Employee benefits: your best retention tool doesn't have to cost a fortune
Sep 18, 2026
Attracting good people is one thing. Keeping them is another. The businesses getting this right aren’t necessarily the ones spending the most on benefits; they’re the ones spending it on the right things.
Recruitment gets a lot of attention, but retention is where the real cost of getting benefits wrong shows up. Replacing an employee is expensive and disruptive, long before you factor in the knowledge and client relationships that walk out the door with them. Increasingly, what keeps people, and what attracts them in the first place, isn’t just salary. It’s whether they feel looked after.
That’s where employee benefits earn their place, and specifically the products that don’t always get top billing: Group Life Assurance, Group Income Protection and Group Critical Illness, alongside Private Medical Insurance. They’re often seen as background cover, the kind of thing that sits quietly in a benefits pack until it’s needed. But the numbers tell a different story about how much they’re being used, and how much difference they make when they are.
According to Group Risk Development (GRiD), the industry body for the group risk sector, the UK group risk industry paid out a record £2.69bn in claims during 2025; an increase of £96.7m on the previous year, and the equivalent of £7.36m every working day. Group Life Assurance accounted for £1.825bn of that across 12,730 claims, Group Income Protection £670.7m across 17,403 claims in payment, and Group Critical Illness £190.8m. Behind those figures are real families and real employees who needed that support and had it.
What’s less well known is how much these benefits do before a claim is even made. GRiD’s data shows that 68% of employees who were newly absent through ill health in 2025 were back at work by the end of the year; 5,590 people in total, and of those, 3,920 returned before any claim was made, supported by the rehabilitation and wellbeing services bundled into group risk policies. That includes mental health support, physiotherapy and vocational rehabilitation, available to employees and their managers as a day-to-day resource rather than something that only kicks in during a crisis.
GRiD data shows what people are claiming for. Cancer was the leading cause of new claims across all three product lines. But mental illness accounted for 20% of new income protection claims; second only to cancer, which tells you something about the pressures on a working-age workforce, and about where the embedded support is most likely to be used.
That’s the part worth remembering when you’re weighing up whether benefits like these are worth the investment. Group Life, Income Protection and PMI aren’t just financial safety nets; they’re active tools for keeping people well and getting them back to work sooner when things go wrong. For a growing number of employees, especially those with families or financial commitments, that kind of protection is now a genuine factor in deciding where to work and whether to stay.
None of this needs to be complicated or expensive to get right. A well-structured benefits package doesn’t mean offering everything to everyone. It means understanding what your workforce values and building a package around that, then making sure people know it’s there and understand how to use it. A benefit nobody remembers they have isn’t doing its job.
Michael Houchill, Head of Health and Protection at Jensten Insurance Brokers (part of the Jensten Group), says: “The conversation I have most often is with an employer who thinks their benefits package is a cost line, when actually it’s doing work for them every week. The support built into group risk policies- early intervention, mental health support, help getting someone back to work- is used far more than the claims are, and it’s usually the part nobody knows they’re paying for. The employers who get the most from their package aren’t the ones spending the most. They’re the ones whose people know what they’ve got and how to use it.”
If it’s been a while since you looked at what your benefits package is actually achieving for recruitment, retention and wellbeing, now’s a good time to ask the question, and to check whether your people know what’s already available to them.
Get in touch with your Account Executive about what your current package is, and isn’t, doing for you.
Source: Group Risk Development (GRiD), 2025 industry claims data, published June 2026, grouprisk.org.uk (see below).
