and cost efficiency should sit at the center of your ROI story.

Finally, layer in engagement data to add context: it helps explain why participation and outcomes may be moving.

6. Employee engagement

Employee engagement is one of the most common metrics leaders review when evaluating benefits, but it is best used as supporting evidence rather than the foundation of your ROI story. Engagement data can strengthen your narrative when it aligns with participation, utilization, and cost efficiency trends.

Here’s a simple way to measure it:

• Pull a baseline engagement score from your HRIS or quarterly employee surveys (e.g., eNPS).
• Add a simple pulse-check question to your next survey (e.g., “Do you feel supported by our fringe/discretionary/perks benefits?”).
• Compare before-and-after results following the launch of your LSA.
• Look for trends across teams or demographics.
• Review related metrics, such as retention and turnover rates, and use exit feedback to understand what’s driving employee departures. 

If you see an engagement lift after launching a lifestyle stipend or LSA, call it out as a corroborating signal — especially when it matches what you see in participation and utilization.

What an engagement shift may look like:

• Pulse survey question: “Do you feel supported by our benefits?”
  • Pre-LSA responses: 46% yes
  • Six months after launch: 72% yes
    • CFO summary: Higher engagement signals stronger productivity, morale, and day-to-day performance.

Of course, you can track any of these metrics manually in Excel, but you can save a tremendous amount of admin time and headaches by simplifying these processes in a single system like Compt. 

Curious about how to use this type of data to evaluate the effectiveness of your benefits? Check out the Compt guide, “When to Reevaluate Your Employee Benefits: 6 Signs Your Program Needs a Refresh.”

Which benefit categories see the highest ROI?

The employee benefits categories that see the highest ROI are those that combine broad participation, predictable spend, and measurable operational efficiency.

In Compt’s 2026 benchmark data, all-inclusive LSAs reached 91%+ participation across customer programs — significantly higher than most single-category vendor perks.

Not all employee benefits deliver the same measurable impact. Some categories consistently outperform others by driving higher participation, more efficient spend, and clearer links to business outcomes. These high-ROI categories have one thing in common: they support real-life needs, not one-size-fits-all perks.

Learn more in our:

• What Is a Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA)? 2026 Employee Benefits Guide
• Ultimate List of Employee Stipend Statistics (2026): Adoption, Funding, Participation, and Usage
• 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report

Why these categories outperform one-size-fits-all vendors

High-ROI benefits categories tend to share three traits:

1. Flexibility: More employees can use them.
2. Relevance: They solve immediate, real-life needs.
3. Ease of use: Low friction makes participation more likely.

Because no two employees are the same, flexible lifestyle benefits tend to deliver stronger and more measurable ROI than narrow, vendor-based perks.

From a Finance perspective, these categories outperform others because they reduce waste, consolidate vendors, and make participation and spend easy to track.

When low usage signals it’s time to consolidate perks

Utilization data doesn’t just show what’s working — it also highlights when a benefits strategy needs to change. Low usage is one of the clearest indicators that it’s time to move toward a unified LSA or multicategory stipend. When employees barely touch their perks, it often signals a deeper disconnect between benefits design and employee needs.

What low usage usually means:

• Misalignment: The perk doesn’t reflect employee needs or values.
• Waste: Dollars sit unused quarter after quarter.
• Platform fatigue: Too many tools and hoops to jump through.
• Admin drag: HR maintains multiple vendors with limited impact.
• Opaque data: Finance lacks clear visibility into usage and spend.

By centralizing all lifestyle perks into one predictable line item, HR can reduce waste and simplify its benefits structure. According to Compt’s 2026 Annual Benchmark Report, 64% of companies now offer all-inclusive LSAs for these reasons: to reduce vendor sprawl, increase utilization, and simplify reporting.

With this model, usage rises (Compt customers average 91%+ participation), spend becomes more predictable, and Finance gains a more centralized view of participation, investment, and category-level usage.

How Compt makes employee benefits ROI easier to see

Measuring employee benefits ROI can be simple. When you focus on the fundamentals like cost efficiency, competitive positioning, participation, utilization, business impact, and engagement, you get a clear view of what is working and what employees genuinely value. 

LSAs naturally make participation and cost efficiency easier to track. Compt simplifies this further by centralizing reporting, reducing manual work, and improving visibility into how employees use their stipends. HR leaders can then use platform insights (such as participation, category-level usage, and the simple fact of having all your lifestyle benefits in one place) to support ROI conversations with Finance.

