Human Resources vs. Human Capital – and Why It Matters

A Quiet Docket, a Loud Signal for Benefits Leaders

The Supreme Court closed its October 2025 Term on June 30, 2026, and for once the biggest story for employee benefits is what the justices didn’t take up. After several years of consequential ERISA rulings, this term was unusually light on benefits cases. ERISA was the only major regulatory area the Court touched at all this cycle.

For CHROs and CFOs, that quiet is deceptive. The decided cases were narrow, but the case the Court agreed to hear for next term, combined with a fast-moving wave of litigation in the lower courts, means the exposure landscape is shifting under your feet even in a slow year. Here is what actually happened, and what belongs on your calendar.

A quick scheduling note. The Court runs on a fixed rhythm, opening the first Monday in October and running through late June. This term began October 6, 2025 and wrapped June 30, 2026. The next term, October Term 2026, begins October 5, 2026. That is when the case worth watching most closely will be argued.

The One Decided Case: M&K Employee Solutions

The term’s marquee ERISA decision was M&K Employee Solutions, LLC v. Trustees of the IAM National Pension Fund, decided unanimously on May 21, 2026, in an opinion by Justice Jackson.

The case concerned multiemployer pension plan withdrawal liability, the “exit tax” an employer owes when it stops contributing to an underfunded union pension plan. The narrow legal question: must the plan’s actuary lock in the actuarial assumptions, most importantly the interest and discount rate, as of the measurement date, or can those assumptions be set later? The Court held that assumptions do not have to be fixed on the measurement date. The measurement date fixes the facts about the plan, its assets, its participant data, but the actuary may select assumptions afterward, so long as they rest on information available as of that date.

Why It Matters, and to Whom

If your organization participates in a multiemployer plan, this decision removes a timing-based defense to a withdrawal liability assessment. The stakes are not theoretical. In the underlying dispute, a single change in the discount rate swung the fund’s unfunded liability from roughly $500 million to $3 billion. Employers can still challenge an assumption as unreasonable on the merits, but they can no longer argue it is invalid simply because it was adopted after the measurement date.

For CFOs with any multiemployer exposure, the practical takeaway is straightforward: keep current withdrawal-liability estimates in hand and treat assumption volatility as a live balance-sheet risk, not a historical footnote.

For the majority of employers, those sponsoring 401(k) or other single-employer defined contribution plans, M&K is informative but not directly actionable. Which is exactly why the next case deserves your attention.

The Case to Watch: Anderson v. Intel

In January 2026, the Court granted review in Anderson v. Intel Corp. Investment Policy Committee. This is the decision benefits leaders should be tracking closely. It has not yet been argued. It sits on the October 2026 calendar, with a ruling expected sometime in 2027.

The question is deceptively technical but enormously consequential: when a 401(k) participant sues plan fiduciaries for imprudently selecting or retaining an underperforming investment, must the complaint identify a “meaningful benchmark,” an appropriate comparator investment, to survive a motion to dismiss?

That pleading standard is the gate through which nearly every fiduciary-breach class action must pass. Set it high, and many suits end early, before discovery costs accumulate. Set it low, and far more cases proceed into expensive, prolonged litigation. However the Court rules, it will reset the cost-benefit calculus of fiduciary litigation for every plan sponsor in the country.

The action item here is concrete: put Anderson v. Intel on your 2027 watch list now, and revisit your investment-monitoring documentation in anticipation. Whatever standard the Court ultimately adopts, employers with a thin or informal fiduciary process will be the most exposed.

The Real Action Is Below the Supreme Court

If you read only the SCOTUS headlines, you would miss the trend most relevant to your benefits program today. Two lines of litigation are accelerating in the lower courts, and both are worth understanding now, well before either reaches the Supreme Court, if either ever does.

Voluntary and Ancillary Benefits Litigation

Building on the Court’s 2025 decision in Cunningham v. Cornell, last term’s ruling that lowered the bar for pleading an ERISA prohibited-transaction claim, plaintiffs’ firms have begun filing class actions over voluntary benefit programs such as accident, critical illness, and hospital indemnity coverage.

The theory: that employers failed to ensure premiums were reasonable, and that the brokers and consultants who placed those products acted as plan fiduciaries and engaged in self-dealing through undisclosed commissions. Notably, these suits name not just employers but their advisors directly.

The first line of defense is the Department of Labor’s voluntary-plan safe harbor. If your voluntary offerings do not satisfy all four of its requirements, ERISA fiduciary duties may attach to programs you never treated as fiduciary plans. That means the governance, documentation, and disclosure standards you apply to your 401(k) may now be relevant to your accident and critical illness offerings as well.

