What Do Your Employees' Financial Report Cards Actually Say?

If you offer a financial wellness benefit, the useful question isn’t whether employees are stressed about money. It’s which specific gaps are common enough to be worth designing around. Across 58,406 households who completed a Savology financial report card, three gaps show up repeatedly: more than half have no estate documents at all, about four in ten score below a C on retirement readiness, and fewer than a third carry disability insurance (source: Savology platform data, August 2026). None of those are things an employer can see, and all three are things an employer is unusually well positioned to help with.

The three gaps worth designing around

Estate documents. 53.3% of households have none of the seven basic documents, despite owning a home, being married, or having children. Among households with children, 88.1% have not named a guardian. This is the largest gap in the data and the least expensive to close.

Retirement pacing. The average household scores a C+ on retirement readiness, and the distribution is wide rather than clustered. Plenty of employees are in good shape. Plenty are not. The average describes almost nobody, which is exactly why plan-level participation numbers can look healthy while individual outcomes vary enormously.

Income protection. Disability insurance reaches 29.3% of households. For employers, this is the most actionable item on the list, because employer-sponsored disability coverage is often the only realistic way a middle-income household gets it.

Why the estate gap is an employer opportunity

Estate documents are unusual among financial needs: they cost very little, they don’t depend on income, and they’re almost entirely a matter of getting someone to sit down and decide.

That makes them a good fit for a benefits program in a way that, say, investment advice is not. There’s no suitability question, no product to sell, and no meaningful downside to an employee completing a healthcare directive. The barrier is attention, and attention is the thing a benefits calendar is actually good at supplying.

The guardianship number is the one to lead with in any communication to employees with families. It costs almost nothing, it doesn’t depend on what someone owns, and nine in ten parents in this data haven’t done it.

What the data says about participation

Roughly 57% of households who begin a report card finish it. We’d like that number higher, and a shorter version of the survey, about three minutes end to end, is in beta now and will be generally available soon.

For a benefits leader, that completion rate is the number that matters more than enrollment. A program that enrolls everyone and finishes nobody produces no insight and no behavior change. When you evaluate any financial wellness vendor, ask what share of enrolled employees complete the initial assessment, and be skeptical of anyone who reports enrollment instead.

The privacy question, answered directly

Everything above is aggregate. It has to be, and here’s the structural reason why.

Employers who offer Savology never see or store employee financial data. There are no payroll integrations and no data feeds. What an employer receives is aggregate participation, not individual results.

People who join through an organization that pays Savology to serve its people are also not part of Savology’s advisor introduction pool. They are not sold, not shared, and not listed. That separation is enforced with separate databases and separate credentials rather than by policy alone, and it’s audited on an ongoing basis.

This matters more than it sounds. The most common reason employees don’t engage with a financial wellness benefit is a suspicion that their employer will see the results. If that suspicion isn’t addressed explicitly and early, participation stays low regardless of how good the underlying product is.

Say it plainly in your launch communication. “Your employer cannot see your answers or your results” is a sentence worth putting in the first paragraph.

What a useful program looks like

Based on where the gaps actually are:

Lead with the report card, not the content library. Article libraries and webinars find the employees who least need them. A short assessment that returns a personalized result gives someone a reason to engage in the first place.

Time communications to the gaps, not the calendar. Open enrollment is the natural moment for the disability coverage conversation, because that’s when the decision is actually available. Estate documents fit better in a quieter part of the year when they aren’t competing with elections.

Don’t measure success by enrollment. Measure completion, then measure whether anything changed. Among households in this data whose recorded finances changed over time, roughly 69% improved their overall grade, and emergency savings and estate planning were the two subjects that moved most.

Expect the demand to be uneven. The employees with the largest gaps aren’t necessarily the lowest paid. In this data, households earning $100,000 to $150,000 are the least likely of any income band to have estate documents.

The short version

Your employees’ financial gaps are probably not where your program assumes they are. They cluster in the parts of financial life that nothing in ordinary life prompts anyone to handle: the documents, the pacing, and the coverage nobody sends a form for.

Those are the parts a benefits program is genuinely good at fixing, and none of them require you to see a single employee’s finances.