Benefits planning asks HR and Total Rewards teams to perform a task almost no one is particularly good at: accurately predict the future. 

What will employees need next year? Which benefit will become the newest table stakes? Where should you put your limited benefits dollars today so the program still makes sense six or 12 months from now? 

In spite of your best educated guesses, employee needs have a habit of moving faster than annual planning cycles. 

AI is a perfect example: a year ago, employers were starting to think seriously about AI skills; at Compt, we specifically hired for them on our marketing team. Now, employees in all kinds of roles are using their professional development stipends for things like Claude Code, Model Context Protocol training, agent-builder courses, and prompt engineering … not exactly line items most benefits teams had on their five-year roadmaps. 

That’s one reason our new 2026 Midyear Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report is interesting to me beyond the individual numbers. 

The data digs into where employers are putting their money right now, and more importantly, it reveals an employee benefits market moving from simply offering flexibility to designing it more deliberately: adjusting funding, expanding what programs support, and getting better at adapting when “right now” changes. Here’s a snapshot of what we discovered.

Professional development stipend funding doubled.

The median professional development stipend grew 100% from $800 in 2025 to $1,600 per employee in the first half of 2026. The share of Compt customers offering these professional development benefits also rose from 20% to 25%, the largest increase among major stipend categories. 

And as I mentioned, AI is changing what exactly that money buys.

For employees using flexible professional development stipends, 18% of spend went toward AI-related tools and learning. That compares with 11% in more structured programs, such as tuition reimbursement and employees using Professional Development Pro™.   

I read that as proof of how quickly learning needs can change. Employees aren’t waiting for a three-year curriculum to catch up; they’re using their stipend funding on the course, tool, subscription, or new skill they need to excel at their jobs right now. 

That’s exactly where flexible funding wins. When you have a professional development stipend structure capable of supporting whatever comes next, you don’t have to predict next year’s must-have skill.

65% of Compt customers now use an all-inclusive LSA.

Speaking of flexibility, nearly two-thirds of Compt customers now offer an all-inclusive Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA), and the median annual funding level is $1,200 per employee. 

The 65% itself looks stable. It certainly isn’t a dramatic change. That’s what intrigued me about it. 

Flexible benefits are no longer an experiment companies keep pinning to the side of their benefits stack. The all-inclusive LSA is now established benefits infrastructure, and the benefits categories employers choose to offer within it keep changing. 

This year, Treat Yourself, our broadest and most flexible LSA category, moved from outside the top 10 to the No. 1 spot. We’re also beginning to see employers cover GLP-1 medications and other weight-management expenses inside existing LSAs and wellness programs rather than creating an entirely new standalone benefit. 

That’s the model I expect to keep winning for HR and Total Rewards teams: build the structure, then adjust what it supports to adapt to your workforce’s specific and ever-changing needs. It’s a less stressful approach than asking HR to find, vet, implement, communicate, and administer a one-off benefit or point solution every time the world changes.

More access doesn’t necessarily require more spending.

Another fascinating observation? Commuter stipend adoption among employers rose from 7.6% to 9% of Compt customers in the first half of 2026, even as median annual funding fell 23%, from $2,400 to $1,860. Cell and internet benefits and food stipends followed the same basic pattern: more employers made them available, all while the typical funding levels declined. 

To me, that’s another sign of a maturing market. Employers aren’t simply throwing more money (or more point solutions) at every new need; rather, they’re finding ways to expand practical support while keeping their budgets under control. When the market requires it, they’re reducing the funding behind a benefit without taking the benefit away entirely. 

Flexible stipends and LSAs give employers that kind of room to adjust. Funding can move up or down as your budget and your workforce’s needs change, while you retain access to the types of support that matter to you and your people. In a challenging economy with an evolving job market, that might mean increasing investment quickly to meet emerging needs, like with professional development and AI stipends, or making practical benefits more widely available without dramatically increasing the dollars behind them. 

So, what should you actually budget for an LSA or stipend?

After nearly nine years at the helm of Compt, I know there’s no universal right number for your stipend budget, but there are several excellent reference points. 

Company size is one: Average annual stipend funding per employee is $1,642 among companies with fewer than 100 employees, $1,167 among companies with 100–1,000 employees, and $695 among companies with more than 1,000 employees. 

Download the report to learn the overall average and more helpful points of comparison.

And a note for anyone Googling (or asking AI) “average monthly wellness stipend” and hoping I’ll hand you The Number: the median wellness funding among Compt customers is $600 annually. Divide that by 12 and you get $50 a month, but that doesn’t necessarily make $50 the universal monthly benchmark. Employers fund programs on several different cadences, and how often employees receive funding is a program-design decision in its own right. 

So when you read the report, remember that the numbers are all benchmarks, not targets. Ask yourself whether your funding, program structure, and level of benefits administration make sense for your current workforce, and also whether they can keep making sense when that workforce’s needs change or when your headcount grows. 

The goal isn’t to become better fortune-tellers, but to build benefits that don’t require us to be. 

Use Compt’s 2026 employee benefits benchmarks to plan what comes next (and design it right).

Get your copy of the 2026 Midyear Lifestyle Benefits Benchmark Report for the funding ranges, company-size and industry benchmarks, international trends, Compt customer stories, and a five-question checklist to pressure-test your program ahead of renewals.

FAQs: 2026 employee benefits benchmarks for stipends and LSAs