46 North Benefits Gateway
The Pressure Test
How does your benefits spend compare?
Three numbers your unit has already filed with the State of Indiana. The Pressure Test shows you where they sit against real peer units — and, just as important, whether they are solid enough to quote. It takes about two minutes.
1Three numbers you already have
Both figures come straight off your Annual Financial Report in the Indiana Gateway portal, under Disbursements — line D101 Salaries and Wages and line D107 Employee Benefits. Nothing you type leaves your screen unless you choose to send it.
Where the peer figures come from. Every peer percentile on this page is computed from filings made by Indiana units of government to the Indiana Gateway portal — the Annual Financial Report disbursement detail, lines D101 and D107. The reference set holds 1,932 units, of which 863 filed both a salary line and a benefits line and therefore carry a computable ratio. Nothing on this page is modeled, projected, or estimated from a sample.
What this page is not. It is not a savings estimate, and it will not produce one. A benefits-to-payroll ratio and a cost per employee are tools for deciding what to look at first. They do not tell you what a different arrangement would cost. 46 North Benefit Advisors is not legal counsel and not a tax adviser, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, keep, or cancel any product.
The method, in full
The ratio. Benefits spend divided by salaries and wages, both exactly as filed. We compare on the ratio rather than on a per-employee figure because the ratio needs no headcount. The headcount published alongside these filings is not reliable enough to divide by, and dividing by an unreliable number produces a confident-looking wrong answer.
The size bands. A 900-employee county and a two-employee township are not peers. Units are banded by payroll size within their own type, and the number of units in each band is printed on the chart so you can see how thin the comparison is. Bands with few members are shown rather than hidden, marked as thin.
The four checks. A ratio under about 15% almost always means benefits are booked to a separate fund and the filed figure is incomplete. In that case we hold back the per-employee number rather than publish a wrong one. A ratio at or above 60% usually means the benefits line has PERF pension contributions and FICA folded in alongside medical, so it overstates what the health plan costs. A low ratio on a large payroll suggests the covered count needs verifying. And a blank benefits line means the figure was never filed at all.
School corporations. School corporation filings in our reference set do not carry a comparable salary-and-benefits disbursement line, so no peer band is offered for them. The four checks still run against your own figures. We would rather say so than invent a band.
The per-employee comparison. Behind it are 28 Indiana units where we confirmed the headcount against the certified 100R employment report person by person, rather than taking it from a published summary. It is a small reference set, deliberately so. If the headcount you entered is benefits-eligible employees rather than employees actually enrolled, your per-employee figure is a floor, not a true figure — enrollment always runs below eligibility.
A convention worth knowing. Where an advertised budget figure exceeds the adopted one, we report the adopted figure, which is the one that governs.
46 North Benefit Advisors · Indiana ·