Gartner’s recent CFO survey found that roughly eight in 10 plan to trim OpEx between 1-5% in 2026. They need to find those savings somewhere, and benefits are an obvious target because they’re ultra-visible and scale with headcount.

But employees also want more benefits — family care in particular. 81% of employees told BenefitsPRO they’re more likely to stay with an employer that offers caregiving benefits, and 73% said it would influence a new job decision.

The catch is that “family care” is not one problem with one solution. Aging parents, fertility treatments, childcare … it means something different to everyone. And adding a separate vendor for each one would be hard to justify if Finance already wants to cut costs.

The good news is, it’s possible to sidestep this problem altogether. Most of those perks can fold into a broader Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA), which only requires one budget and admin layer, and is flexible enough to cover the rest of your lifestyle benefits as well.

Today’s guide shows you how to offer family care employee benefits without creating another expense category.

Why family care benefits are becoming a retention issue

Family care is a concern that’s hitting almost every demographic in your workforce at once.

• The workforce (and population) is aging fast. As of 2022, nearly a quarter of workers were 55 or older, compared to just 10% in 1994, and employees 65+ have more than doubled over the last two decades. Elder care is no longer an edge case.
• Gen Z and Millennials are in peak family-forming years. So childcare and fertility support are top of mind for a huge chunk of your younger workforce at the same time.
• The financial weight of caregiving is tremendous. Working caregivers spend an average of $7,242 out of pocket every year on caregiving costs. And parents spend 9-16% of their total household income on full-day care per child.
• Costs are only increasing. They’re up 22% from just half a decade ago.
• You can’t always plan for caregiving responsibilities. And when they collide with work, employees become less productive, cut their hours, turn down promotions, or simply quit.

HR and People Ops already know your benefits strategy is one of the biggest levers when it comes to talent sourcing and retention. And family care is one of the largest recurring expenses for a significant portion of the workforce, so helping with it has an outsized impact.

Yet, in our 2026 Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmarking Report, only 4% of customers offer exclusive family and caregiving stipends.

But the retention math is what gets CFOs to pay attention. When someone does leave, SHRM estimates replacement costs at 50–200% of that employee’s salary once you factor in recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity, and ramp time.

TL;DR: What you spend on family care benefits will almost always cost less than what you spend replacing the people who left because you didn’t offer them.

Point solutions make family care benefits admin harder.

The instinct when employees ask for family care support is to go find a vendor that solves that specific problem. That makes sense in the moment, but creates problems once you scale multiple vendors across a team of hundreds.

Three platforms, three contracts, three admin logins

Fertility benefit, childcare stipend platform, elder care EAP add-on. That’s three separate renewal cycles, utilization reports, and vendor relationships HR has to manage on top of everything else.

Budget creep is worse if you’re fronting the money.

Debit card–based card models require employers to load funds upfront before employees spend them. Unused balances, timing mismatches, and low utilization mean you’re carrying costs that don’t reflect actual usage.

Disparate systems create tax reporting headaches.

Each platform tracks its category spend independently, which means taxable and nontaxable benefits must be reconciled across multiple systems at year-end. This increases the risk of reporting errors and manual cleanup for Finance.

Point solutions are hard to sunset.

Mid-contract exits usually result in penalties or renegotiation, and pulling a benefit that even a small group of employees depends on creates morale damage that’s going to be hard to walk back.

Well then … how do employers support caregivers without overcommitting to high-cost, low-utilization point solutions?

LSAs. That’s how.

How LSAs solve the family care problem (without adding to your stack)

If you’re planning fertility, childcare, and/or caregiver benefits, you can fold those into a broader Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA) instead of adding separate vendors.

An LSA is an employer-funded allowance employees can spend across a defined list of eligible categories. Instead of managing a fertility vendor, childcare platform, and elder care EAP separately, you define one allotment and let employees use it for their personal circumstances.

And that’s just the family care side. The same account can absorb other lifestyle categories you’re already funding, such as fitness, professional development, mental wellness, financial coaching, and home office equipment (which is where the real consolidation value kicks in).

One budget, with no surprise utilization spikes

LSAs run on a monthly, quarterly, or annual allotment model. You set the amount per employee, and that’s your ceiling. It becomes your annual cost boundary.

Single admin layer for everything

Instead of managing multiple vendor portals, renewal cycles, and utilization reports, everything runs through that one platform. HR sets the eligible categories, funds the accounts, and the software simplifies expense verification, receipt review, reimbursements, and tax reporting.

(This is why companies offering LSAs through Compt typically spend just 30 minutes per month on admin.)

Employees choose what matters to them

This part solves the “spending more” problem.

• A team member with young kids may use their entire LSA allotment on childcare.
• Someone without caregiving responsibilities might instead put that money toward a gym membership, meditation app, groceries, or all three.

The benefit cost is the same either way, but utilization is naturally distributed across your whole workforce instead of concentrated in one high-cost category.

You’re not paying for a fertility benefit that only 5% of employees use. You’re funding an allotment that 100% of employees can use for whatever fits their life.

Admin simplicity scales as you grow

Point solutions get harder to manage as headcount grows because you have more seats, more contracts, and more renewals to deal with. An LSA scales cleanly; you add employees, you fund their allotments, and the structure stays the same.

LSAs complement FSAs, DCFSAs, and medical benefits.

This is worth being explicit about. LSAs are post-tax, employer-funded accounts with no IRS contribution limits, which gives them flexibility that FSAs and DCFSAs don’t have, but also means they don’t carry the same tax advantages. 

• A Dependent Care FSA still lets employees set aside pre-tax dollars for childcare up to the IRS limit of $5,000. 
• Medical FSAs still cover qualified medical expenses with pre-tax contributions.

An LSA sits alongside those programs and covers the expenses that fall outside IRS-qualified categories, as well as those for employees who’ve maxed their FSA and still have caregiving costs.

For a deeper dive into how childcare stipends work and how they’re taxed, see “The Ultimate Guide to Childcare Stipends for Employees.”

Which family care expenses are typically eligible under an LSA?

Eligibility varies by employer, but most LSA programs that include a family care category will cover some combination of the following:

Fertility and family planning

• Fertility treatments and IVF cycles
• Egg and sperm freezing
• Adoption fees and legal costs
• Surrogacy expenses

Childcare and dependent support

• Daycare and childcare center fees
• In-home childcare and nanny costs
• After-school programs
• Tutoring and educational support
• Summer camps and enrichment programs
• Baby gear and infant essentials

Elder and adult dependent care

• Elder care and in-home caregiver costs
• Adult day programs
• Memory care support
• Assisted living costs
• Patient advocacy services
• Caregiver travel and transportation
• Respite care for family caregivers

Because LSAs aren’t governed by IRS eligibility rules the way FSAs and DCAs are, employers define what’s in and what’s out. You can tailor the eligible categories to reflect what your workforce actually needs.

And because it is an LSA, you can add any one or more of the following categories:

• Wellness
• Professional development
• Food
• Tuition reimbursement
• Remote work office equipment
• And several others!

Tax treatment of common family care employee benefits

Tax treatment varies a lot depending on which family care benefit type you’re dealing with and how you choose to offer it.

Let’s have a look at the main ones.

Childcare: Dependent Care FSA

Employees can contribute up to $5,000 pre-tax per household annually through a DCFSA. This covers daycare, after-school programs, and in-home care for dependents under 13. Employer contributions count toward that same $5,000 cap.

You can find the full list of eligible expenses on the FSAFEDS website.

Fertility: Medical FSA (but it gets complicated)

Under a medical FSA, employees can contribute up to $3,400 to cover qualified medical expenses. If you have been diagnosed as infertile and want to begin an immediate treatment cycle, some fertility expenses qualify as medical under IRS rules:

• IVF
• Prescribed meds
• Diagnostic tests
• Temporary egg storage
• Support surgeries
• Support services
• Travel expenses

But egg freezing for non-medical reasons, surrogacy, and long-term preservation aren’t covered, and donor expenses are evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Elder care: Dependent Care FSA

Same DCFSA as childcare, same $5,000 household limit, shared across both. Team members carrying elder care AND childcare responsibilities are splitting one ceiling, which means the funds run out faster.

LSAs: Post-tax, no IRS restrictions

Again, LSA contributions are taxable income to the employee. They have no contribution limits, qualifying expense lists, or use-it-or-lose-it rules.

If you already offer an FSA and/or DCFSA, employees who need extra money for childcare costs can use it for that. And those who don’t can use it across 10+ other categories. And because all categories run through a single reimbursement workflow, taxable coding and reporting are centralized instead of split across multiple vendors.

How to design a cost-neutral family care benefits program with an LSA

Chances are, Finance doesn’t want a bigger benefits program. Your #1 goal as an HR or People Ops leader is to restructure what you’re already spending to incorporate family care employee benefits.

To win on family care benefits, you don’t have to spend more.

You just have to structure what you’re already spending in a smarter way.

How you offer family care employee benefits is a structural decision. One budget, flexible enough to cover fertility, childcare, elder care, and the rest of your lifestyle benefits stack — with predictable costs, less admin, and higher utilization across the board.

That’s what Compt is built for. One platform where HR defines the categories, employees submit expenses through a single workflow, and Finance has real-time visibility into participation, utilization, and taxable reporting. No additional vendors. No manual reconciliation. Just one predictable, scalable structure.

Request a Compt demo today and see for yourself.

FAQs: Family care employee benefits

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 How to Offer Family Care Employee Benefits (Without Spending More Money) appeared first on COMPT.

On the surface, it makes sense. You already have:

• Payroll
• An expense-management tool
• A helpful HR team ready to jump in and manage it

So why not repurpose what already exists?

Because what seems like a quick, cost-saving shortcut almost always becomes a slow leak of cross-departmental time, data accuracy, and employee trust.

Below, we’ll walk through the three most common “keep it in-house” paths we’ve seen, the hidden costs they create, and the ripple effects they cause over time.

What LSA providers actually do

Before we get into the hidden costs of managing stipends in-house, let’s define what Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA) providers actually are — and why they exist.

What is an LSA provider?

An LSA provider is a benefits platform that helps you design, fund, and manage a Lifestyle Spending Account program.

LSAs are employer-funded, post-tax accounts that employees can use for things like wellness, family support, remote work, commuting, and professional development — within the guardrails you define.

Instead of locking employees into a single gym membership or a rigid perks marketplace, LSAs give them a flexible stipend budget and a menu of eligible categories to choose from.

Common examples include:

• Health and wellness: gyms, fitness apps, nutrition support, wearables, equipment
• Family and caregiving: childcare, elder care, fertility support, pet care
• Remote work: office furniture, tech, internet
• Professional development: courses, conferences, certifications, AI subscriptions
• Lifestyle and well-being: hobbies, travel, mental health apps, or financial wellness tools

What LSA providers handle

An LSA provider takes care of the messy middle — everything that’s complex or risky to manage manually:

• Building the categories and eligibility rules
• Powering reimbursements or card-based spending
• Handling taxability logic and payroll/finance exports
• Providing reporting for HR and Finance to track usage and ROI
• Supporting employees when they have questions about what qualifies

DIY vs. using an LSA provider

You can absolutely try to DIY an LSA. Many companies start with:

• A Google Sheet, Excel doc, or HRIS note to track each employee’s balance
• Expense reports or inboxes full of questions and receipts
• Manual tax coding for every individual reimbursement

That works — for a minute. Then:

• Admin time expands as participation goes up.
• Inconsistent decisions make equity and compliance tricky.
• Finance loses clean visibility into spend, liability, and taxes.

