Types of caregiver employee benefits: co-funded, voluntary, LSA-eligible — and the HCE play

The three common structures

Caregiving coordination benefits typically show up in a benefits stack in one of three structures. Each addresses a different organizational appetite for utilization data, employer subsidy, and integration with existing benefits architecture.

1. Co-funded pilot

How it works: Employer and family share the cost of a defined launch bundle — typically a Record Vault + 90 days of dedicated coordination. The employer's contribution is a fixed-budget pool of funded activations (3, 10, 20 employees); the family pays a meaningful co-pay to ensure real engagement. Aggregate utilization reporting only — no individual case details, no PHI, no family specifics.

What you get: Measurable data inside 90 days — activation rate, time-to-first-deliverable, continuation rate after the funded window, employee satisfaction (if surveyed). The structure lets you test whether the benefit moves your retention math before committing to a wider rollout.

Best fit when: You want a defensible pilot with utilization data; you're evaluating whether to add caregiving as a standing benefit-stack category; you have a small caregiver-employee cohort you can prioritize (recent acute event, high-attrition risk, executive bench).

Where it doesn't fit: If you need a benefit that reaches the entire workforce immediately; if you can't justify any line-item cost without prior utilization data.

2. Voluntary benefit

How it works: Averyn is listed in your benefits portal. Employees who opt in pay directly — typically at preferred annual-commitment pricing through the employer channel. Zero cost to the organization. The employer's only role is to make the benefit visible and accessible.

What you get: Access for the entire employee base. Aggregate uptake reporting if desired. No utilization-related cost exposure. Brand benefit of being seen as a caregiver-friendly employer.

Best fit when: You want to add the benefit category without a co-funding decision; you're a partnership / professional-services firm where retention math at the senior level dominates; you have a benefits portal architecture that supports voluntary listings.

Where it doesn't fit: If most of your employee base can't afford the personal portion at any pricing tier — in which case the co-funded structure addresses the equity question.

3. LSA-eligible

How it works: Lifestyle Spending Accounts (LSAs) are an employer-funded flexible benefit category that employees can spend on a defined list of wellness/financial/family services. Adding caregiving coordination to your eligible list lets employees apply LSA dollars to a benefit like Averyn.

What you get: Reaches your entire LSA-eligible population without adding a new line item to your benefits budget. Caregiving coordination is added as one item among many on the employee's LSA menu.

Best fit when: You already operate an LSA; you want to expand its eligible-services list with a caregiving-specific option; you want employees to make their own allocation decisions across the menu.

Where it doesn't fit: If your LSA dollars are already fully committed elsewhere and employees won't realistically have budget left for this; if you don't currently operate an LSA (in which case standing one up just for this is overkill — the voluntary path is cleaner).

The HCE / executive-voluntary play: why this is the sharpest math

The single highest-ROI structure most benefits leaders are missing is offering caregiving coordination as a voluntary benefit specifically positioned for executives, partners, and other highly-compensated employees (HCEs). Here's why.

Caregiving prevalence is roughly uniform across income bands — if anything, HCEs are slightly more likely to be in caregiving years because they tend to be mid-to-senior career, which correlates with parents in their 70s and 80s.¹ What changes at the top of the org chart is the cost of the consequences.

Replacement cost: Replacing a partner, director, VP, or top professional costs 200%+ of annual salary per SHRM benchmarks.² A single caregiver-driven attrition at the partner level easily costs more than a year of voluntary benefit access for the entire firm.

Silent absorption: SHRM Working Caregivers research finds HCEs are statistically more likely than rank-and-file employees to silently absorb caregiving without flagging it to their employer — partly because of the cultural expectation that "I can handle it," partly because they have the income to absorb the OOP cost, partly because they don't want to signal that they're distracted or might leave.³ The cost shows up later as declined advancement, quiet hours-reduction, early retirement, or a quiet move to a more accommodating firm.

The voluntary structure fits this cohort naturally. HCEs can comfortably afford the personal portion of a preferred-pricing voluntary benefit. They don't need the employer to subsidize cost — they need the resource to be visible, vetted, and easy to opt into without a public conversation. A voluntary listing in the benefits portal accomplishes both: the resource is officially endorsed (so they trust it), and accessing it is a private decision (so they use it without flagging vulnerability).

The retention upside accrues to you anyway. Even though you're not subsidizing the benefit, an HCE who quietly stops absorbing caregiving chaos is an HCE who quietly stops moving toward the exit. The retention math works regardless of who pays the line item.

It also works as an explicit executive-benefit-package addition. For partnerships and professional-services firms, including Averyn in the partner-track benefits package is increasingly common — particularly for firms where the partner attrition story has visible caregiving threads.

The bottom line: if you offer nothing else, offer this. It costs zero, it reaches the cohort that's most expensive to lose, and it gets used by the people who would otherwise quietly leave for the firm that does offer it.

Side-by-side comparison

Choosing the right structure for your org

Most decisions come down to two questions:

1. Do you want utilization data inside 90 days? If yes, co-funded is usually the right starting point.
2. Is your dominant retention risk concentrated at the senior level? If yes, the voluntary structure is the sharpest tool — especially as an executive-benefit-package addition.

Many organizations end up running more than one structure simultaneously — a co-funded pilot for a specific high-risk cohort plus a voluntary listing in the benefits portal for everyone else, for example. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Sources

1. AARP & National Alliance for Caregiving, Caregiving in the U.S. 2025. aarp.org.
2. SHRM, Cost of Turnover benchmarks. shrm.org.
3. SHRM, The Working Caregiver: Untapped Potential (2024). shrm.org.