Forfeiture Litigation

A growing set of cases is challenging whether plan sponsors may use forfeited employer contributions, the unvested employer match dollars left behind when an employee departs before vesting, to offset future company contributions, rather than using those dollars to defray plan administrative expenses.

The Supreme Court has not taken these cases up, but the circuits are actively sorting through conflicting outcomes, and the resolution will shape a routine plan-design choice that most sponsors make without a second thought. If your plan document allows forfeitures to offset future employer contributions, a common and previously uncontroversial provision, it is worth understanding where the circuit split currently stands and how exposed your specific plan language is.

On the Health Side: A Notable Non-Decision

In January 2026, the Court declined to wade in. It denied review in Guardian Flight v. Health Care Service Corp., leaving intact a lower court ruling that there is no private right of action to enforce arbitration awards under the No Surprises Act’s dispute-resolution process. It’s a quiet development, but a meaningful data point for any employer managing surprise-billing and network-adequacy issues. The enforcement mechanism for No Surprises Act arbitration outcomes remains narrower than some plan sponsors may have assumed.

What to Do Before October

A light term is a planning window, not a reprieve. Three concrete moves worth making before the Court reconvenes:

• Document your fiduciary process for both retirement and welfare plans. Courts increasingly judge prudence by process, not by hindsight outcomes. Regular committee meetings, engagement of outside expertise, and documented ongoing monitoring are what hold up under scrutiny, for your 401(k) and increasingly for your health and ancillary plans as well.

• Inventory your voluntary and ancillary programs against the DOL safe harbor. Scrutinize the commissions your brokers and consultants earn on accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity, and similar products. Confirm all four safe harbor requirements are met, and ask directly whether your advisors are being compensated in a way that could be characterized as self-dealing.

• Calendar Anderson v. Intel for the 2026 to 2027 term. Pressure-test your investment-monitoring file against a “meaningful benchmark” standard now, while you have time to strengthen it before a ruling potentially resets the litigation landscape.

The Justices Return October 5. The Quiet Won’t Last.

This term’s light docket should not be mistaken for reduced risk. The lower courts are actively developing theories around voluntary benefits, forfeitures, and fiduciary process that will shape benefits litigation for years regardless of whether the Supreme Court ever weighs in directly. And the one case already on next term’s calendar, Anderson v. Intel, has the potential to reset how every fiduciary-breach claim in the country gets pleaded and litigated.

Benefits compliance is not a once-a-year exercise triggered by a Supreme Court ruling. It is an ongoing discipline of documentation, benchmarking, and process, and the employers best positioned heading into next term are the ones treating it that way now.

Mployer’s benefits rating evaluates plan design and employer investment across Medical, Ancillary, Leave, and Retirement, giving CHROs and CFOs a documented, benchmarked view of how their plans compare to a custom cohort. That is precisely the kind of process discipline courts are increasingly looking for.

This is also where Mployer Insights+ does double duty. Running an Insights+ review produces the kind of independent, third-party documentation that speaks directly to ERISA’s prudent expert standard under Section 404(a)(1)(B). The report benchmarks your plan against a custom cohort matched by size, region, and industry, which gives you a data-driven basis for evaluating whether your costs and plan design fall within a reasonable market range under the cost reasonableness standard in Section 404(a)(1)(A).

It also addresses the duty to monitor under Section 404(a)(1), which is an ongoing obligation, not a one-time exercise at plan inception. An annual Insights+ re-rating establishes exactly the kind of recurring, documented review cadence that obligation calls for, with a written output each cycle that shows the analysis was conducted. Because the report is produced by an independent third party with no carrier or broker relationship to the plan being evaluated, it also speaks to the independence of assessment that the prudent expert standard implies.

None of this is a substitute for legal advice, and plan sponsors should work with qualified ERISA counsel to confirm all applicable obligations are identified and satisfied. But for CHROs and CFOs looking to strengthen their fiduciary process ahead of a term where the lower courts are actively raising the bar on documentation, an annual Insights+ review is a concrete, repeatable way to build that record.

See how your benefits package compares to your custom cohort at MployerAdvisor.com.

