.svg){kind=small}
.svg)
Key Takeaways:
Article: Is Remote Work More or Less Productive Than On-Site Work?
There is little debate about the significance that the COVID-19 pandemic has had in terms of enabling the rise of remote work and reshaping both the workplace and worker expectations as a result.
There is considerably more debate, however, about the impacts that remote and hybrid work have on worker productivity.
While attempts over the last few years to quantify change in productivity due to remote work have yielded mixed results, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently published what appears to be the most comprehensive analysis of productivity as it relates to remote work yet, which yielded some very interesting insights about more than just remote worker productivity.
The Big Question: How Does Remote Work Productivity Compare to On-Site Work Productivity
The simplest answer to the question of whether or not remote work is more, less, or equally as productive as on-site work is that remote work is on average more productive than on-site work.
As is often the case, however, the simplest answer is not necessarily the most helpful or accurate one. There are a number of different factors that can influence whether remote work is more or less productive than on-site work, including industry type and size, as well as less easily generalized factors such as off-site working conditions, which can vary from one employee to the next.
How remote work is defined as well as how productivity is measured are also crucial considerations that can significantly affect whether remote work is more, less, or comparably productive.
The Rise of Remote Work Across Major Industries
Remote work predates the pandemic, of course, and in fact about 6.5% of private sector workers in the US were already working remotely in 2019.
With the implementation of social distancing policies as the Pandemic spread across the US in the spring of 2020, remote work saw a dramatic upswing in many sectors, with some industries seeing more than 30% increases in the proportion of their workforces that are working remotely.
For the following analysis, the term remote work encompasses both fully remote work and hybrid work arrangements where the majority of work is done off-site.
Remote work rose across all industries in the first years of the pandemic. Although the proportion of employees working remotely fell some as social distancing policies at the workplace expired, remote work still remains above 2019 levels in all industries except the agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting industry. This, however, is in part because that industry had one of the top 5 largest remote participation rates among industries even before the pandemic.
Although remote work participation increased across almost all industries into the early post-pandemic years, that increase has not been equally distributed, and some industries have seen much more substantial increases in remote work than others.
In 2019, there were only 5 industries with more than 10% of their workforces working remotely - professional, science, and technical services (16.5%); information (11.4%); finance and insurance (10.5%); real estate rental and leasing (12.4%); and agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting (13.6%).
By the end of 2022, however, more than 75% of major industries had at least 10% of their workforce working remotely.
In fact, as of the most recent data collection, there were only 5 major industries with less than 10% remote participation: retail (9.4%); mining (7.2%); construction (7.8%); food services (4.8%); and transportation and warehousing (8.8%).
At the same time, there are 4 major industries with more than 30% remote work participation, including 1 with more than 40%: information (38.8%); finance and insurance (37.6%); management of companies (33.0%); and professional, scientific, and technical services (41.4%).
Measuring Remote Work Productivity
While different firms have attempted to use a range of different metrics by which to evaluate remote work productivity, including emails sent, managerial performance reviews, and phone calls logged per hour for example, for the purposes of this analysis, productivity is measured by Total Factor Productivity (TFP).
TFP is calculated by dividing worker output by all the inputs that go into producing that output, which provides a more comprehensive and dynamic understanding of productivity as a function of the varied costs that facilitate production.
For example, TFP takes into account not only the reduced labor costs that can accompany remote work due to remote workers accepting lower wages in exchange for flexibility or because they live somewhere with a lower cost of living, but TFP also takes into account other inputs that can change as a result of remote work, such as reduced office space, utility usage, turnover/recruiting service needs, and on-site/local perks and benefits expenses per employee.
How Industry Type and Size Impact Remote Work Productivity
Industry Type
Each industry has its own set of challenges and opportunities when it comes to implementing remote work, and not all industries have been equally proactive in embracing remote work and/or capturing the maximum productivity/value from remote operational structures.
In that light, it does not necessarily follow that industries with higher TFP scores are better suited for remote work while industries with lower TFP scores are less well suited because the circumstances involved within each industry and how each has approached remote work can be radically different.
