Acrisure ICHRA Solutions replaces the group health plan with an individual coverage HRA.
It works like a 401(k) for health insurance. The employer gives employees a set monthly allowance, and each employee uses it to buy the individual health plan that best fits their needs.
An Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement (ICHRA) lets an employer give employees a set monthly allowance, tax free, to buy their own health insurance. The employer sets the allowance. The employee picks the plan.
There is no group policy, no participation minimum and no carrier underwriting the company. The allowance is deductible to the business and tax free to the employee when the plan is administered correctly.
Employees who do not enroll in coverage do not receive the allowance. It only pays out against a verified individual health plan.
Tell us the business’s current employee health benefits. Our team will review and propose an ICHRA solution that works for employees and saves on yearly renewal spikes.
Step 1
The employer sets a monthly allowance and decides which classes of employee are eligible.
Step 2
Each employee compares individual plans available where they live and enrolls in the one they want.
Step 3
Acrisure builds the plan documents, runs employee communications, supports enrollment, and keeps everything tax compliant.
Renewal increases keep coming. A fixed monthly allowance means nobody hands you an increase you did not vote on.
Doctors and hospitals keep dropping out of group networks. Each employee picks an individual plan with a network that still works for them.
Miss a group plan’s participation minimum and it is usually the healthiest people who walk. An ICHRA has no participation requirement at all.
Remote, multi-state, hourly and part-time workforces stop being a problem. Each employee shops the market where they actually live.
The rest of this page is written for agents. Employers, jump ahead.
How the program works, how you get paid, and how to get appointed.
Agent and broker detailsFour things happening to agents right now, none of them your fault, all of them your problem.
Percentage-of-premium compensation on a 15-life group was never much, and it gets compressed while the work grows. You do more meetings for a smaller check.
Somebody walks in with a monthly allowance model and takes the case on price. You never get a second look at it.
Some ICHRA platforms put themselves between you and the employer. You did the work, and now somebody else owns the renewal conversation.
Failed participation, six lives, three states, all hourly. Those were dead leads for a group plan. Somebody is writing them now.
Stream one
You earn a commission on the per employee per month (PEPM) administration fee. It is paid on every active employee, every month the group is on the program.
This is the piece that does not exist on a traditional group case. It runs on headcount, not on premium.
Stream two
You also earn commission on the coverage employees enroll in. That is paid monthly and it continues as long as the policies stay in force.
Two streams on one case, and the employer stays your client.
We administer the plan. We do not take over the relationship, and we do not sell around you.
An employee logs in, sees the allowance their employer set, and compares the individual plans available where they live. They pick one, enroll, and the allowance is applied.
You can demo this live in an employer meeting the week you are appointed. It is the part that turns a skeptical owner into a scheduled kickoff.
The monthly amount their employer set, shown up front before they shop.
Individual plans available where they live, side by side.
Monthly, without the employer chasing receipts.
Your existing book is the pipeline. Here is what to tag.
Do one thing this week. Open your CRM, tag every renewal in the next 90 days and every individual client who owns a business, and call that list.
If the group plan is working and the renewal is flat, leave it alone. Three situations where you should.
Low deductible, employer pays 100 percent. ICHRA can match it. It will not beat it.
Five or six people, one office, one good network. Group is often cheaper.
Some employers want a single shared plan for culture reasons. That is a real answer.
| Traditional group plan | Acrisure ICHRA Solutions | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost control | The carrier sets the renewal. You react to it. | The employer sets a monthly allowance and holds it. |
| Plan choice | One plan for everyone, chosen by the employer. | Each employee picks their own plan. |
| Participation | Minimums apply. Miss them and the plan is at risk. | No participation requirement. |
| Network | The carrier dictates the network for the whole company. | Employees keep the doctors and networks they already use. |
| Tax treatment | Employer contribution is deductible. | Deductible to the employer, tax free to the employee. |
Acrisure was founded in 2005 and grew into one of the largest insurance brokerages in the world, largely by acquiring established agencies rather than building from scratch.
A significant share of those acquisitions were employee benefits agencies, general agencies and administrators with decades of operating history. That experience is what sits behind this program.
