According to Plum‘s State of Employee Benefits 2026, the employee health benefits platform, based on data from 15,000+ policies across 1 million lives over 4 years, the share of employers offering comprehensive health benefits — combining deep insurance with real preventive healthcare — has grown from 5% to 23%.
Four years ago, that kind of plan, covering not just comprehensive insurance (>5L sum insured, progressive maternity benefits, term and accident insurance) but deep healthcare benefits (telehealth, health checkups, and mental health support) was considered an exception. Today it’s nearly 1 in 4.
This means:
- Companies offering sum insured >₹5,00,000 has increased 53%
- Companies offering a maternity limit >₹75,000 has increased 155%
- Companies adding term life and personal accident has increased 179%
- The median number of healthcare benefits has increased from 1 to 3.
- Healthcare share of total benefits spend has grown 4x over the last four years.
This shift has accelerated so much that the median benefits plan today roughly matches the 2024’s top quartile on quality of insurance coverage, and beats them on healthcare benefits.
What Plum considers the 2% Club — companies spending roughly 2% of payroll on health benefits — was part of the top two percentile two years ago. That makes up roughly the top decile today.
For years, the conversation around employee benefits in India began and ended with insurance,” said Abhishek Poddar, Co-founder and CEO, Plum. “That’s no longer where the best companies stop. What has changed is that employers are beginning to think about healthcare before a claim happens, not only protection when it does. That is a fundamental shift – from thinking of benefits as a checklist item to actually proactively building great health outcomes.”
Benefits plans are different across funded startups, local bootstrapped Indian businesses, and international companies.
International companies blow their Indian peers out of the water. Median spend per employee is about 1.6× a funded startup and nearly 3× a bootstrapped Indian organisation.
- Bootstrapped Indian companies operate on a materially thinner benefits stack than funded or global peers, running roughly two years behind on the benefit stacks.
- For funded startups, a funding round drives a 35% jump in per-employee benefits spend: parental coverage, maternity, life and accident cover, and everyday healthcare all expand together.
- While international companies offer better benefits, quality of cover depends on their intention to invest in India. Companies setting up in India for its service arbitrage lags behind R&D/product/tech hubs across insurance and healthcare benefits.
How companies are becoming catalysts for great health outcomes.
When companies make thoughtful investments in their team’s health, they act as a force multiplier for crores of Indians. They will emerge as catalysts for great health outcomes across the country.
“The next big challenge for companies is getting people to use the benefits they already have, for it to change an outcome. ” said Saurabh Arora, Co-founder and CTO, Plum. “As tech improves the experiences for benefits, we will witness Jevon’s Paradox in employee healthcare – we predict healthcare costs to go up as companies see exponentially higher utilization rates.”
- Companies investing in healthcare benefits are increasing access to the employees.
- A significant percentage adopt a health benefit for the first time in their lives because it was offered by their company. First time users across benefits: 61% for health checkups, 31% for gym memberships, 74% for mental health.
- This extends to family members too. Dependent share across benefits are as follows: 37% of doctor consultations, 24% of OPD claims, 38% for mental health.
- This increased in adoption, coupled with a wide range of healthcare benefits, has translated to great outcomes for Indians:
- 70% of users booking repeat health checkups saw a clinically significant improvement in biomarkers across nutrition, metabolic health, and cardiovascular health.
- These health outcomes have a significant impact on claims incidence.
- Plum performed a 5-year matched pair comparison of companies offering healthcare benefits and companies not offering it across claims incidence and ICR.
- Companies investing in preventive healthcare — telehealth, checkups, early screening — recorded 13% lower chronic disease claim incidence. This translates to a ₹480/employee savings during premium, and is expected to compound at an annual growth rate of ~6% over the next three years.
Thoughtful investment in a company’s own workforce is a force multiplier for crores of Indians — productivity, retention, and cost savings all follow from getting that right, not the other way around. Health insurance still reaches under 40% of India, with premiums making up just 0.36% of GDP — a fraction of what markets like the US and South Korea spend. But in those same markets, it was employers, not government mandate, who drove private coverage forward first.
India’s group health coverage is already growing at 23% a year. The standard India Inc. builds over the next few years won’t just define what a good benefits plan looks like — it may well determine how fast the rest of the country gets covered at all.
