The short version
2026 editionKey takeaways
Each takeaway links to its canonical data row. Reported figures belong to their cited producer; modeled results are labeled as calculations.
- All workers: paid sick leave access: 80% (March 2025).U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- All workers: paid vacation access: 80% (March 2025).U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- All workers: paid holiday access: 81% (March 2025).U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Full time: paid sick leave access: 88% (March 2025).U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Part time: paid sick leave access: 56% (March 2025).U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- 1 to 49 workers: paid sick leave access: 73% (March 2025).U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- 500 workers or more: paid sick leave access: 90% (March 2025).U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- All workers: retirement benefits access: 72% (March 2025).U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- All workers: retirement benefits participation: 53% (March 2025).U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- All workers: medical benefits access: 72% (March 2025).U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- All workers: medical benefits participation: 45% (March 2025).U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- All workers: medical benefits take-up: 63% (March 2025).U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
How does paid leave access vary by worker group?
Access means a benefit is available to a worker. The three leave categories are separate benefits, not mutually exclusive groups of employees.
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| Private-industry worker group | Paid sick leave access | Paid vacation access | Paid holiday access |
|---|---|---|---|
| All workers | 80% | 80% | 81% |
| Management, professional, and related occupations | 93% | 90% | 91% |
| Management, business, and financial occupations | 96% | 97% | 96% |
| Professional and related occupations | 91% | 87% | 89% |
| Service occupations | 65% | 59% | 56% |
| Sales and office occupations | 81% | 80% | 86% |
| Office and administrative support occupations | 88% | 88% | 90% |
| Full time | 88% | 93% | 92% |
| Part time | 56% | 40% | 50% |
| Service-providing industries | 80% | 78% | 79% |
| 1 to 49 workers | 73% | 71% | 73% |
| 50 to 99 workers | 75% | 76% | 74% |
| 100 to 499 workers | 87% | 87% | 90% |
| 500 workers or more | 90% | 91% | 93% |
Occupational, hours-status and size groups overlap. Size means establishment employment, not a company’s total workforce. No private-versus-public comparison is made.
Primary source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — September 25, 2025
How common are retirement benefits and participation?
Retirement access and participation answer different questions: availability across all workers versus actual participation. Take-up uses workers with access as its denominator.
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| Private-industry worker group | Access | Participation | Take-up |
|---|---|---|---|
| All workers | 72% | 53% | 73% |
| Management, professional, and related occupations | 85% | 73% | 86% |
| Management, business, and financial occupations | 90% | 79% | 88% |
| Professional and related occupations | 83% | 70% | 84% |
| Service occupations | 47% | 25% | 53% |
| Sales and office occupations | 77% | 54% | 69% |
| Office and administrative support occupations | 78% | 61% | 78% |
| Full time | 81% | 62% | 77% |
| Part time | 47% | 23% | 49% |
| Service-providing industries | 71% | 51% | 71% |
| 1 to 49 workers | 55% | 38% | 70% |
| 50 to 99 workers | 71% | 45% | 63% |
| 100 to 499 workers | 86% | 60% | 70% |
| 500 workers or more | 90% | 76% | 84% |
Occupational, hours-status and size groups overlap. Size means establishment employment, not a company’s total workforce. No private-versus-public comparison is made.
Primary source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — September 25, 2025
How common are employer medical benefits?
Medical access does not mean that every eligible worker participates. Keep the participation and take-up measures separate when comparing an employer’s own enrollment records.
Scroll horizontally to compare all columns →
| Private-industry worker group | Access | Participation | Take-up |
|---|---|---|---|
| All workers | 72% | 45% | 63% |
| Management, professional, and related occupations | 87% | 60% | 69% |
| Management, business, and financial occupations | 94% | 69% | 74% |
| Professional and related occupations | 83% | 55% | 66% |
| Service occupations | 48% | 22% | 46% |
| Sales and office occupations | 69% | 43% | 62% |
| Office and administrative support occupations | 79% | 50% | 63% |
| Full time | 87% | 57% | 65% |
| Part time | 25% | 10% | 42% |
| Service-providing industries | 69% | 42% | 61% |
| 1 to 49 workers | 54% | 31% | 58% |
| 50 to 99 workers | 73% | 43% | 58% |
| 100 to 499 workers | 85% | 55% | 65% |
| 500 workers or more | 90% | 63% | 70% |
Occupational, hours-status and size groups overlap. Size means establishment employment, not a company’s total workforce. No private-versus-public comparison is made.
Primary source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — September 25, 2025
Are benefits benchmarks legal requirements?
No. These statistics describe survey results; they do not determine what benefits a specific employer must offer. An access rate is not a compliance threshold.
Eligibility, local requirements and individual employment arrangements need separate review. This report does not provide legal or employment-classification advice.
How should a team compare its own benefits?
Create a benefit inventory with a separate eligibility rule, eligible-worker count and enrolled-worker count for each plan. Compare like denominators before interpreting a difference.
This report covers selected paid leave, retirement and medical measures. It does not cover every benefit, benefit generosity, paid family leave or the full cost of a plan.
How this report was built
Methodology and limitations
- We extracted the private-industry columns of BLS Tables 1, 2 and 6 from the March 2025 release. The selected rows compare occupations, hours status and establishment sizes without pooling overlapping categories.
- Access, participation and take-up retain the agency’s definitions. Published take-up rates use unrounded underlying data, so dividing rounded displayed percentages may not reproduce them.
- We do not infer days of leave, financial value, plan quality or retention outcomes from an access percentage. Standard errors are not displayed here; no pairwise significance tests are claimed.
What these numbers cannot tell you
- The National Compensation Survey excludes groups outside its covered employment population. This page is restricted to private industry and must not be relabeled as all U.S. workers.
- Establishment size differs from firm size. Occupational and full-time/part-time categories can reflect different job mixes.
- These are March 2025 observations, verified in 2026, not newly measured 2026 benefit rates.
Freshness and corrections
Maintained by the Workspace369 editorial team. Review annually after the BLS Employee Benefits release. The edition date changes only when the evidence or content is substantively reviewed; it does not change the underlying observation period.
First edition: . Data extraction, source attribution and arithmetic checked for this edition. No independent peer review is claimed.
Found an error or a newer primary release? Send a correction with the source and affected statistic. Confirmed corrections should be recorded in the revision history before republishing.
Primary sources and provenance
Every reported numeric cell links directly to its producer. The downloads include exact table or workbook locators, observation periods, access dates, formulas and input references.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor StatisticsEmployee Benefits in the United States, March 2025: Tables 1, 2 and 6 ↗Published September 25, 2025. Accessed September 13, 2026.U.S. federal government data; attribution requested. No agency endorsement.
Source file fingerprint (SHA-256)
981c5f305989e59eeb6ca791ff3d98603f74922afc72d28c12e90fbade9db10a
Made to be checked, then cited
How to cite this report
For a source-reported statistic, credit the original publisher and link to the exact row here when using our compilation. For a modeled result, cite Workspace369 and include the assumptions. Linking to this page does not make us the original producer of third-party data.
Workspace369. (2026-09-13). Paid Leave and Employee Benefits Benchmarks. https://workspace369.com/research/paid-leave-employee-benefits-benchmarks/. Primary sources and observation periods as listed in the report.