That said, some industries have certainly fared much better than others when it comes to retaining and increasing productivity output relative to input via remote work.
Some of the industries with the highest TFP ratio, indicating the greatest year-over-year growth in net output over input as remote work quickly escalated during the pandemic, include data processing, internet publishing, and other information services; funds, trusts, and other financial vehicles; publishing; rental and leasing; and chemical products.
Some of the industries with the lowest (negative) TFP ratios, indicating a loss of productivity correlated with the rise of remote work, include air transportation; oil and gas extraction; metal products; and performing arts, museums, spectator sports, and related activities.
The industries with the largest productivity gains as remote work rose during the pandemic were funds, trusts, and other financial vehicles; data processing, internet publishing, and other information services; computer system design and related services; and publishing services including software.
The only industries to record decreasing remote work productivity during the pandemic as measured by TFP are securities, commodities contracts, and other financial investments; insurance carriers and related activities; and broadcast and telecommunications.
Industry Size
Productivity gains must also be considered in light of industry size, with relatively smaller industries seeing more extreme productivity swings than relatively larger industries.
Some of the larger industries that recorded remote-work-induced productivity gains include construction; real estate; miscellaneous professional, scientific, and technical services; and federal reserve banks, credit intermediation, and related activities.
Some of the larger industries that experienced a net decrease in productivity because of remote work’s rapid adoption are retail; wholesale; broadcasting and telecommunications; insurance carriers and related activities; and ambulatory healthcare services.
In total, across the 61 industries that were analyzed, on average each 1% increase in remote work participation resulted in a 0.08% increase in TFP.
Mployer’s Take
With 7 out of the top 10 industries that recorded the largest increases in remote work during the pandemic all correspondingly increasing their output by a larger margin than their input costs, the correlation between remote work and increased productivity is clear.
That said, remote work is not a one-size-fits-all solution for every given job function or private organization let alone any/every industry.
Certain industries - especially those heavily involving tech, data, publishing, and professional and scientific services - seem to be particularly well-suited for remote working arrangements, while other industries with a disproportionately large number of location-specific jobs like retail, mining, transportation & warehousing, and construction, are less well-suited in general.
That said, within nearly every organization regardless of industry there are jobs that are primed for remote work, even if not every organization in every industry is equally prepared to capture the same value and productivity from remote arrangements where applicable.
Despite the growing evidence of the productivity benefits associated with remote work, however, many organizations may move away from and/or downsize remote programs in the coming years, especially if the job market shifts in favor of employers as it is likely to do.
Larger and older organizations with more established managerial structures may choose to bring employees back to on-site work for a variety of reasons such as fostering collaboration, justifying commercial real estate expenses, and encouraging voluntary turnover in line with planned reductions in the organization’s payroll.
Still, because remote work is most effectively utilized by smaller, more tech-heavy organizations, new market entrants will increasingly rely on remote work to capture the productivity benefits and gain an advantage over the entrenched players in their markets.
As a result, remote work is likely to see an upward trajectory over the long term as successful remote-friendly new entrants grow and absorb an increasing share of the market, but the short-term prospects for remote work growth remain uncertain and may be linked to the greater economy and job market.
As this analysis makes clear, however, on average, remote work is more productive than on-site work, and organizations that are best able to capture that value regardless of industry or organizational size/type can obtain and/or maintain a meaningful advantage over their competition.
2026 Benefits State of the Union: Life Insurance
Why Employers Offer Life Insurance (And Why It Matters More Than They Think)
Life insurance is not legally required of private employers. There is no federal mandate compelling you to offer it. And yet 83% of employers do. That near-universal adoption is not driven by regulation. It is driven by the recognition that a basic life insurance benefit is one of the clearest signals an employer can send about how it views its relationship with the people who work there.
At its core, employer-sponsored group life insurance provides a death benefit to an employee’s designated beneficiaries if that employee dies while covered under the plan. For most employees, particularly those with families and financial dependents, that coverage represents real peace of mind. It costs the employer relatively little to provide. It means a great deal to the employee who has it. And when it is absent, employees notice, especially those at stages of life where financial protection for their families is a priority.