LSA providers exist to centralize and automate those workflows so your team doesn’t have to.

They bring together:

• Design: categories, eligibility, and budgets
• Execution: how employees spend and submit
• Compliance: tax logic aligned to IRS rules where applicable
• Insights: adoption, category usage, and team spend over time

In other words, the right LSA partner lets you offer modern, personalized benefits without turning your HR and Finance teams into full-time stipend accountants.

Three options for “keeping it in-house”

Now that we’ve covered what an LSA provider actually does, let’s look at what happens when companies try to manage stipends internally.

In nearly every organization, this takes one of three forms:

1. Tracking everything manually in spreadsheets. 
2. Using an existing expense-management tool to handle reimbursements.
3. Adding the stipend directly to paychecks.

These options seem reasonable at first glance — but each one hides real costs, risks, and ripple effects that compound over time.

Option 1: Tracking stipends manually (spreadsheets, email, Slack)

At first, spreadsheets seem simple. One column for employee names. One for stipend amounts. One for reimbursements. And another for remaining balances.

However, over time, they become an operational burden on HR and Finance and a second job for whoever is “owning” the program.

The 5 hidden costs of manual tracking

Hidden cost 1: Admin hours increase (and rarely decrease).

The amount of time it takes to manage a program manually at launch is often the least amount of time a person will ever spend managing a program. 

That said, it’s because the program is new and unused, and every data column works (or should work) perfectly.

But the reality is that as more people use your program, it begins to increase in complexity, and thus effort.

Let’s look at an example. For a 250-person company offering a $500 annual wellness stipend:

• 250 employees × 12 submissions/year × 10 minutes to review and log each = 500 admin hours per year

At a conservative $40/hour blended HR/Finance rate, that’s $20,000 per year spent on required actions like:

• Reviewing receipts for accuracy
• Checking eligibility
• Adding reimbursements through payroll
• Updating spreadsheet balances
• Emailing Finance and employees

​​That’s the equivalent of more than three full work months of effort — just to process a stipend program manually.

It doesn’t include the time employees spend chasing approvals or asking, “Did my reimbursement go through?”

And it also doesn’t include the time it takes to ensure that every bit of dollar and cents is accurately added, communicated, and reimbursed in a timely manner.

Some questions for you to consider with this path would be:

• Are you planning to reimburse people immediately, or on a specific pay cycle?
• How will you handle the program if the person managing it is OOO for vacation or an emergency?
• Will you rerun payroll for late submissions or hold them for the next cycle?
• What will you do if any numbers are transposed inaccurately? Will you adjust their balance? If they were overpaid, will you request the funds back? And what will this do to the program and HR’s credibility?

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: HR and Finance lose multiple hours each week to low-value admin work.
• After one year: That “just a few hours a week” turns into dozens of lost strategy days. Projects that help retention, recruiting, employer brand, or culture get delayed because stipends need reconciling.
• After a few years: The program is either abandoned (“too much work”) or continues along in a half-broken state that nobody wants to manage.

Hidden cost 2: Compliance becomes a continual guessing game.

Without automation, someone has to decide line by line:

• What is taxable vs. nontaxable
• Which IRS rules apply (e.g., certain education or remote-work expenses)
• What needs to be reported through payroll
• Where to put receipts (in the event of an audit)

Every row in the spreadsheet becomes a mini tax decision.

Here’s a thought exercise:

Imagine 250 employees submit four stipend expenses each per year = 1,000 transactions. If even 5% of those need special handling, that’s 50 cases in which HR or Finance must stop, research, and decide how to treat the expense. 

Each of those 50 decisions has to be documented, explained, and retrievable, ideally with receipts and policy context attached, to satisfy IRS accountable-plan requirements.

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: HR/Finance feel a low-level anxiety: “Are we sure we did this right?”
• After one year: You’re carrying unresolved risk, and small errors in coding add up to under- or over-withholding that surfaces at year-end.
• After a few years: If you’re audited or need to restate something, it’s challenging to defend every line item from a patchwork of old spreadsheets, emails, and Slack messages.

Hidden cost 3: Errors compound quickly.

Spreadsheets are fragile, and it’s too easy for one small mistake to create a breakdown in the data:

• Someone drags a formula down incorrectly.
• A row gets overwritten.
• A column is sorted without including all data.

Prior to joining Compt, one customer told us that a single typo doubled an employee’s reimbursement amount — unnoticed until payroll reconciliation. Fixing it meant:

• Reversing the overpayment
• Rerunning payroll
• Communicating the mistake to the employee
• Updating multiple internal records

Now extend that to hundreds of entries across multiple programs.

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: You spend time firefighting individual issues (e.g., fixing balances, communicating with confused or upset employees).
• After one year: Employees start to assume the process is unreliable (“My coworker got paid, I didn’t” or “I was under-reimbursed”), and HR is perceived as disorganized.
• After a few years: Leadership starts to question whether stipends are “worth the hassle,” and the benefit is either cut or drastically scaled back — not because it was a bad idea, but because it was managed in a fragile way.

Hidden cost 4: Employees don’t have visibility, so they ask HR.

When stipends are tracked manually, employees usually can’t see important details of their lifestyle benefits program:

• Their current balance
• How much they’ve used
• Which purchases are eligible
• What’s been reimbursed (and what hasn’t)

So they ask HR. Frequently.

Every cycle brings a new round of messages:

• “How much do I have left?”
• “Is this item eligible?”
• “Can you resend the policy?”
• “When will I get reimbursed?”
• “How do I know if I’ve been reimbursed?”

Each question might take two minutes to answer. But with even 100 employees, that’s hours of time answering questions every month.

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: HR becomes the “human interface” for the stipend program.
• After one year: Your team spends meaningful time answering repeat questions instead of improving benefits, culture, or processes.
• After a few years: The stipend program has a reputation internally as “confusing” or “hard to use,” even if the budget is generous.

Hidden cost 5: Changes are challenging to make.

When you manage stipends manually, even small program changes create outsized administrative headaches.

Most HR teams launch a stipend program with the best intentions: a simple stipend, a set budget, and a clean spreadsheet.

But stipends are living benefits. Over time, leadership will want to adjust amounts, add categories, include global teams, or shift cadence from annual to quarterly to make the benefit more visible and meaningful.

That’s where manual programs begin to break, because every “small” tweak or program change creates a new layer of complexity that needs to be accounted for.

If you want to decrease a stipend during the year, many questions with complicated strategies arise, like:

• What do you do with employees who were already reimbursed for more than the new limit?
• Do you claw back funds or eat the overage?
• How do you ensure fairness across departments or regions?

Beyond that, adding new hires creates new math. Do you give them the full annual amount if they join in October? Or do you prorate based on start date, and if so, who’s manually tracking that and communicating it?

If you operate globally, the complexity multiplies. You now have to decide:

• Do all employees receive the same amount, or do you localize by cost of living or exchange rate?
• How will you track and convert reimbursements in multiple currencies?
• How do you ensure the tax treatment is correct in every country?

What looks like one line of policy text — “$500-per-year wellness stipend” — becomes a cacophony of exceptions, calculations, and decisions for every geography, hire date, and policy change.

And it becomes more challenging to adjust your program based on industry best practices. For example, Compt’s Annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark data shows that quarterly stipends are the most common funding cadence, likely because they drive the highest participation. It makes sense; they’re more memorable, create anticipation, and keep your company top of mind as a generous and supportive employer.

But when you’re managing manually, quarterly or monthly stipends are almost impossible to maintain. Each new period means resetting balances, reuploading data, and verifying who’s eligible again. As a result, most manual programs default to annual stipends, which sound easier but feel distant and forgettable to employees.

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: Program changes that should take minutes become multistep spreadsheet projects involving HR, Finance, and Payroll.
• After one year: Policy changes slow down or get delayed entirely because they feel too disruptive to manage. Employees miss out on evolving benefits that could have positive effects on their productivity, engagement, and happiness.
• After a few years: The program stagnates. What started as a flexible benefit becomes rigid and outdated, while other companies modernize and localize their offerings with ease.

Manual-tracking approach summary: what really happens over time

Option 2: Using expense-management software

If you already reimburse travel or office expenses, using that platform for stipends can sound efficient.

But the problem is that expense software is built for accounting controls, not benefit programs.

It would be like asking your CFO to DJ the company party. They could technically manage the playlist, but that’s not their expertise, and no one’s dancing. 

Expense tools are built for Finance to account for spend. Stipend tools are built for HR to create meaning with spend. Expense tools were made to enforce company spend policies, not create moments employees love.

The 5 hidden costs of using expense tools for stipends

Hidden cost 1: The tool is misaligned with the job.

Expense tools view purchases as liabilities: “You spent this on work, so we owe you money.”

Whereas, benefits need to feel like investments: “We care about you, and we’re funding your wellness / learning / family support.”

That difference matters in how employees behave.

• In an expense tool, stipends feel like work bureaucracy: forms, codes, approvals.
• As a benefit in a dedicated platform, stipends feel like support: clear categories, visible balances, simple submissions.

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: Employees treat stipends like any other expense report — and money that quickly becomes owed to them.
• After one year: Engagement is mediocre. Many people don’t bother, especially if they associate the tool with tedious work tasks.
• After a few years: Leadership may conclude “stipends don’t really move the needle,” when in reality the experience was wrong, not the concept.

Hidden cost 2: The tax trap for Finance

Expense-management tools generally assume that most reimbursements are nontaxable business expenses. 

They’re designed to track employees’ business travel, software costs, office supplies, and other company-related purchases.

Stipends are different:

• Many categories (e.g., wellness, family, general lifestyle) are taxable benefits that must be run through payroll.
• Some (like certain education or remote-work expenses) may fall under specific IRS sections.

Expense tools don’t usually handle those distinctions automatically, so Finance has to:

• Export stipend expenses from the tool.
• Determine which ones are taxable.
• Manually feed them into payroll or adjust general ledger (GL) entries.

A single missed taxable classification can snowball into hundreds of dollars in under-withholding per employee.

You can avoid this altogether by tightening the parameters of your program and only offering workstyle benefits like reimbursements for professional development, commuter expenses, or remote-work equipment, but then you’d miss out on creating a truly supportive program that makes your company a great place to work. 

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: Finance spends extra time manually reviewing and classifying stipend expenses.
• After one year: You have a messy mix of records across your expense tool, payroll, and GL, none of which fully agree.
• After a few years: If there’s an audit or leadership wants a clear view of benefit spend and tax treatment, Finance has to reconstruct history from multiple systems.

Hidden cost 3: Expense management software costs add up.

Most expense tools charge per active user, often in the range of $9-$25 per employee per month.

At 500 employees, that’s: $54,000-$150,000 per year in software licensing alone.

Before you even reimburse a single stipend dollar.

Then add:

• HR time configuring new categories
• Finance time reconciling reimbursements
• IT time managing permissions and integrations

What feels like “free” because you already have the tool quickly becomes more expensive than an LSA solution.

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: It seems like a smart way to avoid adding another vendor.
• After one year: You realize you’ve spent tens of thousands in licensing and internal time for something that still doesn’t quite fit.
• After a few years: You’re locked into a system that no one loves, and have fostered a belief that these benefits are owed to employees — making it harder to change.

