Health savings accounts have spent years as the benefit employees enroll in and forget. New survey data suggests that habit is breaking, fast.
The Plan Sponsor Council of America’s 2026 Health Savings Account Survey, sponsored by HSA Bank and covering 726 employers that sponsor an HSA program, found that 83% of employees with HSA access contributed to their account in 2025, up sharply from 73.4% in 2024. Average contributions climbed to $2,829 for the year, and account balances ended 2025 at an average of $6,477. The share of participants investing their HSA savings, rather than leaving them as cash, rose to 22%, up from 20.3% in 2024 and 18.9% in 2023, while 68.5% of employers now offer HSA investment options, a 12.8% increase since 2022.
The gap sits on the employer side. PSCA’s data shows only about a quarter of employers actively position HSAs as part of a broader retirement savings strategy for employees, and nearly two-thirds cite employee education as their most common HSA-related challenge, with half of employers providing that education only during open enrollment.
The original insight is the mismatch between behavior and messaging. Participation and investment rates are both climbing without most employers doing the retirement-framing work that would explain why, which suggests employees are arriving at the “HSA as a long-term account” conclusion on their own, likely from financial media and workplace peers, faster than benefits teams are building programs to match. That is a signal for HR platforms selling financial wellness tools: the same dynamic that pushed employer health costs to multi-year highs is now pushing employees toward self-directed retirement saving inside a benefit most companies still treat as a single-year expense line, not the structural cost problem it actually is.
Source: Plan Sponsor Council of America
