How every number is computed

BenefitsLedger is a reading of one public dataset: the annual Form 5500 that every U.S. employer health and welfare plan with 100 or more participants must file with the Department of Labor, together with its Schedule A, which lists each insurance contract, the carrier, the premium, and every broker or agent paid on it. The Department publishes the complete filings as bulk CSV files. We download them, keep the health plans, and compute the pages you see. Nothing is self-reported to us and nothing is estimated.

Plan years 2023 through 2025, "Latest" editions of three EBSA files: F_5500 (the main form), F_SCH_A (insurance contracts) and F_SCH_A_PART1 (broker and agent compensation per contract). Part I rows are joined to their contract by filing acknowledgement ID and form sequence. The DOL refreshes these files monthly as late and amended filings arrive; we rebuild on the same cadence and print the build date on every page.

Every benchmark, ranking, broker and carrier total on this site is computed on the most recent plan year the Department has received in full: 2024. Large plans file seven months after the plan year ends, or two and a half months later with an extension, so the following plan year (2025) arrives between the following July and the following spring, and the DOL publishes what it has received around the first of each month. We load that year too: an employer's page shows its 2025 filing once every plan it filed for 2024 has arrived for 2025 with Schedule A attached (so a half-arrived employer never shows a false drop), and the national 2025 figures appear only on pages that say how many filings they rest on and the date the DOL had received them through. Medians are not recomputed on a partial year; the year-over-year change is measured on employers that have filed both years.

Filings whose welfare benefit codes include 4A (health) and whose participant count at the start of the plan year is 100 or more: 58,547 employers for plan year 2024. Insured plans under 100 participants are exempt from filing, so most small employers do not appear, and neither do most governmental or church plans, which are exempt from ERISA. Only filings for plan years beginning in 2024 are used (the DOL's "2024 Latest" file also carries delinquent earlier years filed on the 2024 form, which are dropped), and when a plan year was filed more than once the latest filing is kept. When one employer files several health plans, they are grouped under its EIN and the largest plan sets the headline participant count.

"Premiums" adds earned premium across every Schedule A contract an employer filed, in every coverage line (medical, dental, vision, life, disability, stop-loss). "Broker commissions and fees" adds Schedule A line 2 totals the same way. Self-funded employers pay medical claims themselves, so for them the premium column holds only stop-loss and ancillary contracts, and their consultant fees may be paid outside any insurance contract and never appear here. A contract is flagged as implausible and excluded from every total, with the flag shown on the page, when its compensation exceeds $25 million, or exceeds twice its own premium above $1 million, or its premium per covered person exceeds $50,000, or it reports compensation above $5,000 per covered person with no premium at all. Negative amounts are read as zero. Part I broker rows that add up to more than their contract's Schedule A total are scaled down to that total; where the contract reports no compensation at all, only token Part I amounts are kept. Part I names whoever the carrier paid, including individual agents; that is the public filing. The DOL field is cut at 35 characters and a national brokerage files under dozens of office names, so BenefitsLedger groups the offices of about 45 large firms under one name (the as-filed spellings are listed on the firm's page) and merges a truncated spelling with the full one on the same employer; everything else is grouped exactly as filed.

Rate = (commissions + fees) ÷ earned premium, using only contracts coded as health (medical) coverage, for employers with at least $100,000 of such premium. That restricts the rate to fully insured medical plans, where the denominator means what readers expect; a rate is withheld when any medical contract with broker pay has no premium (an administrative-only contract), and medians count only plans that paid a commission or fee, with the zero-commission count shown beside them. The national median for 2024 is 3.8% on 4,574 plans. A broker's median rate uses only plans where it was the sole broker named, and is shown only with at least ten such plans.

Size bands follow participant counts (100–199, 200–499, 500–999, 1,000–4,999, 5,000+). State is the sponsor's mailing state on the filing. Industry is the two-digit NAICS sector of the filing's business code. Dollar medians include every employer in the group that reported any broker compensation; rate medians include only employers with a computable rate. Medians built on fewer than 30 plans are marked or withheld.

Large plans are due on the last day of the seventh month after the plan year ends, with an automatic two-and-a-half-month extension on request. We compare the date the DOL received the filing with the extended deadline and show the difference in days, so "late" here means late even with an extension; a filing received after the base deadline but inside the extension window is labeled as such. Amended filings carry the amendment date, so no timing is asserted for them. The filing's own DFVCP flag is shown when set.

Whether the plan is any good. Form 5500 reports money flows and headcounts, not plan design, employee contributions, network quality or claims experience. Carrier bonuses and override commissions paid outside a contract do not appear. A "fully insured" or "self-funded" label is inferred from the funding and benefit arrangement boxes on the form and from whether medical premium was reported; mixed arrangements exist. Totals here reach $6.9B in broker pay because dental, life and disability contracts count too; medical-only figures are lower.

• October 24, 2026 — Plan year 2025 loaded as the year still arriving (34,505 employer filings received through September 24, 2026); employer pages show their newest complete filing; benchmarks stay on 2024. Added the statistics pages, a citation sentence and visible update date on every number page, CSV downloads for rankings and brokers, and per-record change dates in the sitemap.
• October 20, 2026 — Rebuilt from the full 2024 and 2023 DOL datasets: 58,547 employers, 12,126 brokers, 1,452 carriers. Added broker, carrier, state, industry and benchmark pages. Retired the 0–100 "fiduciary fitness" score; pages now show the filed figures and peer medians instead.
• April 2026 — First release: 18,132 employers from a curated corpus with a per-employer audit page.

Questions about the method: hello@benefitsledger.com. The official source is the DOL Form 5500 search.