Hidden cost 4: Reporting gaps decrease program visibility and impact.

Expense tools are great at telling you details like, “We spent $X this year on travel” or “We spent $Y on software.”

However, they’re not great at telling you:

• Which employees used their stipends (participation rates).
• What percentage of funds allocated are spent (utilization rates).
• Which categories are resonating (e.g., health vs. family vs. home office).
• Whether usage is equitable across locations, levels, and teams.

Without this visibility:

• HR and leadership can’t tell if the program is working.
• Finance can’t forecast accurately.
• Leadership can’t see clear ROI.

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: You get some high-level spend numbers, but not much insight.
  After one year: When someone asks about the impact of stipends, there’s no real story to tell.
• After a few years: Budget conversations become difficult. It’s easy for stipends to be cut when no one can clearly articulate their value. And again, it was the experience that was wrong, not the concept.

Hidden cost 5: Rigidity makes every change harder than it should be.

Expense systems are not designed for flexible, human-centric benefits. So changes like:

• Adding a new stipend category midyear
• Adjusting budgets by team or country
• Experimenting with a new benefit (e.g., AI tools, caregiving support)

… often require:

• New approval rules
• New coding requirements
• Help from the Finance team

In an LSA or stipend platform like Compt, HR can often make those changes in minutes.

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: You can technically “get something live” with your existing system.
• After one year: Your program is frozen in place because every small change is painful to implement.
• After a few years: Your benefits feel outdated compared to what other companies offer because your tools won’t support your new ideas or needs.

Expense-tool approach summary: what really happens over time

Option 3: Adding money to payroll

“We’re just going to add it to their paycheck,” is something we have heard many times before at Compt. Heck, some of the largest and most well-funded companies do it, so if it works for them — why wouldn’t it work for you?

And we get it. Of all the DIY methods, this one looks the easiest:

• Add $X to everyone’s paycheck.
• Call it a “wellness” or “learning” stipend.
• Move on.

No receipts. No extra software. No approvals. Hooray!

Unfortunately, this “simple” shortcut quietly breaks the purpose, compliance, and clarity of the program.

The 6 hidden costs of stipends added to paychecks

Hidden cost 1: You lose tax efficiency (and overpay payroll taxes).

This is one of the most important, and yet least obvious, costs companies overlook when choosing to go the paycheck route.

Once stipend funds are added to payroll, they’re treated as wages, which means:

• You lose eligibility for nontaxable exemptions (e.g., some education, remote work, equipment, and more under IRS rules).
• You pay payroll taxes (e.g., FICA, FUTA, SUTA) on dollars that might otherwise have been nontaxable.
• Employees pay additional taxes on stipends that would otherwise be nontaxable, too.
• Employees see smaller net pay because they’re paying taxes on nontaxable benefits.

Here’s an example:

Take a $500 annual work-from-home stipend. 

At 250 employees, that’s a cost of $125,000 for the year to fund this program. 

However, because this is going through a paycheck, the company will pay roughly 9% in employer payroll taxes (i.e., FICA, FUTA, and SUTA combined). This adds $11,250, making the benefit actually cost $136,250 total for the company.

And employees then pay about 20% in income and FICA taxes on that same amount, which means their take-home value drops from $500 to about $400 after taxes.

That’s roughly $137,500 a year combined in avoidable taxes — all for a benefit that could have been processed tax-free.

Using a tax-compliant platform like Compt eliminates that waste by treating those stipends correctly as reimbursements and ensures no one (not the employee nor the employer) is paying unnecessary taxes. 

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: You may not feel the difference, especially for taxable categories.
• After one year: Finance starts spending time reconciling which stipends should’ve been taxable and which could’ve been reimbursed tax-free.
• After a few years: You’ve overpaid thousands in unnecessary payroll taxes and lost the ability to demonstrate value or defend your benefits budget.

Hidden cost 2: 100% of funds are spent (and you’re never under budget).

When stipends are processed through payroll, they always will have 100% utilization. That means your company is always at the maximum amount of budget. 

Example:

Your 250-person company offers a $500 annual wellness stipend, which amounts to a $125,000 cost to the employer to fund these stipends.

Regardless of whether a person uses the “stipend” for its intended purpose, all $125,000 will be spent. Not a penny under budget, ever. 

And then this doesn’t account for the taxes, as mentioned above, which would add an additional $11,250. This totals $136,250 for the company.

That means:

• 100% of the stipend budget is spent, automatically, every cycle.
• 0% of that spend can ever be recaptured, even if employees don’t value or use the benefit.
• From a Finance perspective, it’s the equivalent of prepaying for zero insight.

By contrast, when stipends are managed through Compt, utilization depends entirely on how you design your program.

• Some stipends, like wellness, see 60% utilization. 
• Others (like education or professional development) might average 20-50%, depending on seasonality or access.
• You can design for flexibility — up to 100% utilization if desired — but you’ll never exceed your set budget. Unused funds simply stay unspent.

With payroll, every dollar leaves the account, whether it’s valued or not. With a stipend platform, you pay only when employees actually use the benefit.

Hidden cost 3: Payroll and budget models get distorted.

Payroll systems blend stipends into recurring wages, which can distort:

• Headcount cost modeling. It looks like base comp is higher than it is, complicating hiring and budgeting decisions.
• Bonus and merit planning. Stipend dollars may unintentionally factor into “total comp,” making it look like some employees are paid more than peers.
• Pay transparency reporting. In states or regions in which you must disclose pay ranges, stipends that are embedded in payroll can skew reported numbers.

Thought exercise:

Imagine you’re planning next year’s hiring budget. You pull average “fully loaded” salary data from your HRIS, but it includes stipend dollars as if they’re permanent compensation. You’re likely to:

• Overestimate what future hires will cost.
• Or reduce actual salary offers because the numbers look higher on paper.

Either way, the data is no longer clean.

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: No obvious problems — you don’t see the distortion yet.
• After one year: Finance and HR are making decisions from data that quietly mixes pay and perks.
• After a few years: It becomes difficult to untangle what’s actual salary vs. what was intended as a flexible, optional stipend.

Hidden cost 4: You lose visibility and control over data.

Payroll doesn’t track how employees use the funds. Once it’s cash, it’s indistinguishable from salary, which means you lose all visibility into the impact of these benefits. 

You lose the ability to answer:

• How much of this benefit is being used for its intended purpose?
• Are employees even aware of what this benefit was meant to support?
• Is it improving engagement, retention, or satisfaction in any measurable way?
• What’s the ROI of this spend compared to other benefits?

Several HR leaders told us that when stipends ran through payroll, they couldn’t show leadership any proof of value — only a higher payroll number.

Without usage data:

• Finance can’t defend the budget.
• HR can’t optimize the program.
• Executives can’t see or tell a story about impact.

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: You get the benefit of “simplicity,” but zero insight.
• After one year: When budgets tighten, stipends become a prime target for cuts because they’re invisible in terms of outcomes.
• After a few years: You’ve spent a meaningful amount of money with no way to prove whether it did anything for engagement, retention, inclusion, or other business outcomes that matter to you.

Hidden cost 5: Administrative “debt” accumulates in payroll.

Payroll-based stipends look “set and forget,” but they’re not:

• Changing amounts midyear requires payroll configuration and testing.
• Adding new categories (e.g., professional development, family, AI tools) means new codes or descriptions.
• Fixing withholding errors requires reruns and manual adjustments

Every tweak touches:

• HR (policy + communication)
• Finance (budget + approval)
• Payroll (system setup + processing)

What was supposed to be a simple benefit becomes a three-team mini project anytime something changes.

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: You can launch quickly, which feels great.
• After one year: You hesitate to evolve or improve the program because you know it requires payroll surgery.
• After a few years: Your stipend offering looks outdated, not because you lack ideas, but because it’s baked too deeply into payroll.

Hidden cost 6: Employees stop seeing it as a benefit.

When a stipend becomes just another line on a paycheck and employees don’t see a separate balance, there’s no visible reminder of what it’s for and the emotional signal (“We’re investing in your wellness / learning”) disappears. People often forget what they’re supposed to use it for.

In contrast, when you use a stipend vendor like Compt, your benefit will be top-of-mind for employees for them to use. And beyond that, you’ll have a significant, visible impact that is appreciated by everyone.

To further highlight this point, below we’ve included a few quotes from real Compt users (anonymized) about how their stipends are being used and appreciated:

• “My company’s Compt stipend helps me to make sure I always have time and money put aside for my health and well-being, regardless of pay.”
• “I actually bought the dishwasher and oven. I’ve been without an oven and stovetop for 4 years, and a dishwasher for 8 years.”
• “They help offset costs for unexpected needs and offer me the opportunity to enjoy life without the financial worry.”
• “They’ve allowed me to feel less guilt about paying for wellness and things that are a necessary part of my life.”
• “The benefits impacted me in a positive way by giving me something to look forward to, like a present to unwrap.”
• “I buy stuff for myself that I usually wouldn’t splurge on.”
• “While it seems like such an easy benefit to implement, it has a huge impact. Thanks.”
• “I’ve dreamed of having matching family PJs for Christmas, and I was able to make it a reality for our whole family!”

Ripple effect:

• Immediately: Nobody complains, because hey, money is money.
• After one year: No one ties the extra cash to your culture or values. It doesn’t improve health, productivity, or happiness; it just disappears into regular expenses.
• After a few years: If you remove it, people experience it as a pay cut, even though it was never meant to be a permanent salary adjustment.

Payroll-based approach summary: what really happens over time

The reality checklist: Are you actually saving money or time?

If you’re keeping stipends in-house, below are a few questions you can ask yourself to make sure that your plan truly is the right path for your company: 

• Do you know how many hours HR and Finance spend managing reimbursements each month?
• Can you prove stipend utilization, participation, and ROI to leadership? If not, how much does it matter to you today, or for the next budget cycle, or in the next five years?
• Are you certain your tax classifications would hold up in an audit?
• Are you over-taxing or under-withholding by treating everything as payroll?
• Do employees actually know what’s available to them, or has it disappeared into “somewhere in payroll” or a spreadsheet?
• If you needed to change categories or budgets tomorrow, how many systems and people would that touch? How hard or easy would it be to change things midyear?

If even one answer makes you pause, your “in-house” approach isn’t free — it’s costing you in time and taxes.

Beyond stipends: Grow into full-scale lifestyle benefits with Compt

Most Compt customers start with a single stipend (often wellness or lifestyle) and expand once they see the impact.

With the same platform, they add:

• Rewards & Recognition: Automate birthdays, anniversaries, and spot bonuses with proper tax classification.
• Professional Development Pro™: Manage tuition reimbursement and manager-approved learning budgets.
• Company Swag Store: A free branded swag + swag stipend store that handles ordering and shipping while letting employees choose what they actually want.

“Many of our customers begin with one stipend — and within months, they’re managing multiple programs in one place, from work-from-home budgets to spot bonuses.”

— Amy Spurling, CEO, Compt

Ready to simplify your stipend program? Request a Compt demo. 

The post Managing Employee Stipends In-House: Hidden Costs, Risks, and Better Alternatives appeared first on COMPT.

During my time at HubSpot, I co-created the HubSpot Academy division.

I helped build and scale education that trained millions of people around the world in a completely different way of working: inbound marketing. 

