Supporting Employees Through Comprehensive Total Rewards: Insights from the 2026 Employee Benefits Survey
August 19, 2026 1:00 PM ET
Employee benefits are evolving faster than ever, and employers everywhere are balancing rising costs with the growing expectations of a changing workforce. Benefits leaders are making decisions — such as whether to absorb the price of specialty medications, expand family leave, or embrace new technology — that shape retention, well-being, and organizational success.
Join SHRM's Thought Leadership team for a webinar that explores the key findings from the 2026 Employee Benefits Survey, one of the longest-running annual studies of benefits trends in the U.S., informed this year by data from more than 5,000 organizations. This session offers a look at the latest data shaping benefits strategies across employers of all industries, sizes, sectors, and regions, including:
- Why 88% of employers rated health-related benefits as their top priority and how they are managing the cost of specialty medications such as GLP-1 drugs.
- The substantial expansion of paid parental leave.
- The surge in prevalence of employer-sponsored artificial intelligence subscriptions, up 17 percentage points from last year.
- Emerging trends in professional development, including the rise of executive and leadership coaching.
We will unpack the data-driven insights defining benefits in 2026 and share actionable strategies to build a competitive, cost-conscious benefits package.
SHRM Knowledge Advisors will join the live webinar to answer your questions in real time—right in the chat. If we don’t get to your question during the session? No problem, SHRM members can head to SHRM Connect after this webinar to keep the conversation going with advisors for 30 extra minutes. This benefit is only for members who join the live webinar and not included later on demand.
Meet the Presenters
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Addy Weaver
Addy Weaver, Ph.D., is an Associate Researcher on SHRM’s Thought Leadership team, where she researches trends in employee benefits and benchmark data from thousands of organizations. She holds a Ph.D. in Behavioral Science from the University of Rhode Island and has applied her knowledge of human behavior to studying the social cohesion of teams in the workplace.
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Kathryn Mayer
Kathryn Mayer is responsible for SHRM’s total rewards coverage and contributes to HR Quarterly and All Things Work. She has covered the health and benefits industry since 2011 and has served as senior benefits editor and chair of the Health & Benefits Leadership Conference at Human Resource Executive, editor-in-chief of Employee Benefit News, and executive managing editor at BenefitsPro. Her award-winning stories have been recognized by the Jesse H. Neal Award, the American Society of Business Publication Editors, and the National Federation of Press Women. She is the coauthor of the nonfiction book Disneyland on the Mountain: Walt, the Environmentalists, and the Ski Resort That Never Was (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).
SHRM certification has approved this webinar for 1 PDC toward SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP recertification. A program code will be provided at the end of the webinar.