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_Sources

_{M&K Employee Solutions, LLC v. Trustees of the IAM National Pension Fund, decided May 21, 2026 (unanimous, opinion by Justice Jackson).}

_{Anderson v. Intel Corp. Investment Policy Committee, certiorari granted January 2026; argument calendared for October Term 2026.}

_{Cunningham v. Cornell University, decided 2025 (prior term).}

_{Guardian Flight v. Health Care Service Corp., certiorari denied January 2026.}

_{American Bar Association, October 2025 Term preview.}

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July brings major updates across Insights+, Catalyst, and Vista, focused on helping our partners work faster with more automation, deeper intelligence, and expanded AI capabilities, from instant benchmarking reports and smarter prospecting to more flexible reporting. Explore the updates below.

Insights+

• Automated Report Generation — Insights+ reports now generate automatically the moment a request is submitted.

• Redesigned Report View — The report now renders natively in the browser: cleaner, more readable, and a closer match to the final output.

• Real-Time Edits — You can instantly edit and generate reports in real-time. No more wait periods or help needed to edit and generate a new report.

• Strategic Recommendations in Mployer AI — Generate consultative, mode-specific recommendations directly in the report's AI panel across six modes — General, Cost Strategy, Plan Design, Coverage Gaps, Funding Strategy, and Underwriter Notes — then refine with follow-ups before sharing with a client.

• Add Medical Plans on Upload Documents Flow — The "Do you have another medical plan?" question is now available on the Upload Documents flow, matching the flexibility already in Manual Entry.

Catalyst

• AI-Powered PDF Export — A dynamic PDF export is now available from each company profile page. Choose between an Executive Summary or Full Report format, with content automatically tailored to the employer's available data, surfacing the most relevant sections, charts, and insights for each company.

• Commercial P&C Data on Company Snapshot — The Company Snapshot now includes Commercial P&C Broker and Carrier Display Cards, giving you a consolidated view of an employer's commercial relationships without leaving the snapshot.

• Commercial Lines Insights for Licensed Users — Users with a commercial license now see a Commercial Lines Insights section on the Opportunity & Signals tab, surfacing filing information from Commercial P&C data alongside benefits context.

• Advanced Salesforce Entity Matching — Send-to-Salesforce now supports more precise account linking through advanced entity matching. A token-sharing fix also means one admin's Salesforce connection now covers the whole account.

• Retirement Plan Quality Queries — The AI assistant can now answer questions about retirement plan quality, advisor relationships, and compliance status, extending natural language search into the retirement vertical.

• Broker Classifier Filters — Filter brokers by scope (national vs. regional), retirement advisor status, and commercial lines activity, making it easier to ask targeted questions about broker specialization and positioning.

• Broker Column on Commercial P&C Results — The Commercial P&C results page now shows a Broker column, so commercial broker relationships are visible directly from the search grid.

Vista

• Simpler, More Flexible Report Generation — Upload a client's benefits and carrier documents, now several at once, and Vista builds a structured, broker-branded financial report from what's provided, without requiring every detail upfront. The output adapts to the documents you have, so you can generate a report for any group.

• The Mployer Assistant, Inside Every Report — Every report now includes an AI assistant panel where you can ask questions about a client's numbers and get instant, report-grounded answers and talking points, pulled directly from the report.

• A Redesigned Workspace — Vista is now built around a cleaner three-panel layout: quick actions on the left, your reports and report history in the center, and at-a-glance stats with search and filtering.

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Vision Benefits: The Most Widely Offered Ancillary Benefit Employers Get the Least Credit For

Vision is the most commonly offered ancillary benefit in employer-sponsored plans. In fact 89% of employers offer it nationally, higher than dental, higher than life insurance, and higher than any voluntary benefit. And yet vision is also one of the most underfunded benefits in the market. The average employer contributes $3 per month toward a single employee’s vision premium. For a family, the average is $6.

That disconnect: near-universal offer rate, near-zero employer contribution, is the central story in vision benefits today. Employees enroll in vision at a 74% rate when it’s offered, making it a high-utilization benefit. But the financial signal most employers are sending through their contribution level is that vision is an afterthought: available, but not invested in. This piece covers the national benchmarks on offer rates, plan structure, contributions, coverage design, and the carrier market so employers can see exactly where their vision program stands.

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Offer Rates and Plan Structure

Vision is offered by 89% of employers nationally the highest offer rate of any ancillary benefit. Among those who offer it, 74% of eligible employees enroll. That utilization rate is significant: nearly three out of four employees who are given access to vision coverage use it, which means the benefit is genuinely visible to your workforce. Employees notice when they use a benefit and when their coverage is adequate or not.

On plan structure, vision is even simpler than dental. A strong majority of employers offer a single vision plan 95% nationally. Two-plan structures are rare, and three or more plans are essentially nonexistent. Vision plan design is standardized enough that a single well-designed plan serves most workforce demographics without requiring the complexity of a buy-up option. The decision is less about how many plans to offer and more about whether the single plan you offer is adequately structured.