This post approaches life insurance from the employer’s perspective: what you are providing, how to structure it, what the market looks like, how to explain it to your workforce, and what questions to ask at your next renewal. Life insurance rarely wins a job offer on its own. But it is a visible component of a benefits package that candidates and employees evaluate as part of the whole picture.
What You Are Actually Offering: Key Terms and Plan Types
Understanding the vocabulary of group life insurance is the starting point for making good decisions about it and communicating clearly about it to employees.
Offer Rates: Basic Life and Voluntary Life
83% of employers offer basic employer-paid life insurance nationally. Among those employees whose employers offer it, 97% are enrolled, one of the highest participation rates of any benefit. That near-universal enrollment reflects how employees treat basic life insurance: when it is offered at no cost, virtually everyone accepts it. 96% of basic life plans are noncontributory, meaning the employer absorbs the full premium cost.
Voluntary life, offered by 92% of employers, allows employees to purchase additional coverage beyond the employer-paid basic amount. Voluntary life is typically employee-paid at group rates, which are generally lower than individual market rates and, critically, often available without medical underwriting up to a guaranteed issue amount. For employees who want more than 1x salary coverage or whose family situation warrants higher protection, voluntary life is how they get it without going through individual underwriting. Offering voluntary life costs the employer very little in direct dollars, since employees fund it themselves, but it adds meaningful value to the benefits package and is worth communicating clearly at open enrollment.
How the Benefit Is Structured: Flat Dollar vs. Earnings Multiple
Nearly half of employers set life insurance as a variable percentage of earnings, typically expressed as 1x, 2x, or another multiple of annual salary. About a third use a flat dollar amount. The choice between these two structures has meaningful implications for both the employer and the employee.
Flat dollar plans are simple to administer and easy for employees to understand. A $50,000 life insurance benefit is a $50,000 life insurance benefit. The limitation is that a flat dollar amount set years ago may have become inadequate as wages and inflation have risen. An employee earning $90,000 with a $25,000 flat life insurance benefit has coverage that would not cover a year of their salary. Flat dollar plans should be reviewed periodically against wage growth, not just against the carrier market.
Earnings multiples scale automatically. When an employee receives a raise, their life insurance coverage increases proportionally without any plan amendment or administrative action. For employers with meaningful variation in compensation across the workforce, an earnings multiple ensures that the benefit stays proportionally relevant for all employees. The tradeoff is slightly more complexity in administration and in communicating the benefit to employees who need to understand that their coverage changes with their pay.
Among flat dollar plans, the range is significant: from $8,500 at the 10th percentile to $48,793 at the 90th percentile. An employer with a $10,000 flat dollar benefit is offering a benefit that does not cover even a quarter of the median household income. That is a visible gap to employees who are evaluating their financial protection.
The Earnings Multiple Market: One Times Pay Dominates
62% of earnings-multiple plans use exactly 1x salary as the benefit level. 21% use 2x, and 13% sit between 1x and 2x. Only 3% go above 2x salary.
1x salary is the market standard, but it is worth being honest with employees about what that means in practice. Financial planning guidance consistently suggests that individuals need 10 to 12 times their annual income in life insurance to adequately protect dependents over the long term. 1x salary covers roughly one year of income replacement before an employee’s family needs to find another source of financial support. For an employer, providing 1x salary as a baseline and offering voluntary life insurance for employees who want more is a reasonable and common approach. What matters is communicating both clearly: here is what the company provides, and here is how you can supplement it if your situation warrants it.
The maximum benefit cap data shows wide variation across the market. The median maximum benefit under earnings-multiple plans is $321,154, but this rises steeply toward the top: $693,182 at the 75th percentile and $1,416,667 at the 90th percentile. These high caps are most common among plans designed for organizations with significant executive or high-income populations, where a 1x or 2x multiple on a high salary generates a large face amount. Setting an appropriate maximum benefit is a plan design decision that affects both cost and equity across the workforce.
