One question that I get asked a lot is how long should open enrollment be?
For the most part, I base my answer to this question based on how many eligible employees are at the company.
Here I will walk through how long I would set up open enrollment based on different conditions.
But, before I share what I recommend in terms of number of days an open enrollment should be, I want mention a couple of important things about the open enrollment period.
Open Enrollment Begins on the First Day, Not on the Last Day
One thing I always like to discuss with the groups I work with is that employees need to get in the habit enrolling early starting on the first day of the enrollment.
Employee’s also need to learn that the last day of the enrollment is the LAST day. If they don’t enroll during the enrollment period, then they missed open enrollment.
This is particularly true if you are using either onsite or call center benefits counselors. There is nothing more frustrating than putting counselors to work on a case and for the first part of the enrollment nobody enrolls. Then, when the deadline approaches, everybody wants to enroll and it overwhelms the number of counselors.
Worse, I’ll often get requests to extend the enrollment period to accommodate the poor planning of the employees. There are three problems with extending an enrollment when benefits counselors are utilized. Those are:
- Benefits counselors cost money which someone has to pay for
- Benefits counselors may already be committed to another enrollment once your enrollment ends.
- Benefits counselors need to be trained on your enrollment platform and benefits. This makes it difficult to staff an enrollment after the pre-arranged enrollment period.
So, to combat this, I do my best to let the groups I work with know up front, that we won’t be able to extend the enrollment with counselors. The only way I can extend an enrollment when counselors are involved is if the broker and our team approve the cost of such an extension (and the counselors are available).
As a back up option, if you need to extend the enrollment, I recommend keeping self-enrollment open in place of the counselors continuing to work.
Whether an enrollment should be extended does need to be decided on a case by case basis.
But get in the habit of letting your employees know to enroll early and that once the enrollment ends, it’s over.
Have a Consistent Yearly Open Enrollment Period
One other tip I like to give is to have open enrollment at roughly the same time each year. As an example, if you set your open enrollment period for the first two weeks of November, then follow that approach every year so employees know what to expect if possible.
What are my open enrollment period options?
I typically look at the following open enrollment period options:
- One week – Five business days (Monday – Friday)
- Two weeks – Ten business days (Monday – Friday)
- Three weeks – Fifteen business days (Monday-Friday)
- Four weeks – Twenty business days (Monday – Friday)
- Up until the date payroll deductions need to be provided to the person who sets up these deductions – Used for special off cycle enrollments.
Usually when I use the one week option, I tend to prefer making it extend into a week and a half. The reason is because sometimes you have employees on vacation and staggering an enrollment over a two week period will pick up employee enrollments like that.
While I have business days list above, employees can also self-enroll on weekends up until the deadline
I like the last day of the enrollment to be on a Friday.
Less than 100 Eligible Employees
If your company has less than a 100 employees, I would opt for a one week to one and a half week enrollment period.
This many days is usually just about right for 100 employees.
100-1,000 Eligible Employees
For employers with 100-1000 employees, I like the two week open enrollment period.
1,000-5,000 Eligible Employees
Once you exceed 1,000 employees and up to 5,000, I like the enrollment to be at least 3 weeks long.
However, I will keep the enrollment open an additional week after the enrollment deadline to clean up any outstanding enrollment issues. I will talk more about this in a second.
5,000 and More Eligible Employees
For groups over 5,000 eligible employees, I set up an enrollment period of 4 weeks.
I then keep the enrollment open behind the scenes for an additional week or so to clean up any outstanding enrollment issues.
Unpublished Post Enrollment Admin Period
Once and enrollment ends, I like to have a two to ten day administrative period. This admin period allows me to get enrollments completed that had an issue during OE that needed to be addressed before the enrollment could be completed.
This also allows me to complete a few more enrollments if I need to do that.
Conclusion
The number of days of the open enrollment period lasts depends on the size of your group. Communicate the open enrollment period to all employees, encourage the employees to enroll early and before the deadline.
Once employees know that deadline is THE deadline, they will learn quickly to enroll during the enrollment period and not to ask for an exception post enrollment.
The key though is to communicate this message clearly, multiple times and through multiple channels to the employees. Then there is no excuse for for missing the deadline.