What made it unique was that we weren’t just training our customers. We were also training prospects, agency partners, students, and new employees inside HubSpot.

Our goal was to help people learn how to use the internet to grow their business.

And our challenge was behavior change at scale.

Today, HR teams are facing something eerily similar: AI is changing the rules. And from my conversations with HR executives, practitioners, L&D professionals, and more a general sentiment has popped up: most people have a general sense of the starting point of AI adoption through clear HR policies, they often don’t know where to go from there.

And I get it, why would they what’s expected since it’s still so new.

But the thing is, we’re also seeing is that AI usage is quickly becoming a baseline expectation inside companies.

A recent Gallup study found the number of employees using AI at work nearly doubled in two years, with weekly use jumping from 11% to 19%.

And while more people are using it, people are still unsure about its role in the future.

According to Ernst & Young, 71% of U.S. workers are concerned about AI in the workplace, and 75% fear tech-driven job loss. It’s what they’re calling “AI Anxiety.” So yes, there is enthusiasm, but there’s also real fear.

That’s where HR comes in.

This isn’t just an IT problem. This is a people opportunity. And we believe that HR is uniquely positioned to lead it.

Why HR? Because HR owns the employee experience. If people feel unsupported, afraid, or unprepared to engage with AI, the return on even the most ambitious tech investments will fall flat. Gartner and McKinsey both cite lack of employee readiness as a top blocker to AI success.

And enabling readiness isn’t new territory for HR, it’s what you already do.

AI enablement is ultimately a matter of change management, talent development, and psychological safety — all core HR competencies. You know how to help people grow, adapt, and feel safe while doing it. That’s why HR isn’t an adjacent player in this transition. You’re essential to making it work.

As Amy Spurling, Compt’s founder and CEO, put it:

“If AI is your biggest investment this year, your second should be helping your team adapt to it. AI is already reshaping work. Your benefits better help your people keep up or they’ll find an employer who does.”

To help companies adopt AI responsibly and successfully, HR teams need to master what we’re calling the AI Adoption Trifecta: three foundational pillars that make or break your organization’s AI adoption success. They’re simple and people-first.

Let’s break them down.

1. Clear policy → So employees know what’s encouraged, what’s off-limits, and how to use AI responsibly

Setting expectations builds confidence. And it reduces risk. Clear AI policies help employees:

• Understand when, where, and how they should use AI
• Know what’s prohibited (e.g., uploading confidential data into ChatGPT)
• Follow internal guardrails around data privacy, intellectual property, and bias mitigation

Good policy doesn’t mean restriction. It means clarity. It gives employees the psychological safety to try without fear of doing it “wrong.”

Need a place to start? Even a lightweight acceptable-use policy can help build guardrails. Encourage teams to treat AI like a powerful intern: useful, imperfect, and requiring fact-checking and human judgment.

2. Practical support → So people aren’t left guessing

As Kim Rohrer, longtime people leader, explains:

“The important thing is not just to give your employees money to spend on AI tools, but to help them understand ways to integrate it into their work. … Even deciding where to spend their budget might seem overwhelming or intimidating.”

Don’t assume your team knows how to start. Most don’t.

Support means more than a single training or a Slack channel of AI enthusiasts. It means:

• On-demand learning and trusted resources
• Encouraging experimentation with sandbox sessions
• Role-specific guidance and examples
• Making space to learn together

This is where L&D and HR shine. They create inclusive learning environments where people can safely build fluency, curiosity, and trust in new tools.

Or consider doing as a recent piece in HRD suggests:

“Consider creating AI champions within each department — employees who receive extended training and serve as peer mentors during the transition. These champions can provide real-time support and feedback, making the learning process more collaborative and less intimidating. 

The investment in training pays dividends through improved user adoption, reduced errors, and maximum value extraction from AI tools. Organizations that skimp on training often find their expensive AI implementations underutilized or misapplied.”

And there’s clear demand: McKinsey reports that 94% of employees are aware of generative AI, but only 48% say their company offers formal training. 

If you’re looking for others who are creating formal training, consider reading up on the World Economic Forum’s AI Literacy Framework, or Zapier’s AI Fluency Assessment in interviewing.

Closing that gap is one of the most powerful levers HR can pull.

3. Flexible funding → through a stipend, so everyone can explore what works for their role

One-size-fits-all tools no longer work. Teams need the freedom to explore AI in ways that make sense for their work. That means budget, flexibility, and transparency.

AI stipends are the modern way to do this.

Instead of centrally choosing one tool, progressive companies are offering AI stipends through Compt’s Professional Development Pro™. It’s a centralized, tax-compliant way to:

• Fund AI upskilling on demand
• Support personalized AI adoption without losing visibility or compliance
• Track adoption trends and reimbursement patterns with zero guesswork

Employees using AI stipends today say:

• “I used my AI stipend to upgrade to ChatGPT Pro. It’s been a game-changer for my productivity.”
• “It made me feel supported to try new tools without asking for approval every time.”

At Compt, we’ve rolled out three unique AI stipends for customers just this quarter.

And we’re not alone. Buffer recently announced a $250 per year AI Tools Stipend to support their team’s exploration and skill-building in this space.

Why the AI Adoption Trifecta Matters

If you’re missing any one of these elements, your AI adoption efforts will stall. You’ll see increased AI Anxiety (as named above in the Ernst & Young piece), misuse, or confusion.

But when you combine:

• Clear expectations
• Practical, people-first training & support
• Flexible funding

… you create a culture where AI is safe to try, supported at every step, and customized to each person’s job. It’s about empowering your people to take on an AI-curious mindset, which is what many of today’s teams need.

As the HR Brew cited Todd Blaskowitz, senior client partner on the AI strategy and transformation team at consulting firm Korn Ferry, HR can start encouraging employees to embrace an AI mindset. By asking questions, like:

“Help your people rethink their work, rethink the outcomes that they’re trying to do with a mindset of, ‘How might AI improve this?’” Blaskowitz said. “How might AI enhance the overall experience, the overall quality, my overall productivity?”

And my personal favorite that I’ve asked my team, “What can we do now with AI that we couldn’t do before?” The ideas, opportunities, and innovations are leading us in incredibly fascinating journeys that (hopefully) add more value to our customers and interested HR leaders.

That’s how real adoption happens. And with stipends, it’s adoption you can actually measure and tie to ROI.

Closing thoughts

The good news? You’re here now. You’re right on time.

And the even better news? HR is built for this moment.

Driving AI adoption isn’t just about policies and tools — it’s about trust, communication, learning, and change management. HR already owns all of that. You’re the stewards of culture, capability-building, and inclusive growth.

You’re the function that:
– Builds companywide clarity from ambiguity
– Champions learning across levels and roles
– Understands how change really happens — through people

That’s why this isn’t just a tech rollout. It’s a human one. And HR is already holding the keys to success.

Let’s make AI adoption real.

Schedule a demo of Compt today.

The post HR’s AI Playbook: A 3-Part Framework for Company-Wide Adoption appeared first on COMPT.

HR leaders such as Patty McCord, Laszlo Bock, Mari Sefo, and Debra Corey have proven that challenging traditional approaches to benefits, flexibility, and recognition leads to workplaces that are more empowering, human-centric, and ultimately more successful. Their work demonstrates that by questioning the way things have always been done, HR can create a lasting ripple effect on employees’ lives, far beyond the time they spend at any one company.

This is especially important today; employee expectations are higher, talent competition is global, and well-being is tied directly to performance making this mindset isn’t just progressive and essential. Forward-thinking HR leaders who reimagine how people are supported at work are building cultures that attract top talent, drive engagement, and help their organizations adapt in times of uncertainty and change, and future-proof the business.

How to apply First Principles in HR to create lasting impact

Great HR leaders think like first-principles innovators.

Instead of tweaking the status quo, they ask: “What is the fundamental goal we are trying to achieve? And if we started from scratch, how would we design the best solution?“

1. Benefits: Rethinking what employees actually need

Traditional benefits are often designed based on what other companies are doing, rather than what employees truly need.

Debra Corey questioned this approach when she was revamping a global benefits program. Employees wanted support for well-being, but well-being meant different things to different people. Instead of forcing a one-size-fits-all program, she introduced a well-being allowance — a stipend that employees could use for whatever mattered most to them, whether that was therapy, a gym membership, or a food intolerance test.

“The wellbeing allowance was a specific sum of money (around $500 annually) based on employees’ locations that could be used on ‘anything’ that could improve overall wellbeing. Employees simply had to provide their goal, how they would reach it, and the cost of the chosen activity or equipment.” – Debra Corey, Getting Personal

And the results? Employees felt more valued, and engagement increased.

Research backs this up too: a 2025 Morgan Stanley at Work study found that 91% of employees say they’d feel more invested in staying with a company that offers financial benefits tailored to their specific needs, underscoring the power of personalization

Another HR disruptor, Patty McCord, co-author of Netflix’s famous Culture Deck, pushed against traditional benefit models, advocating instead for radical transparency and treating employees as adults. McCord helped shape one of the most influential HR cultures by focusing on autonomy and freedom, ideas that have since become mainstream.

“You’re not a kid who needs a policy. You’re an adult who can have a relationship with the company, and if you mess up you get a conversation, not a form to fill out.” – Patty Mccord, How She Built Netflix’s Culture

As McCord put it: “We said, ‘What is the work, and what do people really need to do it? Forget the policy book.’” That’s first‑principles thinking; building HR from the ground up.

Building work from the ground up has become increasingly important in today’s work landscape, with AI rapidly transforming the nature of work itself. AI adoption is widespread, permeating nearly every sector. Studies show that up to 30% of U.S. jobs may be impacted by AI by 2030, making the demand for human skills like creativity, empathy, adaptability, and prompt engineering grow as fast as the technology itself.

HR is now managing the workforce, and proactively participating in re-writing the rules. As the workplace gets quickly reshaped by AI, offering flexible AI stipends is emerging as the best benefit companies can provide in 2026. Reason being, these stipends allow employees to choose how they skill up, experiment, and integrate AI tools into their work, helping them succeed, stay relevant, and thrive.

2. Recognition: Rewarding the many, not just the few

Employee recognition has traditionally focused on high performers, which are a select few who receive large bonuses (think President’s Club) while the majority of employees get little to no recognition at all. But Debra Corey flipped the model upside down, asking: Why spend 80% of our recognition budget on just 5% of employees?

Instead, she created a Recognition Pyramid, where more budget went toward frequent, everyday recognition for all employees, rather than saving it for annual awards. This approach aligns with research from Gallup, which found that employees who receive frequent recognition are five times more likely to feel connected to company culture and four times more likely to be engaged.

Laszlo Bock, former Chief People Officer at Google, took a similar approach. He introduced peer-to-peer recognition programs, believing that top-down awards weren’t enough. Instead, he championed public appreciation platforms and spot bonuses distributed by teams—not just managers.

3. Flexibility: It’s about listening

When companies rushed to embrace flexible work post-pandemic, many simply mirrored what others were doing, without considering or asking what their employees actually needed.

First-principles thinkers in HR start by asking: What does flexibility truly mean to our workforce? For some employees, it means remote work. For others, it means the ability to adjust hours to accommodate childcare, caregiving, or mental health needs.

