Last updated: September 2026
Every small business owner has asked a version of the same question at some point. Are we offering enough? Without real numbers, the answer usually comes down to a guess, a competitor’s job posting, or an anecdote from a former employee. BLS data gives an actual answer, and it isn’t encouraging for small firms working alone. Among businesses with fewer than 100 workers, 59% of employees have access to retirement benefits. At businesses with 500 or more employees, that number is 90%.
The gap isn’t new, but it matters more heading into 2026. NAPEO’s latest tracking survey finds 68% of business decision-makers now name healthcare costs among their top challenges, second only to economic uncertainty. Georgia employers competing for talent against larger companies, or against businesses that have already closed the benefits gap through outsourcing, are working against numbers that are well documented and easy for a candidate to research.
The Access Gap Runs Wider Than Retirement
Retirement isn’t the only category where scale matters. BLS’s most recent Employee Benefits release found 72% of workers at businesses with fewer than 100 employees have access to medical care benefits, compared to 90% at the largest employers. Dental access sits at 30% for small firms versus 70% at large ones. Vision follows the same pattern: 21% versus 44%. None of these numbers reflect how much a small business owner values their team. They reflect what an insurance carrier is willing to price for a group of 12 versus a group of 5,000.
What “Competitive” Actually Means at Your Size
Comparing your benefits package to a national average, or to a large company’s job posting, sets an unrealistic bar and can make a genuinely solid small-business package look worse than it is. The more useful comparison is against businesses your own size. SHRM’s Employee Benefits Survey offers benchmarking tools broken out by organization size for exactly this reason, built from data collected across 5,472 organizations of every size in 2026. A business with 20 employees offering dental, vision, and a 401(k) match may already be ahead of its size bracket, even if it can’t match a 500-person company’s offerings dollar for dollar.
Why More Small Businesses Are Outsourcing the Comparison
NAPEO’s 2025 Annual Tracking Survey found that 61% of small and mid-sized businesses now outsource health insurance, 56% outsource payroll, and 50% outsource retirement benefits, primarily to save time and stay focused on running the business rather than researching plan design. Nearly nine in ten non-PEO users, 87%, say they’re interested in exploring a PEO in the future. The interest is there. What typically stops a business from acting on it is uncertainty about the actual cost-benefit math, which is usually clearer than owners expect once they see real numbers for their specific headcount.
What Closing the Gap Actually Looks Like
Businesses that close the benefits access gap tend to do it one of two ways. Some absorb higher costs on their own to match larger-employer plan designs, which works until the next renewal cycle brings another double-digit increase and the same conversation starts over. Others join a larger purchasing pool, most often through a PEO, where thousands of employees from many small businesses are grouped together for pricing purposes. NAPEO’s research points to the second path being far more common among businesses that successfully close the gap and keep it closed year over year, rather than re-litigating the same decision at every renewal.
The difference shows up most clearly at renewal time. A business handling benefits alone re-shops the market every year, hoping a broker finds a slightly better rate than the year before. A business inside a larger pool is negotiating from a position that doesn’t reset every twelve months, because the size of the pool, not the size of the individual business, is what carriers are pricing against. That structural difference is why the access numbers above look the way they do, and why they tend to stay wide unless a business changes how it buys benefits in the first place.
Questions to Ask Before Your Next Renewal
- How does our retirement and health plan access compare to businesses in our size bracket, not the national average?
- What would it cost to close the benefits gap on our own versus through a larger purchasing pool?
- Which benefits are we not offering that our size bracket typically does?
- How much owner or HR time goes into researching and administering benefits each year?
This is the exact math that leads many Georgia business owners to look at a PEO. Joining OneSource means your employees stop competing in the small-group market and start accessing the same purchasing pool as businesses many times your size. Benefits access, and the time it takes to manage it, both change. If you want to see where your business actually stands against the numbers above, contact OneSource PEO at (678) 990-8630.
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