Ready to see how this looks in practice? Request a Compt demo today.

FAQs: ROI of lifestyle benefits and discretionary perks 

Below are the most common questions CFOs and HR leaders ask when evaluating employee benefits ROI.

The post How to Measure Employee Benefits ROI: Advice From 5 HR and Total Rewards Leaders appeared first on COMPT.

Written by Turiya Gray

Turiya Gray is a dynamic HR executive with 20+ years of experience building workplaces where people and performance actually thrive. Turiya is obsessed with making work better for everyone and known for her sharp insights, impactful leadership, and passion for helping organizations get people and culture right. She is also the cohost of the top-rated HR unConfidential podcast that launched in 2018. Currently, Turiya serves as Senior Partner & Fractional Chief People Officer at FXG Partners, partnering with midsize companies to deliver thoughtful, high-impact HR leadership.

Connect with Turiya on LinkedIn.

I’m sure many of my HR friends remember what was happening in the workplace in summer 2021: COVID uncertainty, remote-work fatigue, burnout everywhere. Employee well-being had officially shifted from “nice to have” to “business critical,” and the Great Resignation was prompting every company to rethink how they attracted, retained, and meaningfully supported their people.

I stepped into the Chief People Officer role at a 300-person HR technology software firm in the midst of this “unprecedented time” with all things Total Rewards at the top of my priority list. While our long-term work included building a clear rewards philosophy, modernizing compensation, and evolving benefits, I quickly realized we had a more immediate opportunity: our employee perks.

Like many companies, we offered perks that were well-intentioned but we questioned whether they were the right investments for our people. So instead of tweaking around the edges, we chose to start fresh by grounding everything in empathy, strategy, and real data.

Starting where every good HR project starts: with the truth

Before we could introduce anything new, we needed an unfiltered view of what already existed. Too often, HR teams jump straight to solutions, but without the truth, you end up solving the wrong problem.

We began by mapping our current perks ecosystem end-to-end to better understand what we offered, who actually used it, what it cost, and how easy (or not) it was to administer. We discovered that many of our current perks were underutilized, misaligned, or simply too complicated to be worth the effort.

This data told us what was happening, but now we needed to know why. So we went straight to the source, our employees, to get their feedback and help on shaping the path forward. 

Our incredible People Ops Director at the time led a companywide perks survey asking employees what they valued, what they could live without, and what they wished we offered. We also sat down with our ERGs to better understand unique needs across identities and lived experiences, because “one-size-fits-all” never actually fits anyone.

Within weeks, we had a clearer picture of what mattered most to our employees. They wanted perks that offered flexibility, aligned with their actual lives, and were clear and accessible.

Building something better — and more human

Armed with these insights from employees, we set out to rebuild a perks program that truly worked for our people and for the business. 

Our goal was simple but ambitious: design a program that reflected our values, aligned with our newly crafted Total Rewards philosophy, supported diverse needs, and could scale alongside the company. Equally important? It had to be much easier for our Benefits Manager to administer (more on this below!).

Here’s where we landed:

• We evolved some existing perks. Our home-office stipend was revamped, we added tuition reimbursement to our learning and development stipend, and we expanded our family planning support and family concierge services. We also expanded our gender-affirming care stipend to better meet the needs of eligible employees.
• We offered some new options. We introduced a wellness/fitness stipend and a therapy stipend. One key learning was that having a standalone therapy stipend was important to our employees. Culturally, it sent a message that employees wouldn’t have to choose between using the wellness stipend for a gym membership or therapy — they could do both. Operationally, it mitigated potential barriers to access to mental health support for employees who wanted to reduce their out-of-pocket costs.
• We thought beyond the stipends. In addition to financial-based stipends, the feedback from employees elevated a need for more holistic well-being support. We introduced monthly self-care days and no-meeting Fridays as a starting point to address some of the things that were impacting employee productivity and morale.

After crunching the numbers and securing buy-in from other execs, it was time to put our new program into action. This included the critical step of solving for ease of use and administration.

Enter Compt — our secret weapon

Designing the right perks program was only half the challenge. The other half that every HR leader knows all too well is making sure the program could actually run without burning out our People team and confusing employees.

Our Benefits Manager was (and still is) an absolute rockstar: service-oriented, committed to a top-notch employee experience, and has never met a challenge she wouldn’t tackle head-on. However, she had too many manual tasks to manage. Things like verifying receipts, untangling spreadsheets, and chasing the never-ending “Where do I submit this?” questions were taking up a lot of her time. 

