The Benchmarking Data Behind a Winning Benefits Business Case

A Reward director puts together a solid case for extending parental leave. It gets a fair hearing, then gets parked for the next planning cycle. Three months later, a strong candidate turns down an offer because a competitor's package includes six months of paid leave the company doesn't match. The business case wasn't wrong. It just didn't have the one thing that would have made leadership move faster: proof that the market had already moved past them.

That's the job benchmarking data does. It doesn't tell you whether your benefits are good. It tells you where you sit against the organisations you're actually competing with for talent, and it turns a vague sense of falling behind into a specific, evidenced gap. Internal data, the kind covered in step one of this series, builds the need case. Benchmarking data builds the urgency case, and a proposal usually needs both to get past the first round of questions.

Falling behind moves budgets faster than getting ahead

Leadership already benchmarks everything else. Revenue per employee, headcount growth and market share get measured against named competitors, not against an internal sense of good enough. Benefits deserve the same treatment, because reward decisions get made the way pay decisions do: relative to the market, not in isolation.

The distinction that matters is absolute quality versus relative quality. "Our benefits are good" is a judgement, and it invites debate about what good means. "Our benefits sit below the market for the talent we compete for" is a comparison. It’s harder to argue with because it isn't an opinion: it's a number.

This works because of how people respond to competitive threat rather than opportunity. Two in five employees would leave their current employer for better benefits elsewhere, even without any change in pay, according to WTW's 2024 Global Benefits Attitudes Survey. That's not an argument for a nicer benefits programme, it's a retention risk with a number attached. Numbers like that move budgets faster than descriptions of workforce sentiment ever do.

Ben's own Global State of Benefits Report tells a similar story from the other direction: even where companies rank benefits engagement as a top priority, many still report low appreciation and low utilisation of what they already fund. Separately, Aon's Global Wellbeing Survey has found that although the large majority of companies globally now run some form of wellbeing programme, barely half are satisfied with the outcomes. Put those findings side by side and the case for benchmarking becomes clear. It isn't enough to know your benefits are reasonable by your own standard. You need to know whether they're reasonable relative to the market you're losing people to.

Four sources worth knowing, and what each one is actually for

Not all benchmarking data measures the same thing, and treating it as interchangeable is one of the fastest ways to weaken a business case. Each of the following has a distinct strength, and a case built on the wrong one for the argument at hand tends to invite the question it was meant to pre-empt.

• Mercer's Global Talent Trends is the broadest lens, covering enterprise organisations across dozens of countries and industries. It's strongest on programme design and personalisation, so it's most useful when the argument is about how a benefits strategy should be structured rather than what it should cost.
• WTW's Global Benefits Attitudes Survey is the most direct read on what employees say actually drives their decisions to join, stay or leave. It's employee-facing rather than employer-facing, which makes it the strongest source for arguments built on attraction and retention risk. Note that WTW rebranded from Willis Towers Watson in 2022; it's the same organisation, and it also runs a separate, employer-facing benefits trends survey worth distinguishing from the employee attitudes data when citing figures.
• Aon's Global Wellbeing Survey is narrower and deeper, focused specifically on financial wellbeing, mental health and inclusion. Aon's UK benefits and trends survey, drawing on over 240 employers, is a useful regional companion when the case needs country-level rather than global detail.
• Ben's own Benefits Benchmarking data draws on data from more than 1,100 companies across 25+ countries, which makes it particularly useful for organisations managing benefits across multiple markets, where global consultancy data can thin out once you get past the largest economies.

A practical note: several of these sit behind paywalls or require survey participation to access the full dataset. Most publish free executive summaries or press releases with topline figures, which are usually enough to support a specific claim in a business case, even where the complete report needs a subscription or a completed submission of your own data first.

Spend is the benchmark everyone reaches for, and the least useful one

When people say "benchmark our benefits", they usually mean find out what competitors spend. It's the easiest number to ask for and the least instructive one to act on, because spend alone tells you nothing about whether the money is landing well.

Four comparisons are more useful:

• Coverage: what's actually offered, not how much it costs. Two companies can spend the same amount and offer entirely different levels of protection.
• Utilisation: what employees at comparable organisations actually use, not what's nominally available to them.
• Sentiment: satisfaction scores from comparable workforces, which tell you whether a benefit is landing as intended rather than sitting unused.
• Regional parity: whether the programme delivers equivalent value across geographies, not just in the markets where the company started.

Category-level benchmarking often reveals the clearest gaps. Aon's UK Benefits and Trends Survey 2025 gives a breakdown detailed enough to spot where financial wellbeing or mental health support specifically lag the market, rather than treating benefits as one undifferentiated line item.

Not every gap is worth the budget line

Benchmarking will surface more gaps than any Reward team can realistically close in one cycle, and treating every one as equally urgent dilutes the case rather than strengthening it. Three filters help decide what's worth prioritising.

• Talent pool impact: does the gap affect the talent the business competes for most directly? A gap in a benefit that matters to a small, low-turnover team is a lower priority than one affecting a role the business consistently struggles to fill.
• Internal correlation: does it line up with a retention or engagement problem you can already evidence internally? A benchmarking gap that matches an existing internal data point makes a stronger case than one standing alone.
• Competitive scale: do competitors have a clear, demonstrable advantage here, or is the gap marginal? A one percentage point difference in coverage isn't a business case. A structural absence is.

Benchmarking is directional, not prescriptive. It tells you where to look, not what to build. That judgement still belongs to the Reward team, and it should be weighed against where each gap sits within the wider business strategy, which is where step four of this series picks up.

Different leaders need different evidence

The same benchmarking data lands differently depending on who's in the room, and pitching it the same way to everyone is a common reason strong data fails to convert into a decision.

To a CEO, benchmarking is about competitive positioning: being seen as a leading employer in the markets that matter most to the business. To a CFO, it's about the cost of falling behind set against the cost of closing the gap; spend comparisons matter more here than anywhere else in the case, but only when set alongside the retention and attrition cost they offset. To people leadership, it's about workforce expectations and employer brand perception, particularly in markets where the company is actively trying to grow.

One well-chosen benchmark, matched clearly to the audience in front of you, does more work than a deck full of charts. If a CFO needs one figure, give them one figure, not twelve.

The benchmark shows you where the market is, not where you should be

Ben's own team has been unusually direct about this. In a piece published on Ben's site, VP of Benefit Design and Partnerships Carl Chapman described the typical benchmark report as a “that’ll do” document, the kind that lets a business confirm it's roughly in line with competitors and move on, without ever asking whether roughly in line is actually good enough.

That's the risk worth naming. Benchmarking to the median works if the business is competing for median talent. It doesn't work if the business needs to lead a market rather than follow it. "The market does it" isn't a justification on its own: it's a starting point for a conversation about whether the market's current position is one worth matching at all.

Benchmarking should complement internal workforce data, the kind covered in step one of this series, not replace it. External data tells you what's normal. Internal data tells you what your own people actually need. A business case built entirely on the first without the second risks solving a problem the market has, rather than the one your organisation has.

Benchmarking data gives a business case something internal data alone can't: an external, competitive reason to act now rather than later. But it's one half of the picture. Internal workforce data makes the need case. Benchmarking makes the urgency case. Together, they get a proposal past the point where leadership can reasonably ask, "compared to what?"

From here, the conversation usually turns to numbers of a different kind: what the investment actually returns. That's where the ROI modelling piece in this series picks up.