Employer Contribution: A Market-Wide Gap

Vision employer contributions are low across the board, and that’s not unique to any particular employer it’s a market-wide pattern. The national breakdown:

• 17% of employers pay 100% of the vision premium (full contribution)

• 42% of employers pay a portion of the premium (partial contribution)

• 41% of employers pay nothing toward the vision premium (no contribution)

The 41% contributing nothing stands out it’s materially higher than the comparable figure for dental (26%). Nearly half of all employers offering vision are passing the entire cost to employees. Among those who do contribute, the averages are modest: $3 per month for single coverage and $6 per month for family coverage, representing 50% of the single premium and 36% of the family premium.

The total vision premium is low enough that the contribution gap may seem inconsequential in isolation: $7 per month for single coverage, $21 per month for family. But the contribution pattern sends a signal that employees read into the broader benefits package. An employer covering 50% of a $7 single premium a $3.50 monthly contribution is technically contributing, but the gesture is so small it barely registers. Employers who cover vision premiums in full, or contribute at a meaningful level, stand out against a market where most employers are doing the minimum.

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Plan Design: What Vision Coverage Actually Covers

Vision benefits are structured around a set of specific coverage elements: the annual eye exam, corrective lenses (glasses or contacts), and frames. Understanding how each element is designed and how frequently coverage refreshes is where meaningful plan differences emerge.

Copayments

Vision plans typically use copayments rather than coinsurance at the point of service. The national benchmarks:

• Eye exam copay: $10 (national average)

• Materials copay (frames and lenses): $25 (national average)

A $10 exam copay and $25 materials copay are well-established market standards. Employers above these benchmarks charging $25 for an exam or $50 for materials are meaningfully above the market norm on employee cost-sharing for a benefit that costs very little to provide generously.

Lens and Contacts Reimbursement

For corrective lenses and contact lenses, plans reimburse up to a maximum allowance. The national benchmarks by percentile:

• 25th percentile: $130 maximum reimbursement

• 50th percentile (median): $150 maximum reimbursement

• 75th percentile: $150 maximum reimbursement

The tight clustering at the 50th and 75th percentiles both at $150 reflects how standardized vision reimbursement levels have become. The median and the 75th percentile are the same number, which means the majority of competitive vision plans land at or near $150 for lens reimbursement. An employer with a $100 allowance is visibly below market; an employer at $150 is squarely competitive.

Contacts Coverage

Contact lens coverage comes in two structures, and the difference matters for employees who wear contacts exclusively:

• In lieu of frames: $80 average maximum reimbursement applies when the employee chooses contacts instead of glasses

• In addition to frames: $18 average maximum reimbursement applies when the employee wants both

The in-lieu-of-frames structure is the more important benchmark for contact lens wearers. An $80 allowance is the national average, but contact lens costs can easily exceed that a year’s supply of daily disposable contacts often runs $400–$800 before any reimbursement. Employers evaluating their vision plan should check both the contacts allowance and whether the plan requires contacts to be used in lieu of frames or allows both.

Coverage Frequencies: When Benefits Refresh

Vision plans specify how frequently each benefit type refreshes how often employees can get a new exam, new lenses, and new frames under the plan. This is one of the most variable design elements across vision plans, and one employees frequently compare:

• Eye exams: 96% of plans refresh annually (12 months); 1% refresh every 24 months

• Lenses: 93% refresh annually (12 months); 4% refresh every 24 months

• Frames: 41% refresh annually (12 months); 56% refresh every 24 months

The frames frequency is the most differentiated element. A majority of employers refresh frame benefits every 24 months meaning employees can get new frames every other year. The 41% who refresh frames annually are offering a more generous benefit in a category employees notice, since frames are both a functional and aesthetic item that employees actively choose. Annual frame refresh is a low-cost way to differentiate a vision plan from the majority of the market.

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How Larger Employers Approach Vision Funding

Like dental, vision benefits are fully insured for the vast majority of employers the employer pays a fixed monthly premium, the carrier assumes the claims risk, and the administrative relationship is simple. This is appropriate for most organizations, particularly those without the scale to make self-insured vision economically meaningful.

For larger employers, self-insured vision follows a similar logic to self-insured dental: vision claims are highly predictable, low in severity, and consistent year over year. At sufficient scale, the carrier’s built-in risk margin becomes a visible cost that can be recaptured through direct claims funding. Self-insured vision adoption follows the same employer-size curve as dental low among small employers and growing significantly as covered-life counts increase, with the most meaningful adoption among employers with 250 or more covered lives.