We needed a way to administer the perks program that was flexible, compliant, easy for employees to navigate, and met the needs of our program administrators and friends in Finance. This is where Compt was a lifesaver!

After researching a few tools, we landed on Compt because it offered exactly what we needed: an employee lifestyle benefits platform that allowed us to:

• Set up multiple stipends, each with its own amount, cadence, and eligibility criteria.
• Vastly improve the employee experience with visibility into exactly what was available to them, what they’d submitted throughout the year, and balances they should be sure to use before any cut-off dates. It also created a smooth submission process — no more hunting for forms!
• Ensure compliance and protect employee privacy, especially for sensitive categories like mental health.
• Easily track real-time utilization (with some amazing, detailed reports) so we could monitor the effectiveness of our new program on an ongoing basis.
• Provide our Finance friends visibility into utilization and spend so budgets can be monitored and updated accordingly.
• Eliminate manual approvals with automated workflows that would scale with us as the company grew.

The outcome? Employees loved the flexibility. Finance appreciated the accuracy and transparency. Our Benefits Manager loved the administrative simplicity and the tons of time she got back!

Compt helped us take a human-centered perks strategy and operationalize it in a modern, scalable, data-driven way. It was the right strategy and the right system working together.

What I learned

Rebuilding a perks program in the midst of workplace disruption confirmed for me the power of human-centered design and that companies should do their best to meet people where they are. When you strip away assumptions and actually listen, employees will tell you exactly what they need. When you pair that insight with flexible, well-designed, well-administered programs, the results are undeniable.

Companies and HR/Total Rewards leaders are navigating rising costs (e.g., healthcare and other operational costs), which means every investment has to be the right one. Perks can’t be viewed as just the “extras” off to the side that go unmanaged and unmonitored until it’s time to cut costs. They must be strategic and responsive to your unique business and employee needs in a way that strengthens trust, culture, and performance.

If you’re rethinking how to design perks that actually work for your people and your HR team, request a demo to see how Compt makes flexible, human-centered benefits easy to run.

Want more customer input? View all of Compt’s case studies.

The post Why I Chose Compt for Our Employee Perks Program appeared first on COMPT.

Equity isn’t about giving everyone access to the same exact thing — that’s equality. Rather, equity is about giving each individual what they need to succeed and grow.

On paper, one-size-fits-all professional development programs can look efficient. In practice, they rarely deliver meaningful value for most employees. A single course, platform, or program rolled out across an entire department assumes people start from the same place, have the same goals, and learn in the same way. They don’t.

Employees bring different backgrounds, roles, lived experiences, and constraints to work. Equitable professional development recognizes that reality and takes a more flexible approach, one that allows people to shape their learning around their responsibilities, learning styles, and circumstances.

What are the barriers to equitable professional development?

Designing flexible professional development programs is difficult, even for well-resourced HR teams.

Most programs are built from internal perspective. That’s not because HR leaders want to limit access, but rather because time and budget constraints push teams to design around what they already know. The result is often a generic offering that reflects a narrow slice of the workforce rather than the full range of employee needs.

Uniform professional development programs also struggle because they ignore where employees are starting from. Some employees are early in their careers and need foundational skills. Others are deep specialists who need advanced or role-specific learning. When everyone is pushed through the same program, the result — uneven outcomes, which can unintentionally widen skill gaps — falls short of efficiency.

Designing programs that intentionally account for different starting points, learning needs, and lived experiences takes expertise that many teams don’t have in-house. And external support comes at a cost: HR consulting rates commonly range from about $44 to $300 per hour, which makes deeper program design inaccessible for many organizations.

Time pressure makes this even harder. HR teams are rarely asked to slow down and design thoughtfully. Instead, they’re asked to respond to immediate needs, fix what’s broken, and keep the business moving. In that environment, it’s far easier to deploy a single program that works “well enough” than to pause and build something more equitable, even when leaders know the trade-offs.

Flexibility is the key to equitable professional development.

The common thread across these challenges is control over decision-making.

Traditional professional development programs require HR to anticipate what employees need in advance. That expectation breaks down quickly in modern organizations because roles tend to evolve, teams often scale unevenly, and employees all face different constraints outside of work.

Flexibility changes the design problem. Instead of asking employers to predict every learning need, it gives employees shared power to shape their own development within clear boundaries.