The practical version: you are not handing your client to a two-year-old software company. You are handing the administration to a benefits operation that was doing this before ICHRA existed, and one whose employer clients are mostly small businesses already.
Four steps. Most agents are contracted within a week.
Step 1 · 5 minutes
Name, agency, the states you are licensed in, and the lines you write.
Step 2 · 15 minutes
Program overview, commission schedule, and confirmation of your licensing.
Step 3 · About a week
Paperwork and carrier appointments handled on our side.
Step 4 · Same day
Portal access, a walkthrough, and the name of your support contact.
Quoting tools
Side by side proposals
Marketing assets
A named support contact
Live portal for demos
If you run a business, the offer is simpler than it sounds. You decide what you can spend on health benefits each month. We do the rest.
The next step is a conversation, not a commitment. We will build a side by side against what you have now, or against what it would cost you to start from nothing, so you see real numbers before you decide.
This is something you choose to do for your business, not something a mandate requires.
The individual coverage HRA is authorized by federal rule and administered under IRS, Department of Labor and Health and Human Services regulation. It is the same category of employer health benefit as a group plan, with the same protections attached.
ERISA, COBRA and HIPAA apply. Reimbursements are excluded from taxable income under the tax code when the plan is documented and administered correctly, which is the part we handle.
An employer can vary the allowance by permitted class, including full time, part time, seasonal, salaried, non-salaried, temporary staffing employees, employees in a collective bargaining agreement, employees in a waiting period, non-resident aliens with no U.S. income, employees in the same rating area, and combinations of those. Classing is how an employer offers a real benefit to hourly staff without matching what they spend on the office. Minimum class size rules apply in some situations.
Most small employers are not subject to the ACA employer mandate. Under 50 full-time equivalent employees there is no mandate and no affordability penalty, which removes the compliance risk that makes this topic sound complicated.
Affordability still matters, just for a different reason. It decides whether your employees can claim a marketplace premium tax credit, and that applies at any employer size.
The test compares an employee’s cost for the lowest-cost silver plan in their area, after your allowance is applied, against a percentage of household income set by the IRS each year. For plan years beginning in 2026 that percentage is 9.96 percent, up from 9.02 percent in 2025. We model it by class before anything is finalized.
No employer knows an employee’s household income, so the IRS allows safe harbors. The common ones are W-2 wages, rate of pay, and the federal poverty level. These matter most to employers at or above 50 full-time equivalents, but the federal poverty level safe harbor is also the simplest way for a smaller employer to set an allowance that clears affordability.
This is the most misunderstood piece of the model. An employee who is offered an affordable ICHRA is not eligible for a marketplace premium tax credit, whether or not they take the ICHRA.
If the offer is not affordable, the employee gets a choice. They can accept the ICHRA or decline it and claim the tax credit instead. We run that math per class before anything is finalized.
Employees have to be notified at least 90 days before the plan year begins. Build that into the timeline on any mid-year move.
Gaining ICHRA eligibility triggers a special enrollment period, so employees can buy individual coverage outside of open enrollment. Losing group coverage triggers one as well.
An employer can reimburse premiums only, or premiums plus qualified medical expenses. Qualified medical expenses are defined in IRS Publication 502 and cover things like copays, prescriptions and dental or vision costs. The employer picks the structure at plan design.
This comes up on nearly every small case. C corporation owners are employees and can participate. Owners holding more than 2 percent of an S corporation generally cannot participate tax free.
Sole proprietors and partners are not employees, so they cannot participate directly. If a spouse is a W-2 employee of the business, the owner may be covered as a dependent on the spouse's reimbursed plan.
If you have fewer than 50 employees you can use either an ICHRA or a QSEHRA, so this comparison matters. A QSEHRA caps what you can contribute each year and requires the same terms for every full-time employee. A GCHRA is different again, since it has to sit alongside a traditional group plan and reimburses out-of-pocket costs rather than premiums.
An ICHRA has no contribution cap and lets you set different allowances by class, which is why it usually wins for a small employer with a mix of full-time and hourly staff. It cannot be offered to the same class of employees who are also offered a group plan.
Get appointed, or take the program details and think about it.
