Employee Classes

Employee Classes Defined

Employee classes allow businesses to draw distinctions among employees in benefits.

The ICHRA Health Care Plan comes with 11 different employee classes that businesses can leverage while structuring a contribution strategy. The classes separate employees into groups by job-based criteria that include locations, employment status, hours worked, and more. The 11 classes are as follows:

1. Full-time employees

2. Part-time employees

3. Salaried employees

4. Hourly employees

5. Temporary employees of staffing firms

6. Seasonal employees

7. Employees covered under a collective bargaining agreement

8. Employees in a waiting period

9. Foreign employees who work abroad

10. Geographical locations 

11. A combination of two or more of the above

An employer can offer a contribution to one class and not another, or they can differ amounts from class to class. To keep things simple, an employer can even offer the same amount to all classes equally.

Please note that executives are not able to be carved out into their own class. All salary employees would need to be provided the same ICHRA amount. By regulation, we are bound to the eleven classes above.

Age-Based Contributions

For age-based contributions, businesses can only offer higher allowances to older employees. The employer must ensure that their older employees would be eligible for a larger amount, but not exceed a certain ratio. For example, the contribution for the oldest employee must be more than that of their youngest co-worker but cannot exceed more than three times the amount. If an employer offers its 18-year-old employee $100 a month, it could only offer the oldest employee up to $300.

More Flexibility Equals Benefits Success

With the employee class structure, employers are able to get a little creative with how they want to structure their benefits. They can specifically target highly valued employees. For most businesses, their full-time employees provide the greatest value, which is why it might make sense for an employer to offer them larger amounts than part-time employees.

Employers can also choose to offer different allowance amounts to different employees within each class based on the employee’s age and family size. For example, they could offer $400 to full-time employees who are single and $800 to full-time employees who have a family.

With so many options and flexibility, ICHRA can be tailored to each business’ budget so they can achieve the most desirable outcomes.

In conclusion, the ICHRA Health Care Plan brings flexibility back to the employer. Structuring employee eligibility based on the defined classes can enable businesses to use the ICHRA Health Care Plan to seek out talent more effectively and maintain valuable employees. Flexible plan options such as the ICHRA Health Care Plan will help employers achieve benefit success, and that’s a win-win for everyone.

Classes Exclusions

There are some classes commonly used in traditional group that are not eligible class options when it comes to ICHRA. You can't class employee's based on the below characteristics.

• Job Type (executives, sales, etc)
• Tenure, seniority, etc
• Medicare population