Laszlo Bock led Google’s shift toward data-driven HR decisions by listening to employees and analyzing work patterns before making sweeping changes. His team discovered that small tweaks, like giving employees more control over their calendars, improved productivity and satisfaction more than fully remote work policies. Similarly, Debra Corey encountered pushback when suggesting employee focus groups to determine benefit needs. A leader once told her, “That’s what I pay you to do.” But she knew better, with data from Qualtrics showing that companies that listen to employees and act on feedback are 12 times more likely to retain top talent.

Why Challenging HR Norms Matters: The Ripple Effect

As Kat Kibben pointed out in a recent article, the best HR leaders don’t just change policies; they change lives.

Debra Corey recently heard from a former employee who thanked her for encouraging them to join their company’s 401(k) plan at 21. That small moment of guidance set them up for financial security years later.

HR leaders often don’t see the long-term impact of their decisions, but their influence extends far beyond a paycheck. Whether it’s enabling financial security, supporting mental health, or giving employees the recognition they deserve, small changes today can create ripples for decades to come.

HR enforces policies, and shapes workplace experiences that allow people to thrive.

By questioning traditional norms, rethinking benefits and recognition, and truly listening to employees, HR leaders can drive real change that lasts far beyond their tenure.

If we embrace first principles thinking in HR, we move beyond “best practices” and start designing workplaces that actually work for people.

And when we challenge everything, we create the kind of impact that outlives us.

The post First Principles in HR: Rethinking Benefits, Recognition, and Flexibility appeared first on COMPT.

In a 2024 survey from Resume Builder, 64% of the 764 surveyed companies said they already require employees to work from the office, 23% plan to implement RTO policies by 2025, and 7% by 2026 or later. Only 6% said they have no plans at all for RTO. And all 764 of these companies adopted a fully remote model during the pandemic.

Another survey from Resume.org found that nearly three-quarters of companies with existing RTO policies expect employees to work in the office at least three days a week by the end of 2025.

Before you fly into a potential fit of rage – HOW DARE THEY?! The truth is, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for doing so — prior investments in office spaces, infrastructure, or a new HQ, for example. It’s also easier to monitor workflows and accountability when everyone is in one place. And new hires and junior employees do benefit from on-the-spot guidance.

But for your team members who were hired remote or adjusted to that work model, the thought of returning to the office will likely create mixed emotions. Some may welcome the change, but many will feel anxious or even resistant.

And can you blame them?

As noted, for the past five-plus years, remote has jumped tremendously for the many workers that are able to work remote (as essential employees were excluded from this trend). Whether or not you agree with it though, if your organization is one that is rolling out ‘back to the office’ announcements, there is a right and wrong way to go about it.

So, how can you make RTO more inviting for your people? In today’s guide, I’m going to show you exactly how.

How do Returning to Office (RTO) policies work?

A return-to-office (RTO) policy is a set of guidelines and procedures outlining how your employees are expected to work in the office. It covers when employees need to be in the office, what safety measures you’ll put in place, and how remote work will still be accommodated (if at all).

There are three ways you can model an RTO policy:

• Optional RTO: Giving employees a choice in whether or not to return to the office. For instance, Spotify has allowed employees to work from anywhere since 2021, with no mandated office days.
• Hybrid RTO: Continuing to allow remote-capable employees to work from home part of the week. Apple, Citigroup, Google, J.P. Morgan, and Meta are all examples of companies requiring employees to show up three days per week.
• Full-time RTO: Mandating that all employees be office-based during regular working hours. Amazon, for instance, has mandated that its corporate employees return to the office five days a week starting in January 2025.

Hybrid RTOs are the most common — 2024 data from Gallup shows that more than half (55%) of remote-capable employees in the U.S. employees work on a hybrid schedule.

Designing a successful RTO policy

1. Understand the potential impact RTO policy will have on your workforce.

The reality is that with many employees working remotely so long, return-to-office policies will uproot employees’ lives and force them to retrofit their entire schedules around a new work paradigm. This is especially problematic for working parents, caregivers, and those who have established routines based on their remote work schedules. 

It’s also an issue for those who moved during the pandemic, as so many did, to be outside of high‐cost, traditional office hubs. In fact, according to “The New Geography of Remote Work” by Dr. Adam Ozimek, about 2.4% of Americans (~4.9 million people) reported having moved because of remote work since 2020.

Beyond the impact it’ll have on your employees’ lives, you have to consider the following:

Direct costs

Unless you’re renting a space through a service like WeWork, you have the costs that come with operating a physical office space, like utilities, cleaning, security, and general upkeep.

Talent acquisition and retention

In a late 2024 study, the University of Pittsburgh tracked over 3 million tech and finance workers’ LinkedIn employment histories and over 2 million job postings to analyze the effect of RTO on S&P 500 firms.

Among companies with RTO mandates, they found that on average:

• Turnover rates increased by 14%.
• Time-to-hire rose by 23%.
• Hire rates decreased by 17%.

Some of your best employees might leave. The indirect costs of hiring and having job vacancies are going to rise significantly. Attracting top talent will be more difficult. And being less competitive in the labor market could result in not filling that position at all.

Resource commitments

If you’re taking out a lease for a new office building, know that commercial leases generally last 3-5 years. Even if the decision has unforeseen negative consequences for your team, you could be locked into that agreement (and its corresponding payments) for almost half a decade.

Collaboration and team cohesion

Back in 2022, when U.S. COVID guidelines started to ease, Envoy surveyed 1,000 American office workers. 90% said being back is “better than they expected,” and 36% said priority meetings and collaborative work are reserved for their days onsite.

Many will argue there is no substitute for the connections you can make when you’re face-to-face with your peers and managers every day.

In-person interactions facilitate spontaneous discussions and relationship-building. And they (can) create stronger bonds that lead to a unified team culture.

But the flip side of that is worth considering: Remote work can mean fewer distractions and interruptions from that constant colleague banter. This could be why the Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that, across 61 different industries, productivity increases as remote work increases.

There’s also a lot of evidence challenging the common belief that ‘collaboration is better in the office.’ For instance, data from Culture Amp indicates remote employees feel more positively about collaboration, consultation, and communication compared to their in-office or hybrid counterparts.

2. Evaluate whether RTO is truly necessary.

If you don’t align your RTO with your employees’ needs, there might be significant consequences (potentially leading to total RTO failures). Consider Amazon’s January 2025 policy requiring everyone to return to the office: one survey found that 73% of employees are considering quitting because of it.

To determine whether an RTO policy is truly beneficial, start by surveying your employees. Ask them:

• How they feel about each RTO option (optional vs. hybrid vs. full-time)
• What their reaction to returning to the office would be
• How important in-person interactions are for their job role
• What they need from you to succeed in an onsite or hybrid position
• Their thoughts on the biggest challenges or benefits of each RTO option
• Which perks and benefits would make their lives easier during the transition

Based on that feedback, you can run a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the benefits of RTO are worth the projected costs, and how you can best implement it.

Once you draft the policy, you can send a follow-up survey to see how comfortable they are with what you’ve created and what could improve it. Making your employees feel a part of the decision, rather than being told what they can and can’t do can make all the difference in how they approach new policies.

3. Make your RTO policy as flexible as possible.

Nine times out of ten, you’re going to want to avoid the ‘5-days in-office’ mandate.

PwC research finds that hybrid workers tend to feel more engaged and satisfied than both their five-days-in-the-office and fully remote counterparts. And according to the aforementioned “Global Indicator” report from Gallup:

• Six in 10 remote-capable employees want hybrid work.
• Just over one-third (34%) prefer fully remote.
• Fewer than 10% want full-time onsite.

As an employer, the hybrid model can give you the best of both worlds. You can still reap the potential benefits of in-person collaboration and communication, without the drawbacks of forcing everyone to completely change their schedule.

Beyond going hybrid, you can make your return-to-office policy even more flexible by requiring in-office presence X number of times per week or month, but giving them the option to choose which days they actually come in.

You could also implement core team hours, set flexible start/finish times, minimize time spent in meetings, and give your team a flexible time-off policy.

4. Offer commuter benefits.

With remote work, there are no commuting costs. For those who need to come in, the average commute costs $8,466 per year. Compared with the median annual salary ($61,984, as of January 2025), that’s 13.66% of their entire pre-tax income.

In 2024, about 72% of companies offered commuter benefits, which are fringe benefits that offset transit and parking expenses that come with commuting.

Payments for employees’ parking, public transit, and vanpooling expenses are non-taxable. Others, like gas stipends, toll reimbursement, and stipends for ridesharing apps, are not.

You can offer commuter benefits through Compt. Read our employer’s guide to commuter benefits to learn how to implement them.

5. Give them a meal allowance.

It’s easy to control food costs when you work from home because you have your kitchen at your disposal. Meal prepping is possible, but the reality is, we wind up spending more money on food out of the necessity for convenience.

While the nation’s largest companies might be able to provide lunches in their cafeterias or weekly catered lunches, the easiest way to accommodate is to offer a meal stipend.

This is easy to set up with stipend software and it’s wildly popular among employees — among Compt users, “Food” was the second most popular stipend category by employee spend in our 2025 Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report.

6. Provide resources for child care.

Between 1991 and 2024, expenses for daycare and preschool rose at nearly twice the rate of overall inflation. By 2024, childcare costs often comprised 10-20% of a family’s household income, surpassing the federal benchmark of 7% for affordability.

A recent Harris Poll and KinderCare survey found that 85% of HR leaders say RTO mandates impact their childcare support approach. Despite recognizing the importance of such benefits, 78% of HR leaders report challenges in convincing executive teams of the long-term value of providing childcare assistance.

Dan Figurski, President of KinderCare for Employers and Champions, emphasizes the enduring nature of childcare challenges, stating, “Some CEOs are likely betting that pushback against returning to the office will fade, but I think childcare challenges will persist into 2025 and 2026.”

There are several types of childcare benefits — subsidies, FSAs, and on-site daycare, to name a few. Stipends are the least complicated. Compt makes it easy to offer childcare stipends to working parents through payroll, and it’s 100% tax-compliant.

Best practices for managing your RTO transition

Involve your employees from Day 1.

A collaborative approach will significantly increase your employee retention rate during the RTO transition. Surveying your employees before moving forward and after drafting the policy will help you create one that’s fair, balanced, and takes into account your workforce dynamics.

Standardize and communicate the RTO policy effectively.

In a 2023 survey, 49.2% of workers told Fishbowl they didn’t understand their company’s return-to-office policy. If your team doesn’t understand the reasoning or benefits behind the decision, they won’t be on board.

You want to avoid being vague as much as possible. Clearly outline your expectations, the policy’s purpose, and its start date. Share it via multiple channels — email, meetings, messaging apps, and your company intranet.

You should also give employees a contact list for their RTO questions. Besides their direct manager, they should be able to reach someone from your HR or leadership team for additional support.

Set up in-person growth and development opportunities.

Personal and professional development are two major areas where remote work falls short. They’re promoted 31% less frequently than their office-based counterparts, and limited in-person time hinders networking and mentoring.

If you’re going to require your team to come into the office, in-person growth opportunities make it worth their while.

Training, team-building, and development sessions are a good start. Mentors are also valuable for new employees and those who want to take their career to the next level.

It’s also a good idea to have managers hold in-person meetings with their direct reports. There, they can set professional goals, evaluate each person’s progress over time, give and receive actionable feedback, and help them reach the next step.

Pro tip: If there aren’t many in-person opportunities within your organization, you can supplement this with at-home opportunities by using Compt to offer an inclusive professional development account.

