What a PEO remarket actually finds.

We publish nine engagements on this site with the figures each one produced. Read them together and the striking thing is not how large the numbers are. It is that they never come from the same place twice.

One employer’s medical cost fell 29%. Another’s fell 12%. A third saw a 53% reduction in state unemployment tax that appears nowhere else in the set. One engagement turned entirely on a workers' compensation classification. One turned on a participation rule that had made a medical plan unobtainable at any price, where the saving was almost beside the point.

That is the honest answer to the question buyers usually ask first, which is what they should expect to save. Nobody can tell you until they have looked at your numbers. What can be said in advance is where the money tends to hide, and there are four places.

The administrative fee is the smallest number in the room

It is also the only one most buyers compare, because it is the only one quoted plainly. A percentage of payroll against a per-employee-per-month figure, one provider against another, and the exercise feels like diligence.

In the engagements we have published, administrative fee reductions were real but rarely decisive. Benefit plan cost, workers' compensation treatment and unemployment rating moved far more money. A provider who saves you two points on administration and moves you into a health plan costing six percent more has left you materially worse off, and the proposal will not say so anywhere.

State unemployment is not a fixed cost

Most employers treat it as one. It arrives as a rate, it is levied by a state, and there is no obvious lever attached to it.

Under a co-employment arrangement that changes, because the rating that applies is the provider’s rather than yours. The spread between two providers on the same payroll can be very large — in one engagement the reduction was 53%, which was the single biggest line in the result and the one the client had least expected. It is worth asking any PEO to show you their rate in your states before you look at anything else.

Workers' compensation classification is worth challenging before the arrangement is

A boat manufacturer we worked with does almost all of its work on land. But finished boats are tested in canals and on open water, and that small proportion of hours was enough to pull the rate for a much larger population. Open-market comp had become cost-prohibitive, which is why the company had moved to a PEO in the first place.

The general point is that classification does not always follow the majority of the work, and employers assume it does. Before anyone proposes changing your employment model, it is worth establishing whether the rate you are reacting to is correct. Sometimes the fix is a rating argument, which is a far cheaper piece of work than a transition.

Participation rules are a wall, not a price

A carrier needs a minimum share of eligible employees enrolled before it will write a group. An employer whose workforce declines coverage — because they are covered elsewhere, or because the employee contribution is too high against their wages — cannot reach that threshold, and no amount of shopping fixes it. Every carrier applies a version of the same rule.

This is the clearest case where co-employment solves something the open market structurally cannot, because the participation test is applied to a much larger pool. If your broker has told you more than once that participation is the obstacle, the obstacle is structural and it will still be there next year.

The result that outlasts the savings

In one engagement the client’s own summary of the outcome was not the money. It was that a detailed cost analysis had finally let them see the full extent of what they had been paying. They had been inside the arrangement for three years without that view.

Bundled billing is why. When administration, benefits, taxes and insurance arrive as one number, you cannot establish a baseline, and without a baseline every incoming proposal is being compared against something you cannot see. In another engagement the company’s own CFO had attempted a search and failed for exactly this reason — not a competence problem, a visibility problem.

Unbundled billing with every fee and tax disclosed is the least dramatic thing on any of these results pages. It is also the one that means the next renewal can be tested without calling us.

What this does not tell you

Nine engagements is a record, not a dataset. The companies range from twenty-two employees to seven hundred, across manufacturing, distribution, healthcare services, government contracting, real estate and hospitality. We do not add their savings into a headline figure, because a total mixing annual savings with one-off reductions across companies that different would describe none of them.

What the record is good for is showing you where to look. The number that applies to you comes out of your own financials, and finding it costs you nothing.