As with dental, the most common path to self-insured vision at large employers is through the medical plan. When a large employer moves to an ASO arrangement for medical with a major carrier, vision is frequently bundled into the same structure administered by the same carrier, using the same TPA infrastructure, with the employer funding claims directly. The major medical carriers UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Cigna, and the BCBS plans all offer vision as part of bundled ASO arrangements for large employer groups. This explains why major medical and group insurance carriers appear alongside dedicated vision carriers in the market share data: the two are often linked at the administrative level for large accounts.

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The Carrier Market: Who Administers Vision Benefits

The vision carrier market divides into two segments: dedicated vision carriers that specialize in vision benefits, and group insurance and medical carriers that offer vision as part of a broader benefits portfolio.

Vision Service Plan (VSP) is the largest dedicated vision carrier in the country by both employer count and participant count. VSP operates as a not-for-profit and has built one of the largest provider networks in the vision market, which is a meaningful advantage for employers with geographically dispersed workforces. EyeMed, owned by Luxottica (the parent company of LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, and Sunglass Hut), offers broad retail network access as a differentiator particularly for employees who prefer the convenience of in-store vision care. Both VSP and EyeMed are purpose-built for vision and offer strong plan design flexibility.

Guardian Life is a major group insurance carrier with a strong vision product alongside its dental, life, and disability offerings. Guardian’s presence in vision reflects its model of offering bundled ancillary products to employers who want to consolidate their ancillary carrier relationships.

The participant-count view of the carrier market shifts noticeably from the employer-count view. Fidelity Security Life and Sun Life appear prominently when measured by participants but are smaller by employer count a pattern similar to what we see in dental, reflecting their disproportionate presence at large employer accounts. Carriers like Sun Life often enter the vision market through bundled ancillary arrangements with large employers who are already Sun Life customers for stop-loss or group life, giving them access to high-headcount accounts without broad employer-count market share.

For employers evaluating their vision carrier, the key considerations are network access (VSP and EyeMed have the broadest provider networks nationally), retail network options (EyeMed’s retail presence is a genuine differentiator for employees who prefer in-store care), and whether bundling vision with dental or medical creates administrative efficiencies. As with dental, employers who are not bundling through a medical ASO arrangement have full flexibility to select the best-fit vision carrier independently.

What Employers Should Be Asking About Their Vision Plan

Vision is a low-cost benefit relative to medical, which means the gaps between a below-market plan and a competitive one are correctable at modest expense. The key questions:

• Employer contribution: Are you in the 41% contributing nothing toward the vision premium? The total premium is $7 for single coverage covering it entirely costs less than a lunch per employee per month. If you’re contributing nothing, the cost to move to full contribution is minimal and the signal it sends is meaningful.

• Frames frequency: Do you refresh frames annually or every two years? The majority of the market is at 24 months, which means annual frame refresh is a genuine differentiator at low cost.

• Lens and contacts reimbursement: Are you at or above the $150 median for lens reimbursement? Is your contacts-in-lieu allowance at or above the $80 national average?

• Exam and materials copays: Are your copays at or below the $10/$25 national benchmarks? Above-market copays on a low-cost benefit are a visible friction point employees notice at every appointment.

• Carrier and network: Does your current carrier’s network cover the geographies where your employees actually live and work? Network gaps in vision are one of the most common employee complaints about vision benefits.

See How Your Vision Plan Compares to Employers Like You

Most employers don’t know whether their vision plan is above or below market because they’ve never seen it benchmarked against employers who actually look like them. A national average tells you very little. What matters is how your vision contribution, your coverage design, and your carrier compare against other employers in your industry, your region, and your size band.

Mployer rates your vision plan as part of the Ancillary pillar score evaluated against a custom cohort matched to your specific industry, region, and employer size. Whether you’re a 75-person technology company in the Southeast or a 500-person manufacturing employer in the Midwest, the benchmark that matters is the one built from employers who are actually competing with you for the same people.

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See how your vision plan — and your full benefits package — compares to your custom cohort at MployerAdvisor.com.

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_Sources

_{Mployer 2025 and 2026 Employee Benefit Plan Design Study, covering 50,000+ employer plans. All Size Average, All Region Average, All Industries.}

_{Carrier market share data sourced from Catalyst, a leading analytics platform for carrier market share in the benefits industry. Data reflects fully insured vision plans; market share patterns are broadly representative of self-insured vision plans as well.}

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