Don’t expect (or mandate) change overnight.

Change takes time. Your policy won’t be well received if your team members find out they have to make arrangements for childcare, commuting, and personal responsibilities within a few weeks (and definitely not a few days!). Give them enough time to make the necessary arrangements and adjust to your RTO policy.

One approach is to gradually phase in your RTO policy. This way, employees can adjust to the transition first, and you can modify it based on feedback and employees’ responses.

You could also create incentives that make the RTO more doable, like Starbucks is currently doing with its three-day in-office policy. CEO Brian Niccol is offering perks and accommodations like a gym, daycare, and subsidized transit to bring workers back to the Seattle headquarters.

Use the right tools.

There are hundreds of tools and methods to facilitate remote, hybrid, and in-office alignment. You’re probably already using a few, like Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams for communication and project management software for tasks.

For return-to-office policies, you’ll have a few more considerations:

• Wayfinding apps (so employees can find offices, conference rooms, and each other from their phones and laptops)
• Workplace analytics tools (to track metrics like office attendance and badge swipes and gauge the employee experience)
• Hybrid work scheduling (that adapts to the nuances of your team’s RTO preferences and onsite collaboration times)
• Benefits software (to administer stipends, reimbursements, and other return-to-office perks)

When you approach it thoughtfully and strategically, you can make the transition back to the office as smooth as possible and minimize the pushback. With the right tools working together alongside your incentives and employees’ input, you can create a policy that works for your business and your team.

Make RTO painless with the right incentives for your people

With Compt, you can offer tax-compliant stipends and perks to reduce the burden of commuting, meals, child care, and dozens of other work-related expenses. To learn more, request a personalized demo with us today.

The post Returning to Office: How to Make Your RTO Policy Better for Employees appeared first on COMPT.

Flexibility is everything.

We know that from combing through piles of Compt customer data, health and wellness perks consistently rank as the most valued benefits year after year. We’ve highlighted this extensively in the 2025 Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report, but we just didn’t have enough room to really dive into all the data.

But hey, that’s why we have a blog. To give you (so much) more.

We analyzed more than 30,000 health and wellness claims from Compt customers to understand what employees are truly spending their stipend dollars on, and how employers can best support this growing need.

Say it with us: Health and wellness programs should be more than just a check-the-box retention strategy.

These programs are how you show employees you understand what they truly need and how you create a culture that values people beyond perks. With employees redefining what wellness means to them, forward-thinking companies are catching up to capture wellness work trends.

From moving beyond rigid gym memberships to offering holistic, all-inclusive stipends and embracing alternative wellness programs, benefits are shifting to reflect the diverse, evolving priorities of today’s workforce.

So, let’s dig into four wellness trends shaping the future and how HR leaders can turn them into a competitive edge.

Trend 1: The move from rigid and conventional health and wellness benefits to flexible wellness accounts

Traditional wellness industry benefits — think gym memberships and pre-selected fitness classes — just aren’t cutting it anymore. Companies are realizing that these rigid, one-size-fits-all perks don’t reflect the diverse needs of their workforce. Enter broader, flexible stipends that give employees the freedom to choose what actually supports their well-being through a holistic approach.

As Nadine Robinson, Head of HR at Compt, puts it:

These programs let employees take control of their wellness to live a healthier life. Maybe it’s therapy sessions, a standing desk, wearable technology, or a meditation app.

Health and wellness account use cases

We’re seeing this at Compt, with health and wellness accounts continually seeing high utilization rates across companies of all sizes and at all industries. This past year, for every $100 employers allocate to health and wellness benefits, employees actively spend $60 — a significant 60% utilization rate that signals real engagement. 

This shift is about meeting people where they are. Wellness looks different for everyone, depending on their life stage, personal goals, and circumstances. Flexible stipends signal that employers get that.

For instance, our 2025 Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report found that company stipend programs range from $180 to $3,000 per employee per year. In fact, 32% of Compt customers offer an exclusive health and wellness stipend. These stipends range from traditional gym memberships to quarterly massages, First Aid certifications, and yoga retreats.

Trend 2: Employees take more control over their health

More employees are becoming their own health advocates through advancements in technology. With the rise of longevity research and the growing popularity of thought leaders like Andrew Huberman, Bryan Johnson, and David Sinclair, more people are exploring ways to improve their health, slow aging, and increase longevity. 

The problem is many health insurance plans don’t cover the latest innovative products, tests, or personalized care options. As a result, employees are turning to biohacking and self-directed health management to fill the gaps in important health metrics.

Here are a few examples of how employees are taking control, as shown through:

• Biological age testing kits: These kits allow people to determine their biological age and make modern lifestyle changes to improve their long-term health.
• DEXA scans: Often used for detailed body-fat composition analysis, these scans are gaining popularity among employees focused on weight loss and overall fitness.
• Personalized health kits: Services like Viome provide employees with tailored insights into their gut microbiome, which empower them to make informed choices about diet and wellness.

This growing interest in self-directed health aligns with a broader shift in how people approach wellness, even potentially looking to artificial intelligence to deepen their knowledge. Employees want tools and resources that go beyond one-size-fits-all solutions for a more balanced life. 

Forward-thinking employers can meet this trend by offering flexible wellness stipends or programs that support personalized health initiatives. Companies that adapt to these changes will build trust and loyalty while helping their teams prioritize long-term health.

Trends 3: Modern wellness options have their moment

The wellness landscape looks a lot different than it did even a few years ago. With health insurance premiums skyrocketing and more procedures not being covered, employees are seeking options that go beyond traditional offerings according to Compt’s own customer data claims to take back control of their health. Enter alternative wellness options — like red light therapy, cryotherapy, and advanced diagnostic health panels.

These alternatives are gaining traction for a reason. For one, mental and emotional well-being remains a top priority for many in everyday life. Online therapy, in particular, is a standout because it’s accessible, easy to fit into a workday, and fast becoming a go-to resource for employees.

Meanwhile, emerging options like red light therapy are turning heads for their potential mental health benefits, such as reducing anxiety and improving overall emotional health. While still niche, the buzz around these treatments is growing as more people look for innovative ways to improve their overall well-being and reach their health goals.

Part of this wellness work trend comes down to science catching up with the real challenges people face. Traditional health insurance often doesn’t cover deeper diagnostics, specialized drugs, or personalized health solutions, which leaves a gap that employees need to fill. Specialized businesses are stepping in, offering advanced diagnostic panels, tailored health coaching, and treatments aimed at addressing the root causes of chronic issues like thyroid problems or autoimmune diseases.

Forward-thinking companies are taking note and offering holistic wellness stipends flexible enough to cover these nontraditional options. It’s a smart move since employees want benefits that reflect today’s realities, not yesterday’s standards.

Trend 4: Companies do more to align their stipend programs with company values and culture

The best companies don’t just throw money at perks and call it a day. They use stipend programs as a way to show employees what they truly stand for. When done well, these programs go beyond being just ‘nice to have’ and become a direct reflection of the company’s culture and values.

Take Patagonia, for example. Their benefits — like on-site child care and stipends for outdoor activities — aren’t random. They’re designed to reinforce their commitment to environmental stewardship and employee well-being. 

Another great example is ButterflyMX, which uses Compt to offer $300 monthly self-care stipends. 

Lucy Lemons, Chief People Officer at ButterflyMX, says,

This flexibility lets employees decide how to use the funds in ways that actually work for them. And that’s key to capturing wellness work trends in 2025.

The companies that nail this are intentional. If your values are about inclusivity, productivity, and helping employees show up as their best selves, your stipend program should reflect that. Maybe that looks like caregiving stipends for working parents, home office budgets for remote employees, commuter benefits for in-office workers, or wellness programs that cover everything from therapy to fitness apps.

The key is to align what you offer with who you are as a company — and who your employees are as people. That’s how you make a stipend program part of what makes your company a great place to work.

From perks to purposes: Redefining employee wellness

The way employees think about wellness is evolving, and the companies that adapt to wellness work trends in 2025 and beyond are the ones that will stand out. From flexible stipends to caregiving benefits and unconventional wellness options, the trends we’re seeing are about meeting people where they are and empowering them to take charge of their health.

The takeaway? Employees don’t want cookie-cutter benefits. They want flexible stipends that reflect their needs, their values, and their goals. By leaning into flexibility, personalization, and meaningful support, companies can create benefits that not only attract top talent but also keep teams engaged and thriving.

The future of wellness at work is here, and it’s all about building benefits that actually work — for everyone.

Ready to get started? Request a demo.

Planning for 2026? Get the most updated info on our health and wellness stipends in the latest benchmark report:

The post 4 Top Health and Wellness Work Trends in 2025 [Compt Data] appeared first on COMPT.

According to the ADP Research Institute, only 47% of employees think their companies invest in the skills they need to advance. Companies that are offering one-off professional development programs may not be offering enough variety to truly help their employees grow.

During our analysis to create our annual Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report, we dialed in on professional development to understand what’s truly working when it comes to how employees are using their professional development benefits.

To support this growing interest, we recently introduced Professional Development Pro™ to streamline approvals and workflows, and improve overall utilization rates. With nearly one in five Compt customers (18%) offering professional development stipends, the need for a tailored solution to support diverse programs is growing.

We broke down claims from more than 2,500 professional development vendors to understand more about the categories that employees prioritize, and the need for choice is apparent.

What we found? One-size-fits-all training doesn’t work anymore. Employees expect learning tailored to their skills, career goals, and schedules. Flexibility helps learning fit into their busy lives without feeling forced. 

And L&D specialists agree. In a recent podcast with our team, L&D Strategist Molly Dennen said,

Learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum… You don’t have one learning experience that lives in isolation from all of the others that came before or after it.

We’re seeing more companies roll out micro-courses and training that employees can take on their own schedule, with topics ranging from career coaching to AI tools. The wide variety of learning paths show that there isn’t just one way to upskill or reskill tomorrow’s leaders.

Interestingly enough, courses and certifications took the lead at nearly 36% (and helps us understand why student loan repayment support is becoming more critical). And a quarter of reimbursements went to books, which included purchases on audio, hardcovers, summaries, etc.

With AI becoming more prevalent in the workplace, it’s not surprising that productivity and tools came in third.

We expect this number to grow with the popularity of AI-related tools to improve productivity and the ever-present mantra of ‘do more, with less.’ We saw this mirrored in our data of 2025 professional development trends, with AI being mentioned hundreds of times in claim details for tools like ChatGPT pro subscriptions, Claude, or books related to AI topics.

Best practices from Compt on professional development funding and frequency

When it comes to budget, employers are cautiously investing in professional development. While employers may not be able to pay the maximum for student tuition reimbursement (which in 2025, is $5,250 per employee, as determined by the IRS), they are still offering stipends to support professional development needs.

While we see many of our customers opting for quarterly programs for higher utilization rates, Professional Development had zero programs in this timeframe. Instead, the focus was on annual (60%), monthly (10%) and semi-annual or spot programs (30%).

3 tips for building a professional development account (that employees will actually use)

• Make it annual. Offering an annual stipend for professional development means employees can access it when they need it most, perfect for an annual subscription or one-off professional development purchases. Through our analysis, we saw that annual also had the highest utilization rate at 41% versus monthly or semi-annual stipends.
• Start small versus nothing at all. If you can’t support reimbursing tuition, ask yourself: could you offer a professional development stipend of $100 per employee? This could easily go toward books or productivity tools.
• Offer choice. As you can see, choice matters! Consider that your employees likely have different styles of learning, and give them an option to tailor their professional development needs.

