Health benefit costs among top opex worries, CFOs say

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We haaaaaate to add to the list of things keeping you up at night, but have you ever considered adding healthcare costs to the nightmare rotation?

Plenty of other CFOs have, according to a recent survey from Mercer, a global professional services firm.

Approximately three-quarters of the finance executives who responded said healthcare costs ranked among their companies’ top five operating expense concerns, per the survey, which was fielded during February 2026 and polled 161 organizations.

A third of the CFOs said it was an even higher concern—in their top three. Back in the relative calm of 2024, only 19% ranked health benefit costs as a top three concern, the survey noted.

The authors dubbed the results unsurprising, “given that health benefit cost growth is now running at about double the rate of general inflation—and that the average health benefit cost per employee in 2025 was well over $17,000 (according to Mercer’s National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans).”

According to that survey, the average cost of health benefits is expected to climb 6.7% in 2026, which would put health benefit cost growth at a 15-year high. That’s after accounting for “the cost-saving changes employers planned to make. Before making changes, employers faced an average increase of over 9%.”

“The current elevated cost trend, which began in 2023 following a decade of growth averaging only about 3% annually, is putting mounting pressure on benefit budgets and, in some organizations, beginning to affect broader business operations,” the report noted.

As to cost management strategies, 45% of CFOs favored a very strong or strong emphasis on changes to health plan design, such as raising deductibles, Mercer said. A lower percentage of the CFOs surveyed (38%) would place a strong emphasis on raising the employee contribution to health insurance premiums, Mercer said.

We sure hope CFOs are taking magnesium for sleep.