Washington and Oregon each run a state paid family and medical leave programme. Idaho does not. If you employ people across all three, your workforce sits on three different floors — and a single disability policy sits on top of all of them.
That mismatch is the most common avoidable overspend we find on the ancillary lines.
This describes the shape of the problem. It states no contribution rates, no benefit levels and no thresholds, because each state sets its own independently and they change. Verify each state separately, and re-verify annually.
The shape of it
In Washington and Oregon, employees contribute to a state programme through payroll, employers of a certain size contribute as well, and the programme pays a wage-replacement benefit during qualifying leave — for the employee’s own serious health condition, and for family and caring reasons.
In Idaho there is no such programme. An employee there has whatever the employer provides and nothing underneath it.
Why that matters for disability cover
Short-term disability insurance replaces income during a period when someone cannot work. So does a state paid-leave programme, for overlapping reasons.
Buy short-term disability without accounting for the state programme and you are paying for cover that partly duplicates a benefit your Washington and Oregon employees already have. Buy nothing on the assumption that the state covers it and your Idaho employees have nothing.
Neither answer is right for a three-state company, and a single policy applied uniformly will be wrong for at least one group.
What to look at
Where your people actually live, not where the company is domiciled. This is the input everything else depends on and it is the one that goes stale as you hire remotely.
The elimination period. How long before benefits begin. Where a state programme covers the early weeks, a longer elimination period on the private policy can cost considerably less without leaving a real gap — for the employees the state programme covers.
Coordination provisions. How the private policy treats a state benefit received for the same period. Policies differ, and the difference is the whole question. Read this before the premium.
Long-term disability separately. State programmes are time-limited. Long-term disability addresses a different problem and the state programmes do not substitute for it in the way they partly do for short-term.
Whether the definition is own-occupation or any-occupation. Unrelated to the state question, and the single most consequential clause in any disability policy. Worth reading regardless.
What not to do
Do not assume the three states behave alike. They do not, and the two that have programmes do not match each other either.
Do not design for the headquarters state. A policy designed around Washington leaves an Idaho employee in a materially different position, and they will not discover it until the moment it matters.
Do not treat this as settled. These programmes have changed since they were introduced and will change again. It belongs on the annual review, not in the file.
What we do
We ask where your people live at the outset, look at the overlap in each state, and design the disability line around what employees already have rather than around a single national default.
Where the answer is that you are paying for something twice, we say so — which occasionally means recommending less cover than you currently buy.
Where to check the current position
Each state administers its own programme and publishes the current rules, contribution rates and benefit levels. Those are the authoritative sources; anything a broker’s website says about them is a summary written on a date.
For how a programme interacts with your specific policy and your specific employees, that is a question with facts in it — which means your employment counsel, not us.
General information, not advice
This describes how group benefits generally work for companies of this size in Washington, Oregon and Idaho. It is not advice about your company, and it is not legal, tax or actuarial advice.
Roster Benefits Group LLC is a licensed insurance producer and appointed broker. We are not a law firm, not a certified public accounting firm, and not a third-party administrator. Anything turning on how a law applies to your facts needs your own counsel.