Examples from Compt clients

When employees have the freedom to choose their professional development path, they invest in meaningful opportunities that align with their career goals.

We analyzed thousands of claims to see how employees are spending their professional development budgets. While they were all worth the investment, here are some of our favorite ones:

• “​​Year subscription to Code Academy to develop coding skills as they apply to data science.”
• A book, titled: “WorldatWork Total Rewards Handbook” 
• A book, titled: “Work Like a Boss: A Kick-in-the-Pants Guide to Finding (and Using) Your Power at Work [Kindle Edition]” 
• “Kindle Unlimited to access books about SQL”
• “‘Thinking in Systems’ book on management and organizational principles/practices”
• “2 online courses in UC Berekley Extension Program”
• “AI-powered writing assistant”
• “Career coaching”
• “CFA Exam prep”
• “Six Sigma Certification Program”

A focus on student loan repayment

Outside of professional certifications, books, and courses, we saw a growing number of student loan repayment options. This contributed to the 76% YoY increase in spending share across Compt customers, representing 12% of all customer spend. It’s proof that employers are increasingly addressing student debt, recognizing its impact on employees’ financial health and overall well-being.

Today’s world of professional development is radically different, with many options of how to learn, where to learn, and what to learn shifting every day. And we think that’s exciting, as employees can dial into what they truly need, rather than being boxed into learning paths that don’t make sense for them. As the professional development landscape continues to evolve with new 2025 professional development trends, we’ll be right there with it.

Ready to offer professional development choice to your people?

Professional Development Pro by Compt streamlines requests, approvals, and budget tracking, eliminating complex workflows and empowering employees to grow and develop. With our newest product, you’ll join others that are reducing bottlenecks to get their people the support and development needed to get ahead in today’s workforce. Request a demo today.

Planning for 2026? Get the most updated info on stipends for professional development in the latest benchmark report:

The post Our Top Professional Development Trends appeared first on COMPT.

It seems as though you blink and the entire world of work shifts. Mandated return-to-office policies, the rise (and fall) of building more inclusive workplaces, the delicate balance of profits vs. people, and the deluge of AI tools HR practitioners need to understand to be better at (or even keep!) their jobs … these are just a few trends taking hold.

That’s why staying up-to-date with the latest trends, technologies, and best practices in HR is more important than ever.

Attending industry conferences can be a great way to do just that, as they provide opportunities to network with peers, learn from experts, and gain new insights into the world of HR.

Below, we’ll highlight some of the top HR conferences to attend in 2026. From the latest in talent acquisition to diversity and inclusion, cutting-edge technologies, and more, these in-person events and virtual conferences offer something for everyone.

If you don’t see something on the list, let us know.

Psst: Did you know that Compt offers a special Professional Development module to make managing professional development requests like conferences super simple? Learn more and see how to improve professional development in your organization!

February 2026

Talent Acquisition Week

February 2-5, 2026 | $1,795 – $3,095 | San Diego, CA

Talent Acquisition Week (or TA Week) is the go-to gathering for TA and HR leaders focused on AI-powered recruitment, employer branding, global hiring trends, and more. Attendees say they appreciate both the content and the opportunity to connect with peers, mentors, and innovators in the industry.

People Analytics World Conference

February 25-26, 2026 | $879+ | Zurich, Sweden

People Analytics World 2026 brings together senior HR, analytics, and business leaders to show how people data and AI can directly improve business performance. Across two days of case studies, panels, and practical sessions, attendees learn how leading organizations are using analytics to build skills-based workforces, improve decision-making, strengthen organizational resilience, and drive measurable impact on growth and profitability.

March 2026

UNLEASH America 2026

March 17 – 19, 2026 | $2,395 (early bird) | Caesars Forum, Las Vegas, NV

UNLEASH America positions itself as the “International Festival of HR,” bringing together the world’s leading HR and business innovators to tackle the most pressing workplace challenges. Over three dynamic days, attendees experience visionary keynotes from celebrity speakers and global thought leaders, explore breakthrough technologies, and dive into real-world case studies across 50+ exhibitors. The carefully curated agenda covers AI and skills development, employee well-being, leadership transformation, and organizational innovation. Whether you’re seeking to explore next-gen HR technologies or connect with Fortune 500 leaders reshaping the future of work, UNLEASH America delivers actionable insights and unmatched networking opportunities.

Transform 2026

March 23 – 25, 2026 | $1,495 | Wynn Las Vegas, NV

Transform positions itself at the intersection of technology and the diverse communities shaping the future of the workplace. This three-day conference delivers progressive programming focused on HR innovation, curated connections with forward-thinking leaders, and exposure to cutting-edge workplace technologies. Perfect for HR professionals looking to stay ahead of industry disruption and explore how technology can drive meaningful organizational change.

HR Vision London (Spring)

March 25 – 26, 2026 | $1,762 (early bird) | London, UK

HR Vision London 2026 is an executive-level summit focused on HR tech and the future of work, designed for leaders who are transforming their organizations through people, culture, and technology. The event features multiple streams covering topics like HR technology, leadership, talent strategy, analytics, and employee experience, giving attendees a chance to benchmark with global peers and walk away with concrete ideas to modernize their HR function.

April 2026

People Analytics Reloaded

April 16 – 17, 2026 | $2,549-$3,249 | Chicago, IL

This event focuses on the application of analytics in HR, offering insights into data-driven decision-making and workforce optimization. You’ll hear from People Analytics leaders from some of the world’s biggest companies, like Allstate, Estée Lauder, Labcorp, Northwestern Mutual, and Target.

WorldatWork Total Rewards ’26

April 19 – 22, 2026 | $1,595 – $2,455 | San Antonio, TX

Total Rewards ’26 is the premier annual gathering for ambitious rewards professionals seeking to elevate their craft and drive real business impact. This fully immersive experience features 100+ expert-led sessions, hands-on workshops, and curated networking opportunities. The conference explores bold compensation strategies, benefits innovation, pay equity initiatives, employee recognition programs, and how to create total rewards programs that truly resonate with today’s workforce. With seven inventive session formats designed to spark innovation, attendees leave with fresh strategies to transform how their organizations reward and recognize talent.

May 2026

HRO Today Forum North America 2026

May 6 – 8, 2026 | $895 | Hilton Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing, Philadelphia, PA

The HRO Today Forum North America brings together HR leaders, practitioners, technology experts, and innovators shaping the future of North American and global business. Held in Philadelphia to coincide with America’s 250th anniversary, this prestigious gathering features award-winning content, cutting-edge insights into talent management, technology strategy, and risk management, plus unparalleled networking. The highlight is the annual CHRO of the Year Awards Gala and Dinner, celebrating innovators and trailblazers in HR leadership—making this an essential event for executive-level HR professionals.

California HR Conference (CAHR26)

May 11 – 13, 2026 | Pricing TBD | Anaheim, CA

CAHR26 is the essential conference for HR professionals navigating California’s notoriously complex employment landscape. With 47 sessions across seven targeted tracks—including AI in Workplaces, California Employment Law, Talent Acquisition & Retention, Culture & Inclusion, Leadership Development, Total Rewards & Benefits, and Workforce Well-being—attendees gain deep expertise in compliance, risk management, and strategic HR leadership. Earn SHRM PDC, HRCI, and MCLE credits while connecting with peers from the Golden State and beyond.

ASHHRA Annual Conference & Exposition

May 17– 19, 2026 | $900 – $1,200 | Savannah, GA

As the longest-running event for healthcare HR professionals, ASHHRA26 convenes HR leaders from across the healthcare continuum of care to address the industry’s most pressing workforce challenges. Expect dynamic keynote speakers, innovative breakout sessions on healthcare talent acquisition, leadership development, workforce resilience, and inclusion strategies. The conference offers practical solutions to healthcare-specific issues like frontline talent management, healthcare employee retention, and clinical staff burnout. Earn continuing education credits toward CHHR, SHRM, HRCI, and ACHE recertification.

July 2026

HR Healthcare Conference

July 13 – 15, 2026 | $599+ | Boston, MA

HR Healthcare is a peer-led forum for 200+ HR leaders in health systems and hospitals, offering tools and insights to evolve hiring strategies in healthcare. Whether you’re looking to enhance your people strategy or simply connect with fellow healthcare HR professionals, the HR Healthcare Conference provides a unique platform to engage with the challenges and innovations shaping the future of healthcare HR. The conference is not only a hub for learning but also celebrates notable achievements through the HR Healthcare Innovation Awards, recognizing leaders who are making significant impacts in their organizations.

September 2026

Future of Work USA

September 15 – 16, 2026 | $560-$1,600 | Dallas, TX

The Future of Work USA Event launched in 2019 with the core mission to focus on the latest trends & strategies within the Future of Work landscape, including the role of the HR and People function, Talent Management, Workforce Planning, Frontline Workers, Workplace Transformation, HR Technology, Culture, DEI, Employee Engagement, Digital Workplace, Learning & Development, and Office Space & Design.

PSHRA Conference

September 28 – 30, 2026 | Portland, OR

This conference is your opportunity to connect with other HR professionals from across the public sector to share insights, learn about emerging trends, and gain new perspectives on how to meet the challenges facing public sector HR today. At the conference, you will hear from leading experts in public sector HR through keynote presentations and concurrent sessions. From diversity initiatives and cutting-edge research to performance management, recruitment, and retention strategies for the modern workplace, the conference will cover various relevant topics tailor-made for you, the public sector HR professional.

October 2026

CUPA-HR Annual Conference

October 4 – 6, 2026 | TBD

From the thought-provoking keynote speakers to the carefully selected concurrent sessions, this in-person event will offer you opportunities to explore new ideas, recharge your HR batteries, and network with other higher-ed HR professionals.

HR Technology Conference and Exposition

October 20 – 22, 2026 | Price TBD | Las Vegas, NV

As the industry’s leading independent event for a quarter of a century, HR Tech delivers an unrivaled cutting-edge agenda that benefits HR and IT professionals from businesses of all sizes, all industries, and across the globe! With a primary focus on driving HR success through technology, the HR Technology Conference is intended for those looking to continuously optimize the usage of current HR systems as well as those looking to buy. It’s where you’ll gain the insight needed to make critical HR system decisions that will fuel your business while supporting your organization’s unique needs now and in the future.

November 2026

HR Vision London 2026

November 17 – 18, 2026 | £1,499.00+ | London, UK

HR Vision London brings together top HR leaders to discuss best practices for navigating the evolving world of work. The conference features thought-provoking discussions on HR trends, talent management, leadership, and the impact of technology on people management practices.

December 2026

Employee Wellbeing

December 7 – 9, 2026 | Pricing TBD | Orlando, FL

At this conference, you can surround yourself with fellow HR executives and engage in this interactive forum designed to spark conversation, ideas, and innovation around employee well-being for you to take back to your organization.

Looking for more HR inspiration?

Sign up for our monthly newsletter, Getting Personal, where we talk to HR leaders in all industries about getting to the heart of HR and people.

Editor’s Note: This blog is updated yearly for relevance and is accurate at the time of publishing. Please check official websites for any updates to ticket costs or dates!

The post Top HR Conferences You Can’t Miss [2026 Update] appeared first on COMPT.

