Manual spending account fixes can eat 750 HR staff hours a year, a vendor-linked model estimates
Benefits administration vendors quote a per-account fee. They rarely say how much work their platform will push back onto an employer's HR staff after launch, and that cost can run to tens of thousands of dollars a year.
A report from PYMNTS Intelligence produced with SoFi Tech Solutions attempts to estimate it. The report models the manual cases generated when health savings account (HSA), flexible spending account (FSA) and health reimbursement arrangement (HRA) transactions don't go through cleanly. Its example program has 5,000 active accounts, 5 percent of which need someone to intervene each month. That works out to 250 cases, or 62.5 staff hours a month at 15 minutes each. Over a year it comes to 750 hours, worth about $33,750 at the report's assumed loaded labor cost of $45 an hour.
Those numbers are illustrative. SoFi Tech Solutions is a payments technology provider, and the report tells organizations to use their own exception volumes instead of its assumptions. Even so, the framework gives HR a way to price work that gets absorbed into salaries and never appears on a vendor invoice.
What counts as an exception?
Mostly routine cases: eligibility disputes, reimbursement requests that need follow-up, reconciliation errors between payroll and the account provider. Someone in HR or benefits administration ends up resolving each one, and a single case might take five minutes.
Across a growing market those minutes add up. Devenir counted 41.7 million HSAs holding nearly $174 billion at the end of 2025, and account numbers were up 6 percent from a year earlier.
Employers are also watching benefits spending more closely than usual. In Gallagher's 2026 Benefits Benchmarks survey of 3,717 US organizations, 36 percent reported health plan premium increases of at least 10 percent at their most recent renewal, even after making plan changes, as HRD reported in its coverage of how employers are tightening benefits spending this year. A separate MBWL International survey found 36 percent of global employers are prioritizing automation of administrative processes, according to HRD's report on why rising benefits costs are forcing HR to rethink its approach.
Three benefits administration numbers for the next vendor review
Fees and service-level agreements cover only part of what an HSA, FSA or HRA administrator costs. The rest shows up in three internal figures: how many transactions or accounts need manual handling each month, how long each case takes, and why they happen.
The third gets the least attention. Recurring eligibility-file errors tend to point to a data feed or integration problem. Heavy reimbursement volume may reflect plan design, or employees who don't understand their accounts; 57 percent of HR professionals surveyed by InComm Benefits said they already use artificial intelligence in benefits education, according to HRD's report on how HR is turning to AI for that job. Reconciliation failures and broken data transfers are more likely to trace back to the administrator.
That breakdown can change a price comparison. A lower-cost administrator whose eligibility and reimbursement problems keep landing back with the employer may cost more in practice. Higher technology fees can be partly offset if fewer transactions need a person to handle them.
Testing automation claims
Real-time eligibility checks, automated spending controls and direct application programming interface (API) connections do cut some manual handoffs. Nearly every vendor now describes its platform as automated, though, so the label doesn't tell a buyer much.
A more useful measure is the straight-through processing rate, meaning the share of transactions that complete with no human involvement. Employers can ask vendors and reference clients for that figure before signing and track it themselves after implementation.
The PYMNTS model doesn't say what a reasonable exception rate is. Employers will have to work that out from their own case logs, which many benefits teams have never tallied.
