The building trades in Texas are in the middle of a massive talent war. Whether you are running a heavy concrete operation, a commercial plumbing fleet, or an electrical contracting business, you know how hard it is to recruit and retain elite journeymen and skilled laborers. When you are bidding against the company down the street for top-tier talent, your hourly rate only gets you so far.
To win the talent war, you need a superior employee benefits package. But how do you actually know if your benefits are competitive, or if you are simply overpaying for an underperforming health plan?
If your traditional insurance broker just drops a 15% to 20% renewal increase on your desk every year, asks you to sign it, and walks out the door, you are flying blind. You need hard data. You need employee benefits benchmarking in Texas.
At Association Benefit Solutions (ABS), we have been protecting the skilled trades since 1978. We don’t just pass along arbitrary premium increases; we audit your plan against the specific realities of the commercial building sector. Here is why data-driven benchmarking is the ultimate tool for protecting your margins and out-recruiting your competition.
The High Cost of Guessing
The financial stakes for construction and construction-related companies have never been higher. The average cost of employer-sponsored health insurance continues to climb, eating into margins that should be reinvested into expanding your fleet or securing premium raw materials.
If you are stuck in a standard, fully insured health plan from a legacy carrier, your company is absorbing these massive hits directly to the bottom line. But what is your competition doing?
When you utilize employee benefits benchmarking in Texas, you stop guessing. Benchmarking allows you to compare your current health plan against other mid-market companies in your specific region and industry size. It answers critical questions like:
- Employer Contribution Strategies: Are you paying 80% of the employee premium while your competitors are only paying 65%?
- Deductible Alignments: Are your deductibles so high that your workforce feels like they don’t even have insurance?
- Plan Architecture: Is your competition saving hundreds of thousands of dollars by moving away from fully insured models and utilizing level-funded or alternative/modern health plans?
Lazy brokers hate benchmarking because it exposes exactly how much money they are leaving on the table. They would rather blame “the market” for your skyrocketing costs than do the heavy lifting required to actually fix your plan.
What the market is actually offering in 2026 is covered in how to attract top trades in 2026.
The ABS Advantage: Institutional Buying Power
You cannot afford to build Texas infrastructure while subsidizing the massive profits of insurance companies. You need a partner who understands the tight margins of the job site and knows how to negotiate on your behalf.
ABS is the proudly endorsed insurance partner of associations throughout the state of Texas. Because we represent thousands of lives across the skilled trades, we command massive institutional buying power and true economies of scale.
When we benchmark your current benefits package, we don’t just show you the data—we fix the problem. We pull Texas specialty contractors out of volatile, community-rated insurance pools and utilize exclusive master-contracts to secure heavily negotiated rates on superior coverage.
By transitioning your operations into strategic, level-funded and self-funded health plans, we routinely save our clients 20% to 30% on their total healthcare spend. In a level-funded plan, your monthly costs are totally predictable, your risk is capped, and if your workforce stays healthy, your company gets a refund at the end of the year.
You finally get to keep the savings generated by your own crew.
Employers who benchmark below the median usually close the gap with a stop-loss-protected alternative plan design rather than a richer fully insured plan.
Streamlined Administration Frameworks: We Do the Heavy Lifting
Delivering a competitive, highly profitable health plan is only half of the equation. We know that managing HR compliance, tracking IRS regulations, and dealing with carrier billing takes your focus away from running your business.
Instead, ABS provides robust Administrative Services Only (ASO) frameworks to handle your compliance seamlessly. We act as a true extension of your back office. To ensure your business is fully protected, we provide the following premium, included value-added services at absolutely no additional cost:
- COBRA Administration: Flawlessly managed by our team to keep you compliant.
- 1094/1095 ACA Reporting: We handle the complex IRS reporting so your business completely avoids steep federal penalties.
- PCORI Fee Calculations: Computed and compiled automatically for your records.
- Claims Adjudication: If an employee has a medical claim improperly denied, our team fights the carriers directly so your internal staff doesn’t have to wait on hold.
- Employee Navigator: A state-of-the-art Employee Benefits Administration System provided to streamline onboarding and digital enrollment.
- Access to an Employee Labor Law Firm: Expert legal guidance to protect your business in a highly complex regulatory environment.
You manage the job site. We will handle the paperwork.
Stop Subsidizing the Status Quo
If your broker isn’t actively benchmarking your plan against the rest of the market, they are under-delivering. It is time for commercial builders and the skilled trades to treat employee benefits with the exact same level of financial scrutiny applied to labor estimates, materials, and fleet costs.
You build Texas. We protect your business. Good for your team. Great for your bottom line.
Ready to see exactly how your benefits stack up? Take the guesswork out of your next renewal cycle. Get a Free Cost Analysis from ABS today. Our process is completely frictionless—there are no lengthy applications or complex plan documents required upfront. Simply provide us with a recent employee census spreadsheet, and our experts will show you exactly how our institutional buying power can upgrade your coverage and protect your balance sheet.
Compare against the full plan menu on our employee benefits page.