Portability and Communication: Two Places Most Employers Fall Short
Two of the most underutilized dimensions of employer-sponsored life insurance are portability and active communication. Both represent real value that most employees never fully receive because employers do not proactively surface them.
Portability
When an employee leaves your organization, what happens to their life insurance coverage? In most group plans, it ends. But many group life plans offer portability, the option for a departing employee to convert their group coverage to an individual policy or take a portable term policy with them, without having to go through medical underwriting again. For an employee who has developed diabetes, heart disease, or any other condition while employed, this feature can be the difference between being able to obtain affordable life insurance and being priced out of the individual market entirely.
Portability terms vary by carrier and plan design. Some plans allow full portability of the basic benefit; others allow conversion only. Some require the employee to act within 31 days of separation. Employers who know what their plan offers and communicate it proactively at offboarding, not just in the fine print of a benefits guide, are delivering real value to departing employees at a moment when that information is most useful.
Communication
Group life insurance has a 97% enrollment rate when offered at no cost, but a significantly lower rate of employee understanding. Most employees know they have life insurance through their employer. Very few know the face amount, whether it is set as a multiple of their salary, what their current death benefit would be, whether they have AD&D coverage, or whether the plan is portable. The annual open enrollment period is the most reliable moment to give employees a clear, plain-language statement of what they have: your current life insurance benefit is X dollars, which represents approximately Y months of your salary, and you have the option to increase your coverage to Z through voluntary life.
This is not just an employee wellbeing gesture. It is an employer brand decision. Employees who understand and appreciate their benefits are more likely to value their total compensation accurately, which affects retention.
The Carrier Market: Fragmented and Worth Shopping
The group life insurance carrier market is meaningfully fragmented. No single insurer holds more than 11% of employers nationally, and the top four carriers combined cover less than 40% of employers. The All Others category at 63% of employers reflects a long tail of regional carriers, specialty insurers, and smaller national players that collectively write the majority of group life business.
The participant view looks different. MetLife, which ranks outside the top two by employer count, covers 20% of participants by covered lives, reflecting its strength at large-employer accounts with high headcounts. Sun Life’s 12% participant share relative to a smaller employer-count share follows the same pattern: large-account concentration that does not show up proportionally in employer count.
The fragmentation of this market is good news for employers at renewal. There is no single dominant carrier with pricing power, and switching carriers on a group life plan is relatively straightforward compared to switching a medical carrier. Employers who have not formally gone to market on group life in three or more years are worth doing so. Premium rates, portability terms, guaranteed issue amounts for voluntary life, and AD&D inclusion can vary meaningfully across carriers at the same coverage level.
Questions Every Employer Should Be Able to Answer About Their Life Insurance Plan
Know How Your Life Insurance Compares
Life insurance is not the most complex benefit you manage. But it is one where the gap between what employers think they are providing and what employees actually understand and value is consistently wide. The employers who close that gap, by structuring the benefit deliberately, communicating it clearly, and knowing how it compares to market, are the ones who get credit for it.
Mployer’s benefits rating evaluates life insurance benefit levels, plan structure, and voluntary life availability as part of the Ancillary pillar score, benchmarked against employers in your industry, region, and size band.
See how your benefits package compares to your custom cohort at MployerAdvisor.com.
Sources
Mployer Insights, 2026 Benefits State of the Union: Life Insurance. Source: Mployer Insights analysis of 76,000+ employer benefit plans. All Size Avg, 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 life plans; market share patterns are broadly representative of self-insured life plans as well.
AD&D benefit data: Mployer Insights, 2026 Benefits State of the Union. 25th percentile $150,000 / 50th percentile $300,000 / 75th percentile $500,000.
2026 Benefits State of the Union: Disability Insurance
The Benefit That Protects the Paycheck
Disability insurance does not get the attention of health insurance or retirement savings. It rarely comes up in candidate conversations, and most employees give it little thought until they need it. But consider the actual risk it addresses: the Social Security Administration estimates that one in four workers entering the workforce today will experience a disabling condition lasting 90 days or more before they reach retirement age. That is not a rare event. It is a common financial risk that most people are not adequately prepared for on their own.
