Home/How Benefits Decoder works
The three steps, what you need before you start, and what happens to your benefits guide afterwards.
Benefits Decoder works in three steps. You answer a few questions about who you are covering and the care you expect, you give it your employer's benefits guide, and it prices every plan in that guide against your answers and names the one that costs you least.
The whole thing takes a few minutes and there is nothing to install and no account to create. The order matters: the questions come first, because the answers are what turn a guide full of tables into a single number per plan.
Your employer's benefits guide or summary of benefits, and a few minutes. If you do not have the document yet, the free calculators will still show you how the math works.
Whatever HR sent you is almost certainly enough. It is usually a PDF called something like 2027 Benefits Guide or Summary of Benefits and Coverage, and it is the document with the tables of premiums, deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums in it.
Who you are covering, your age bracket, the care you expect this year, and how comfortable you are carrying a larger deductible in exchange for a lower premium. That is all, and none of it is tied to a name.
There is no name field, no email field and no account, because the arithmetic does not need one. Your answers stay in your browser and are used only to run the math.
You can upload the PDF, paste the text, or type the plans in by hand. If you upload a PDF it is read inside your own browser and the file itself never leaves your computer.
Only the extracted text is sent, over an encrypted connection, to be analyzed once. Typing the plans in by hand works just as well if your guide is a printout or a page on an internal HR site you cannot download from.
Nothing is kept. The guide is read once and never stored, the decoded result is delivered to your browser and then deleted from our systems, and your finished report lives in your own browser rather than on a server.
That is a real tradeoff rather than a marketing line: because we keep no copy, clearing your browser data deletes your report and we could not recover it for you.
One plan named as the winner with the annual dollar gap to the runner-up, true annual cost for every plan under light, medium and heavy use, what a doctor visit, a specialist visit and an ER trip would cost on each, your 401(k) match decoded, and the benefits people forget they have.
It also gives an honest “it’s a toss-up” when two plans genuinely are close, rather than inventing a difference that is not there.
Re-runs are included. The $24 covers you and your spouse, both benefits guides, and running the whole thing again when a better document turns up.
This happens more often than people expect. The first guide is frequently a summary, and the full plan documents arrive a week later with the numbers that actually decide it.
Compare every plan in your benefits guide, or start with the free calculators.