This is why professional development stipends have become more common, especially among growing companies. A stipend creates room for choice while keeping your budget defined and predictable.

But equity requires more than just allocating dollars. Employees also need systems that make it easy to find learning options, request approval, and receive reimbursement without friction.

Our Professional Development Pro™ platform gives employers multiple ways to structure learning programs, depending on how much flexibility and oversight they want to provide. That usually means configuring a program around a few core mechanics:

• Allocate a fixed professional development budget per employee or per team.
• Define eligible spending categories such as courses, certifications, AI tools and programs, coaching, or conferences.
• Review learning requests on a case-by-case basis or automate approvals using policy rules.
• Deliver reimbursements directly through payroll for a consistent employee experience.

For employees, this creates a self-serve environment where learning is something they actively design, not something assigned to them. For HR and finance, it keeps professional development spend visible, auditable, and scalable.

Equitable professional development is an accessibility issue.

Flexibility in professional development is often framed as a matter of preference. In practice, it’s frequently an accessibility issue.

Employees don’t all learn in the same ways. Some people struggle with audio-heavy content and retain information better through reading. Others have difficulty processing dense text and learn more effectively through video or interactive formats. When a program supports only one learning mode, it can unintentionally exclude employees who can’t engage with it effectively.

For employees with disabilities, these barriers have measurable consequences. As of 2024, the employment rate for people with disabilities was 42.8% lower than for people without disabilities. Median annual earnings were also more than $12,000 lower. Limited access to learning environments that support different cognitive and physical needs contributes to those gaps over time.

Equitable professional development helps reduce these barriers by allowing employees to choose learning formats and environments that work for them. That flexibility can directly affect whether employees are able to build skills, advance in their careers, and remain in the workforce.

Importantly, accessibility benefits more than employees who identify as disabled. Many employees experience temporary or situational constraints related to health, caregiving responsibilities, or workload. Programs designed with accessibility in mind tend to serve a much broader population.

Flexible professional development budgets also support leadership growth.

Equitable professional development isn’t only about entry-level or mid-career employees.

Senior leaders often struggle to find value in standardized learning programs. Generic courses rarely reflect the challenges they face, and time constraints limit their ability to engage with long-form training.

A flexible professional development budget allows leaders to invest in learning that fits their roles, such as executive coaching, peer communities, or industry-specific forums. These experiences often deliver more immediate and relevant value than traditional coursework.

This approach works well for Compt customer TEN7, which offers a $3,600 professional coaching stipend for its leadership team. The stipend is funded on each employee’s work anniversary and allows leaders to select coaching aligned with their responsibilities and growth goals.

Professional development works best when flexible benefits work together.

Professional development alone is rarely enough to drive performance.

Sometimes employees struggle because they lack specific skills or training. Other times, performance issues stem from stress, burnout, caregiving demands, or inadequate work environments. Rigid professional development programs do not account for those realities and can unintentionally penalize employees who need additional support.

Flexible benefits help close that gap.

Lifestyle Spending Accounts and similar stipend-based benefits give employees access to resources that support learning indirectly by supporting their overall well-being. Common categories include:

• Wellness support, which helps employees manage stress and maintain the focus needed to learn effectively.
• Family support, which reduces disruptions related to childcare or elder care that may interfere with development opportunities.
• Technology benefits, which remove physical and digital barriers to performance and learning.

Compt helps employers like you offer benefits across these and other categories such as equipment and uniforms, remote-work support, travel expenses, and meal allowances. When employees experience greater stability and support, they are better positioned to engage in professional development and apply what they learn.

Over time, this creates a reinforcing cycle. Better support leads to better learning. Better learning leads to stronger performance and retention. Stronger outcomes increase the return on professional development investment.

How to set up an equitable professional development program with Compt

Equitable professional development doesn’t come from picking the “right” course catalog. It comes from how you structure choice, guardrails, and support.

Here’s a look at how it works with Compt:

Put equitable professional development into practice with Compt.

Equitable professional development is not about offering more programs. It is about offering better ones.

When employees are given both resources and agency, learning becomes more inclusive and more effective. Flexible professional development programs recognize that growth is not linear and that support needs change over time.

The more voice employees have in shaping their development, the more equitable and impactful the outcomes become. Flexibility transforms one-size-fits-all professional development into a system that treats employees as whole people and helps organizations get more value from their investment.

Ready to get started? Explore how Compt helps teams design flexible, compliant professional development programs that meet employees where they are today.

FAQs: Equitable professional development

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