As an employer, disability insurance is one of the most direct ways you can protect your employees’ financial security when something goes wrong. It replaces a portion of their income when illness or injury prevents them from working, which keeps employees from facing simultaneous health and financial crises at the most difficult moments of their lives. The fact that only 41% of employers offer short-term disability and 38% offer long-term disability nationally means that offering both represents a genuine differentiator in the market, not just table stakes.
This post covers how disability insurance works, how to structure it, what the national data shows about offer rates and benefit levels, and what employers should be asking at their next renewal.
What Disability Insurance Actually Is: Key Terms
Who Is Offering Disability Coverage and Why It Varies
Nationally, 41% of employers offer STD and 38% offer LTD. The majority do not offer either. That gap is concentrated among smaller employers, where the cost and administrative complexity of disability plans is less easily absorbed, and among industries where the workforce skews hourly or part-time and where disability programs have historically been less common.
Industries with higher physical demands, particularly manufacturing, construction, and transportation, tend to have stronger disability offer rates because the risk of workplace-related injury or illness is more visible and the case for income protection is easier to make. Knowledge-worker industries have historically underinvested in disability relative to the actual statistical risk, partly because the risk is less immediately visible when employees are not working in physically hazardous environments.
For employers who do not currently offer disability insurance, the business case is straightforward: an employee who becomes disabled and has no income protection may be forced to leave the workforce entirely or exhaust all personal savings before returning. Disability coverage keeps employees financially stable during recovery, which increases the likelihood of return-to-work and reduces the employer’s replacement and retraining costs. It is both a benefit for employees and a business continuity tool for the employer.
Short-Term Disability: Structure, Replacement Rates, and the STD Benefit Period
Among employers offering STD, 77% use a fixed percentage of earnings as the benefit structure, meaning all covered employees receive the same income replacement rate regardless of their salary. 22% use a variable percentage, where the replacement rate differs by employee group or salary band.
43% of plans replace exactly 60% of earnings, the long-standing market standard. 24% replace 50%, and 18% replace more than 69% of earnings. The remainder cluster in various intermediate rates. A 60% replacement rate means an employee on STD receives roughly three-fifths of their normal paycheck, which for many employees is adequate for a short-term period but creates real financial pressure if the disability extends for weeks or months.
The STD benefit period is how long the benefit continues to pay. The median benefit period at the 50th percentile and above is 26 weeks, meaning the plan pays for up to 26 weeks of disability. At the 25th percentile it drops to 17 weeks and at the 10th percentile to 13 weeks. The length of the STD benefit period matters particularly for cases involving serious illness, injury recovery, or maternity leave, where employees may need more than a few weeks before they can return to work.
For birth parents, STD is the financial foundation of maternity leave. The disability period covers the recovery from childbirth, typically six weeks for vaginal delivery and eight weeks for cesarean. Whether and how the employer structures additional paid leave on top of that STD period is a separate decision, covered in our Leave Benefits series.
Long-Term Disability: Structure and the Handoff from STD
LTD differs from STD in an important structural way: 55% of LTD plans use a variable percentage of earnings, compared to 77% of STD plans using a fixed rate. This reflects the longer duration of LTD benefits and the greater complexity of long-term disability claims, where factors like Social Security offset, return-to-work provisions, and benefit period length interact with the income replacement rate.
63% of LTD plans replace exactly 60% of earnings when a fixed rate is specified, which is the same dominant standard as STD. The consistency of 60% as the market standard across both short and long-term disability reflects decades of actuarial convention: 60% is enough to sustain basic living expenses for most employees without creating a financial incentive to remain on disability rather than return to work.
The most important design question in LTD is how and when it coordinates with STD. The handoff depends entirely on elimination periods aligning correctly.
How the STD-to-LTD Handoff Works: Elimination Periods
The elimination period is the number of days an employee must be disabled before benefits begin. Getting this right is one of the most important design decisions in disability plan structure, because a gap between the end of STD and the start of LTD leaves employees without income during an already difficult period.
