The Engagement Metrics Brokers Should Report to Clients (and What Good Looks Like)

"We placed the plan" is not a story at renewal — every competing broker placed a plan too. The brokers who keep groups report engagement: whether employees actually enrolled, elected meaningfully, and used the accounts. Here are the six metrics worth reporting, why quarterly beats annual, and what good numbers look like.

Why Placement Isn't a Renewal Story

At renewal, an incumbent broker who can only say "the plan ran and premiums did what premiums do" is defending on price alone. Any challenger with a thinner spreadsheet can win that meeting. But a broker who shows up quarterly with participation trending up, elections rising toward the IRS max, and a FICA savings number attached to their own recommendations has changed what the client is buying: not a plan, an outcome — and outcomes don't get rebid over 20 basis points.

The good news is that account-based benefits (HSA, FSA, HRA) throw off exactly this kind of data. Most administrators just never surface it, and most brokers never ask.

The Six Metrics

Metric	What it tells the client	Where it comes from
Participation rate	Share of eligible employees who opened/elected at all	Administrator enrollment data
Average election vs IRS max	Whether participants believe in the benefit enough to fund it	Election file vs 2026 limits
Monthly active use	Whether accounts are living tools or dead balances	Card swipes / claims per month
Found eligible spend	Dollars of qualifying expenses surfaced per employee	Expense discovery tooling
Forfeiture rate (FSA)	Whether the benefit is burning trust at year-end	Administrator forfeiture report
FICA delta	Employer dollars saved from pre-tax payroll growth	7.65% × incremental pre-tax contributions

A few notes on the less obvious ones:

• Average election vs IRS max is the highest-signal number on the list. The 2026 limits are $4,400 individual / $8,750 family for HSAs and $3,400 for health FSAs; the gap between average election and the cap is unrealized tax savings for employees and unrealized FICA savings for the employer.
• Found eligible spend is the newest metric and the most persuasive with employees: it answers "would I actually use this money?" with their own transaction history. Hammock's expense discovery finds $3,000 per employee on average.
• FICA delta converts everything above into CFO language. Every incremental pre-tax dollar an employee elects saves the employer 7.65% — and unlike premium negotiation, it's a savings line the broker's engagement work directly created.
• Forfeiture rate is the trust gauge; if it's rising, next year's elections will fall. It deserves its own client conversation.

Quarterly, Not Annual

Annual reporting means discovering in month eleven that participation flatlined in month two. Quarterly cadence keeps the numbers small and fixable: a Q1 dip in active use becomes a Q2 education push, not a renewal-eve apology. It also gives you four client touchpoints a year that aren't a bill or a renewal — which, for relationship defense, is worth as much as the data itself.

A workable quarterly one-pager: the six metrics, trend arrows, one insight, one action. Ten minutes to present. That's the whole product.

What Good Numbers Look Like

Benchmarks in this space are mostly folklore, so anchor on a real case instead — with the caveat that actual results vary with participation and election mix. At a $1B tech company that moved open enrollment onto Hammock:

• Elections at the IRS max: 64%, up from roughly 20% under the prior administrator
• Average committed per participant: $5,561, up 38% from $4,039
• Employer FICA delta: $100+ per participant per year on the incremental contributions alone ($234 per employee measured across total elections)
• Enrollment execution: six days, all-digital

Extrapolating that FICA delta: roughly $23,400/yr at 100 employees, ~$117,000/yr at 500, ~$468,000/yr at 2,000 — hedged the same way, since election mix drives everything. Across observed Hammock customers, a 38% lift in pre-tax contributions translates to $100+ of employer FICA savings per participant per year on the increase alone, with employees saving 30–50% on wellness spend routed through pre-tax accounts.

If your client's numbers are far from these, that's not an indictment — it's the agenda for the next two quarters. (One diagnostic worth reading first: why employees don't use HSA benefits.)

Getting the Data

This is where administrators differ sharply. Legacy platforms often can't produce election distribution or active-use data without a ticket and a two-week wait — the same case-study employer's previous administrator had reported the employer match as $0 all year, which is the kind of data quality you're building reports on. When evaluating administrators for a group, ask to see the reporting before you place the business; it's a fair proxy for everything else. (More on that evaluation in our guide to modern HSA administrators.)

How Hammock Helps

Hammock's administration is built to generate these numbers natively: participation, election distribution vs the IRS max, card activity, found eligible spend from AI expense discovery, forfeiture tracking, and the FICA math — clean enough to drop into a quarterly client report. The LMN wellness layer also moves the metrics themselves, because accounts that cover gym, supplements, and recovery get used monthly, not annually.

Broker partners get white-glove support — dedicated account manager, shared Slack channel — so pulling a quarterly report is a message, not a project.

FAQ

Which single metric matters most?

Average election vs the IRS max. Participation says employees showed up; election size says they believed. It's also the metric most directly tied to employer FICA savings.

How do I calculate the FICA delta?

Take the increase in total pre-tax contributions versus the prior year and multiply by 7.65%. (Above the $184,500 Social Security wage base only 1.45% Medicare applies, but for most populations the simple calculation is close enough for a client report.)

What if the client's current administrator can't produce this data?

That's a finding, not a dead end — report what you can get and flag the gap. An administrator that can't tell you election distribution can't help you improve it, which is a legitimate reason to shop at renewal.

Are the case-study benchmarks realistic targets for every group?

No — that was a tech population with strong wages and a well-run digital enrollment. Treat 64%-at-max as an existence proof of what execution can do, not a promise. Direction of trend matters more than hitting any specific number.

The Bottom Line

Six numbers — participation, election vs max, active use, found spend, forfeitures, FICA delta — reported quarterly, turn a broker from a plan-placer into the advisor whose work shows up in the client's P&L. That's the renewal story no spreadsheet rebid beats.

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