We often get asked this question when employers are exploring different benefit options for their people. Stipends vs. reimbursements are two different (though not mutually exclusive) concepts. This guide will show you which type of compensation to use and when.

What are stipends and reimbursements, exactly?

First, let’s define stipends and reimbursements.

A stipend is a fixed sum of money employers offer to employees to cover expenses related to recurring living, travel, and business costs.

Employers typically disburse stipends through payroll ahead of time on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis (monthly stipends are the most common). The amount is always the same, no matter the cost of services or materials.

A reimbursement is a repayment for specific out-of-pocket expenses an employee incurs on behalf of the organization.

It’s typically a one-time payment that occurs after an employee has already paid for a product or service. With reimbursements, employers agree ahead of time to cover a portion (or the total amount) of an employee’s purchases – e.g., a plane ticket, home office equipment, or school tuition.

There are two primary ways employers use stipends and reimbursements:

• To offset business expenses – When employees have to spend their own money to perform their job function or conduct business on behalf of the company, the company will reimburse them and deduct the amount on an expense report. 11 states, D.C., and Seattle, WA legally require companies to reimburse for certain expenses. Regardless of legality, most organizations do it anyway because it’s the fair thing to do.
• As a fringe benefit – Employers often give stipends or reimburse non-business-related costs as part of their total compensation plan. They might also use them as income for employees who go above and beyond, take on extra projects, or consistently exceed expectations. In both instances, stipends are intended to improve employee engagement and offset the costs of everyday life.

Examples of employee stipends

You can offer a monthly stipend for practically anything imaginable. Employers generally select the stipends according to the nature of their business activities and the interests of their employees.

A few of our favorite types of stipends include:

• Cell phone stipends
• Charitable giving stipends
• Equipment stipends
• Family stipends
• Health and wellness stipends
• Learning and development stipends
• Meal allowances
• Remote work stipends
• Student loan repayment assistance
• Travel stipends

For example, ButterflyMX uses Compt to offer its employees $300 self-care stipends each month, which they can use for anything that helps them take care of themselves — health and wellness, professional development, or even student loan repayment.

And tons of companies offer all kinds of stipends. For instance, UrbanSitter reports that 65% of their partner companies provide child care stipends, with the most common amount being $500 per year per employee.

Psst: To learn more about accounting for stipends on expense reports, read our guide on which fringe benefits are taxable and non-taxable.

Examples of reimbursements

Many employers use reimbursements to cover specific employee expenses. Most of the time, they only reimburse up to a specific amount, and employees must provide proof of purchase or other documentation before they can be reimbursed.

Examples of common employee reimbursements include:

• Business meals and entertainment
• Business tools, equipment, and software
• Business travel expenses
• Gym reimbursement
• Home office setup and equipment
• Mileage reimbursement
• Professional development costs (e.g., certifications, courses, conferences, and trade shows)
• Tuition reimbursement
• Uniforms and safety equipment

Some of these — like travel and software expenses — are a necessary part of running your business. But there are reasons to offer others as well — for instance, around half of companies offer undergrad and/or graduate tuition assistance, and tuition reimbursement program participants have proven to be 3-8% more likely to be retained than non-participating employees.

As an employer, setting up an expense reimbursement policy is in your best interest. This way, employees will know precisely what they need to do to be reimbursed for their expenses. It also protects your business from potential fraudulent expense reports and helps you comply with federal, state, and local tax codes.

Stipends vs. reimbursements: What’s the difference?

While stipends and reimbursements provide financial support to employees, the concepts aren’t exactly the same.

Let’s look at some key differences between the stipend and reimbursement model.

Amount

When we refer to stipends, we’re talking about a fixed amount of money given to an employee to help cover specific costs. It’s often given without the recipient needing to account for how they use the funds. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with expenses incurred, and there may not be rules for excess funds.

A stipend is an award given in its entirety.

With reimbursements, the amount reimbursed is contingent upon the actual expenses documented through receipts or invoices. Thus, the reimbursement amount equates to the sum total of all validated receipts or the maximum allowable award amount stipulated by the organization, whichever is less.

Timing

Stipends are usually processed promptly, meaning that individuals receive the full payment upfront. Recipients have the necessary funds to cover anticipated costs without wasting their money.

In that sense, stipends grant individuals financial freedom and planning autonomy from the outset, allowing them to budget and allocate funds best suited to their needs.

Reimbursement timelines are generally more drawn out. Here’s an example timeline:

1. Employees spends their own money on the product, service, or operating expense.
2. They submit a request for reimbursement, along with the appropriate receipts and other documentation.
3. The company reviews the request and verifies it. This review process can take days or even weeks in some cases.
4. They account for the expenses in their report.
5. They issue a payment to cover the costs.

IRS Publication 463 states that expenses must be documented within a 60-day window and then paid within 30 days. However, employers sometimes miss out on valid reimbursements for business purposes due to lost receipts or failure to submit them

Receipt guidelines

For the most part, stipend recipients don’t need to provide any kind of proof or documentation to receive their payments. Instead, specific rules and statutes regulate those that aren’t considered taxable income.

For example:

• Commuter benefits can be withheld from income tax up to $300 per month.
• Student loan repayment assistance and tuition reimbursement are non-taxable up to $5,250 per employee per year.
• Per diem travel expenses are limited by your local per diem rate.
• Vehicle usage is expensive at the standard mileage rate of 65.5 per mile.

Reimbursement typically requires receipts and/or invoices for validation. These receipts should, at the very least, should include the vendor name, purchase/sale date, item/service purchased, and cost. Some expense types require additional information as well.

Tax implications

When it comes to taxes, stipends vs. reimbursements are quite different from one another.

• Tax forms – Depending on the recipient’s residency status in the US, you’ll have to report stipends using one of two tax forms. US citizens or resident aliens must complete a W-9 or W-2 form including these expenses, while non-resident aliens must complete a W-8BEN form. Reimbursements don’t require tax forms.
• Tax reporting – Stipends are taxable income unless they meet specific exceptions under IRS Publication 15-B. Reimbursements under an accountable plan aren’t subject to income, Social Security, or Medicare taxes. Those under non-accountable plans are.

Stipends and reimbursements aren’t mutually exclusive concepts (with Compt, at least).

In certain situations, employers may choose to offer a stipend and reimbursement combination, which we refer to as a stipend reimbursement.

1. The reimbursement model means employers don’t have to front the funds.

Employers benefit significantly from a reimbursement model for employee benefits as it alleviates the financial burden of upfront costs. Companies can efficiently manage cash flow without tying up large sums of money by allowing employees to pay for their benefits initially and then reimbursing them

2. Reimbursements are a ‘use it or lose it’ mechanism — you’re not paying for unused benefits.

Employers only need to reimburse for the amount the employee spends (versus offering a stipend set at an arbitrarily high amount).

Let’s say your company offers a fitness stipend of $150 per employee. When employees don’t use the full $150, you’re essentially leaving money on the table.

For these employee benefits, paying out what employees spend after the fact still makes more sense.

3. Employers can control spending without sacrificing employee autonomy and satisfaction.

The ‘stipend’ aspect of the reimbursement model means that employees can choose the vendors they want.

The direct benefits of this are:

• higher utilization rates (employers using Compt typically see 90% employee engagement)
• happier employees who receive personalized benefits
• inclusivity, especially for remote teams whose employees don’t all have access to the same set of vendors

This is particularly advantageous when offering health benefits, professional development stipends, or health and wellness perks that would be impossible to standardize for every employee’s needs.

Offer employees stipends with Compt for the best of both worlds

We make it simple to manage expenses and tax compliance through our platform. Our platform also integrates with your accounting system, so you can handle tax compliance, and finance teams don’t have to bear the burden of constantly tracking and reporting usage. With 25+ categories to choose from, the possibilities to customize stipend programs are truly endless. See for yourself.

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.

Additional Note: This post has been recently updated for clarity and relevance for our readers.

The post Stipends vs. Reimbursement: Which Should Employers Offer? appeared first on COMPT.

On the surface, benefits are something employers offer to their employees that are either mandated or added on to an existing benefits program as part of an employee’s total compensation package.

What’s more, according to a recent report from Mercer, 85% of Human Resources leaders believe personalized benefits are a must. Jokes aside, your cookie-cutter approach to benefits just won’t work.

But to keep your benefits package from becoming a house of horrors, there are clear right and wrong ways to sweeten the (jack-o-lantern) pot.

Let’s go through a few:

1. Make your benefits heal, not haunt

Offering just the bare minimum when it comes to health insurance is a surefire way to scare qualified candidates away. Today, employees want choice and more options when it comes to their healthcare, which can include all aspects of well-being from physical to mental, financial, and everything in between.

With Compt’s health and wellness stipends, your people can choose what’s best for their well-being, from gym memberships to mental health support.

Health and Wellness consistently tops the list of Compt categories by spend, noting in our latest lifestyle benchmark report it accounted for 17% of overall spend (outnumbered only by Food, at 18%).

2. Don’t put your L&D program in the graveyard

Is your learning and development program wearing a mask, with employees not really understanding what’s available or how to access it?

Show your program’s true colors and make it easy for employees to understand and use the benefits available to them.

Don’t bury your L&D benefits in a graveyard — your people need better awareness and benefits they’ll actually use to help them advance in their career.

Courses, certifications, conferences … now that’s the right kind of candy to fuel professional development.

Psst. We’re developing something awesome for you L&D folks that your people will love. Get in touch with us to learn more!

3. Support zombie brains through comprehensive mental health programs

It’s a fact: Without mental health support, your employees could feel haunted by stress.

Findings from Deloitte report that 77% of respondents say they have experienced employee burnout at their current job, with more than half citing more than one occurrence.

Instead of directing your employees to a meditation app and ignoring their needs, why not offer them a wellness stipend that covers so much more?

Put mental health in the spotlight and give your employees an opportunity to reimburse what matters to them. We’re talking therapy, wellness retreats, or, hey, maybe some goat yoga?

4. Make your people feel Spook-tacular!

A thank you is a great start, but do your employees have an easy way to show that they appreciate all the hard work that goes into making a business succeed?

The same report cited previously from Deloitte names the top driver of employer burnout (nearly a third of respondents) as lack of support or recognition from leadership.

Show your people that they’re fang-tastic (oh yeah, we went there) with a dedicated recognition program. With Compt, you can even integrate a monetary or non-monetary reward and recognition program with often-used channels like Slack or Teams.

Doesn’t that sound purrrfect?

5. Don’t promote a bare-bones retirement program.

Could your retirement program use a little more meat on its bones? A barely-there retirement program doesn’t move the needle for financial support.

Consider adding onto that 3% with a better match plan or additional financial wellness stipends for retirement planning, financial advising, or budgeting tools.

Think outside the (jack-in-the) box when it comes to how you can boost your people’s financial wellness. Could you offer more support in high-cost areas like housing, food, or family? An all-inclusive stipend can help employees choose to reimburse funds for what they truly need.

Turn your benefits from a fright to a delight: Avoid employee benefit mistakes

While employers can’t be the ultimate Life Saver for their people, it’s important to give ‘em pumpkin to talk about.

In all seriousness, your benefits can be a stepping (head)stone to a company culture that attracts the very best employees. Isn’t it time you sliced out some time to give them another look?

The post 5 Employee Benefit Mistakes Haunting Your Talent Strategy appeared first on COMPT.