For STD, 60% of plans use a 7-day elimination period. This means an employee who becomes disabled on Monday begins accumulating toward their benefit on Tuesday, with the first check typically arriving at the end of the first covered week. 23% of plans use a 14-day elimination period. The most common structure is for employees to bridge the elimination period with accrued sick leave or PTO, which is why the interaction between the STD elimination period and the employer’s sick leave bank matters.
For LTD, 68% of plans use a 90-day elimination period, and 23% use 180 days. The 90-day LTD elimination period is designed to align with the end of a standard STD benefit period: if STD pays for up to 26 weeks (approximately 182 days), an LTD plan with a 90-day elimination period will begin before STD ends, creating a clean handoff with no income gap. Where the misalignment typically occurs is when an employer offers LTD without STD, or when the STD benefit period is shorter than the LTD elimination period. In that scenario, an employee who remains disabled after STD ends faces a gap of days, weeks, or months with no income before LTD begins. Employers should map their own STD benefit period against their LTD elimination period explicitly to confirm there is no gap.
Maximum Benefit Caps: What They Mean for Your Workforce
The maximum benefit cap is where disability plans most visibly fail higher-earning employees. The cap sets an absolute ceiling on the weekly or monthly benefit payment, regardless of what the percentage replacement would otherwise produce.
At the median (50th percentile), the STD maximum weekly benefit is $1,602. Annualized, that is approximately $83,000 of covered income. An employee earning $120,000 per year with a 60% replacement rate would normally expect $72,000 annually in STD benefits. At the median cap of $1,602 per week, they receive $83,304 annualized, so the cap does not bind for that employee. But an employee earning $200,000 per year who expects $120,000 in annual benefits hits the median cap at $83,304, receiving only about 42% of their salary rather than the stated 60%.
The LTD median monthly cap of $8,273 annualizes to approximately $99,000. For employees earning above $165,000 per year, the standard 60% replacement rate begins to be limited by this cap. At the 90th percentile, the LTD cap reaches $16,067 per month ($192,804 annualized), which provides meaningful coverage for higher-income employees. The range from 10th to 90th percentile ($4,073 to $16,067 monthly) reflects the wide variation in how generously employers set maximum benefit limits.
For employers with meaningful high-earning populations, the maximum benefit cap deserves deliberate attention. An executive or senior professional who becomes disabled and discovers their LTD benefit is capped at a level far below their salary has a financial gap that employer-sponsored disability, as structured, does not fill. Executive disability policies and supplemental individual disability insurance are the tools for addressing this, and brokers who work with professional services or technology firms routinely review this gap as part of a benefits assessment.
The Carrier Market
Like group life insurance, the disability carrier market is fragmented with no single dominant player. Mutual of Omaha leads by employer count at 12%, followed closely by Guardian Life at 11%. The participant view shifts noticeably: MetLife and Sun Life each cover 14% of participants, reflecting their strength at large-employer accounts with high headcounts. The Hartford, absent from the top-four employer-count list, appears at 10% of participants for the same reason.
The carriers that dominate disability by employer count, Mutual of Omaha, Guardian Life, and Unum, have strong expertise in the small to mid-market segment and offer integrated STD/LTD packages that are easy to implement alongside life insurance from the same carrier. Employers already working with one of these carriers for life insurance often find that bundling disability simplifies administration and can generate favorable pricing.
As with life insurance, the fragmentation of this market is an opportunity. There is no carrier with enough market concentration to hold pricing power unilaterally, and disability is one of the easier benefits lines to put to competitive bid. Employers who have not reviewed their disability carriers and pricing in three or more years should do so, particularly if their workforce demographics have shifted or if they have grown into a size band where different carrier economics apply.
Questions Every Employer Should Be Able to Answer About Their Disability Coverage
Know Where Your Disability Coverage Stands
Disability insurance is the benefit employees rarely think about until they need it, at which point nothing else matters more. The employers who have structured it well, who understand how STD and LTD work together, who have set replacement rates and benefit caps that actually protect their workforce, and who have communicated the benefit clearly, are the ones whose employees feel genuinely protected.
