Home/What is Benefits Decoder?
A short, direct answer to the question, plus what it costs, who runs it, and what it will not do.
Benefits Decoder is a health plan comparison platform operated by Decoder Labs LLC. It reads your own employer benefits guide and shows, in plain English, which of the plans you are offered costs you least for the way you actually use care.
Every autumn an employer hands out a benefits guide and a deadline. The guide contains everything needed to work out which plan is cheapest for you, but it is spread across dozens of pages of tables and written in language nobody is ever taught. So most people compare the monthly premiums, pick the smallest number, and hope.
The premium is only part of what a plan costs. What a plan actually costs you is what you pay in premiums across the year, plus what you spend on care under that plan’s rules, minus anything your employer contributes to an HSA. Change how much care you use and a different plan wins. Benefits Decoder runs that arithmetic on every plan in your guide, for your situation, and tells you which one comes out ahead and by how much.
$24, paid once. That covers you and your spouse, including both benefits guides, plus re-runs. There is no subscription and no account.
One price, one product. There are no tiers to choose between and nothing is held back behind a higher plan. The five calculators and the twelve guides on this site are free and require no payment or sign-up at all.
Decoder Labs LLC. Benefits Decoder is independent: it does not sell insurance, it is not a broker, and it is not paid by any insurer, employer or broker.
That matters more than it sounds. A tool paid for by an insurer has a reason to prefer one answer. This one is paid for by the person reading it, which is why it will tell you when two plans are genuinely a toss-up rather than manufacturing a winner.
No. The guide is read once and never stored, there are no accounts and no names, and the arithmetic runs in your own browser rather than on a server.
There are no tracking cookies on this site, and the analytics we use are cookieless and count visits rather than people.
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 the plans genuinely are close, rather than inventing a difference that is not there.
Not to be confused with similarly named products. Benefits Decoder is at benefitsdecoder.com and is operated by Decoder Labs LLC.
Compare every plan in your benefits guide, or start with the free calculators.