Most employers with disability coverage know they have it. Fewer know whether it is competitive, whether the STD-to-LTD handoff is seamless, or whether the benefit caps are adequate for their actual workforce compensation levels. A benchmark built from employers who look like you is the starting point for answering those questions.
Mployer’s benefits rating evaluates STD and LTD offer rates, replacement levels, and benefit caps as part of the Ancillary pillar score, benchmarked against employers in your industry, region, and size band.
See how your benefits package compares to your custom cohort at MployerAdvisor.com.
Sources
Mployer Insights, 2026 Benefits State of the Union: Disability. Source: Mployer Insights analysis of 76,000+ employer benefit plans. All Size Avg, 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 disability plans; market share patterns are broadly representative of self-insured disability plans as well.
Social Security Administration: approximately 1 in 4 workers entering the workforce will experience a disabling condition before retirement age. ssa.gov.
State mandatory disability programs: California SDI, New Jersey TDI, New York DBL, Hawaii TDI, Rhode Island TCI.
August Release Notes: Catalyst and Insights
Welcome to our latest release. We are excited for you to try the new features. This release focused on four things: making Mployer AI available throughout every product, rebuilding each product's home page to put the AI assistant front and center, adding new filters in Catalyst to help you find more opportunities, and opening free tiers on all products. Below is a summary of the major changes.
Mployer AI throughout Catalyst
The Mployer AI panel is now available on every Catalyst search grid: Employer, Commercial P&C, Broker, Carrier, Company, PEO, and Retirement. You can ask questions about your results without leaving the search.
The home page search bar has been replaced with the same AI chat. You can ask about companies, OSHA data, or benefits in plain language from the top of the page, and your chat history is retained on your device.
All AI surfaces in Catalyst, including the in-app chatbot and home page search, now run on an updated MCP backend, making every assistant significantly smarter.
Commercial Search
Experience Mod, carrier relationship, modeled payroll, and premium are now available as filters and columns in Commercial Search. OSHA and DOT records show violation gravity, the number of employees exposed, and 12-month trend direction across violations, crashes, and drivers. P&C brokers can now build prospect lists around financial exposure and compliance risk directly in the grid.
PEO Search
PEO Search, Snapshot, and Company Snapshot now show a single view of an employer's most recent PEO affiliation, with full switching history available from the same place. Previously, multiple affiliations could appear as separate records. Filters, columns, and exports now include Filing Source, PEO status, Benefits and Overall Rating, Most Recent Filing, EIN, and NAICS, bringing PEO Search in line with Employer Search.
Export and contact visibility
The export modal now shows your remaining credit balance and the actual record count and cost after exclusions, before you confirm. The "Exclude Previously Exported" option now covers the past 12 months rather than your full export history.
Contact records display an email verification status at all times, and you can filter contacts by that status when prioritizing outreach.
Mployer AI on the Insights home page
You can now ask questions about your book of business directly from the Insights home page. An AI assistant sits alongside your submissions and works against your client data, so you can ask which clients scored below benchmark, which reports are complete, which clients qualify for an award, or "show me completed reports where voluntary STD is offered," and get the answer without building filters by hand.
You can filter submissions by benchmark score, lifecycle state, and award eligibility, run reports from the same view, and export any filtered result to CSV.
Free tiers on all products
Every product now includes a free tier. We encourage you to try out all the resources now available to you.
AI panel on Insights+ reports
The Mployer AI panel on Insights+ HTML reports has been redesigned to match the AI panels in the rest of the platform, with the same layout, controls, and prompt patterns. Generate recommendations and ask any questions about the report and data, and get answers instantly.
Help Center
A new Help Center is live, with a home page, per-product detail pages, and a video tutorial library. Webinars, product updates, a glossary, and FAQs will be added within the same structure.
If you have questions about any of these changes, contact Partner Success or reach us through the Help Center.
.png){kind=small}
%20(1).png){kind=small}
.svg)
.svg)