Voluntary Benefits: The Mid-Year Strategy Guide for UK HR

The Paradox at the Heart of UK Benefits Strategy

Here is a number worth sitting with. According to the Drewberry 2026 Employee Benefits Benchmarking Report, 91.7% of UK employers believe their staff understand the benefits available to them. Meanwhile, research from Group Risk Development (GRiD) in 2024 found that 34% of employers acknowledged staff are either unaware of, or do not understand, all the benefits on offer. The gap between employer confidence and employee reality is not just uncomfortable reading. It represents a significant waste of investment.

Voluntary benefits occupy an unusual position in the UK HR landscape. They are, by definition, optional. Employees choose to access them, often funding them directly or accessing them at discounted rates through the employer's arrangements. Unlike core statutory benefits, they require active engagement. And therein lies the challenge. When communication is weak, voluntary benefits become invisible. When they become invisible, they stop delivering any value to either party.

With July marking the start of mid-year benefits reviews for many UK organisations, and Q4 planning just weeks away, there is no better moment for HR and reward leaders to audit what they are offering, how it is being communicated, and whether it is landing.

What Voluntary Benefits Actually Are

The term gets used loosely, so it is worth being precise. Voluntary benefits are employee-selected, often employee-funded benefits that an employer makes available through its workplace scheme. The employer typically negotiates access to services or rates that employees could not secure independently, passing the value of collective buying power on to staff. The employer bears little or no direct cost.

This distinguishes voluntary benefits from core benefits (which all employees receive as standard, such as pension contributions or annual leave), from salary sacrifice schemes (which involve a specific HMRC-approved mechanism and National Insurance implications), and from perks (informal, low-cost extras like free fruit or a company event).

Examples in common use across UK employers include access to a healthcare marketplace, deals and discounts platforms covering everything from high street retailers to cinema chains, gym discounts, employee vouchers for everyday spending, GP on demand services, optional dental and vision insurance, and financial coaching or mortgage advice. Some employers also incorporate their wellbeing hub into the voluntary suite, giving employees a single access point for the full range of discretionary benefits.

The key point is flexibility. A voluntary benefits benefits package can serve a graduate recruiter in Manchester and a seasoned finance director in London in genuinely different ways, because each person selects what matters to them.

Why July Is the Right Time to Review

Most UK organisations operate an annual or semi-annual benefits review cycle. Q1 tends to be reactive, absorbing the fallout from January budgets and appraisal cycles. Q2 is typically heads-down. But by July, the picture begins to shift. Summer represents the last genuine window before September brings the back-to-school rush, October triggers open enrolment season for many schemes, and November spills into year-end budget decisions.

If you are going to change, add, or recommunicate your voluntary benefits package, doing so in late July or August means those changes land with employees fresh in September, before the competing noise of year-end gets in the way.

There is also a retention dimension to July specifically. Staff changeovers peak in August and September, when employees who have been reflecting over summer hand in notice. A proactive voluntary benefits communication in July, reminding employees what they have access to, is a relatively low-cost retention tool at precisely the moment it matters most.

The CIPD Data Point That Should Worry Every Reward Leader

The CIPD's 2026 Reward Survey: Focus on Employee Benefits contains some striking findings. Only 33% of UK employers say their benefits package fully meets its stated objectives. Twenty-two per cent have no clear objectives for their benefits package at all. When you consider that retention (44%) and motivation and engagement (37%) are the most commonly cited benefits objectives, the implication is uncomfortable: many employers are spending on benefits that are not demonstrably working.

Meanwhile, 62% of UK employees now prioritise benefits when choosing where to work, up from 47% in 2025 according to Globacare's 2026 Employee Benefits Survey. The workforce is increasingly benefits-literate. The employer side of the equation, however, has not kept pace.

Two in five UK employers have already scaled back their benefits package in 2026 (Boostworks HR Budget Analysis), even as per-employee benefits costs are rising by an average of 6.5% this year. This creates a pinch point. Costs up, package scope potentially down, employee expectations up. The voluntary benefits model offers a partial answer: it expands what employees can access without materially increasing employer cost, because the employee funds the majority of it.

The Communication Failure

The evidence consistently points to a communication problem rather than a benefits design problem. When employees do not use voluntary benefits, it is rarely because the benefits are unappealing. More often, they simply do not know they exist or they forgot to enrol.

This is a solvable problem, but it requires deliberate effort. A few principles worth applying.

Make benefits visible year-round, not just at onboarding. The induction process is where most voluntary benefits get introduced, and it is also where most of the information is forgotten. New joiners are overwhelmed. Revisiting benefits at 90-day, 6-month, and annual milestones dramatically improves uptake.

Segment your communications. Younger employees may prioritise access to a wellbeing hub and discounts. Employees with families are more likely to engage with family coverage, healthcare options, and financial coaching. Segment benefit communications by life stage or persona and open-rates improve substantially.

Use data to prove value. Uptake data tells you which voluntary benefits are landing and which are not. NPS surveys and benefits utilisation reports, available through most modern HR platforms, can give you the evidence base to make the case for the benefits that are working and rethink those that are not.

Tell the financial story. With 58% of UK employees stating their workplace benefits feel inadequate in the context of rising living costs (HR Magazine, 2025-2026), there is a real appetite for benefits that demonstrably save money. High street discounts, cinema deals, fuel savings, and employer-negotiated rates on insurance all have a tangible cash value. Quantifying that value in employee communications (this benefit is worth up to £X per year) drives engagement far more effectively than a list of features.

What Employees Actually Want in 2026

Research from Zest Benefits, surveying 2,000 UK employees, identifies the voluntary benefits with the highest desirability this year. Unlimited paid leave tops the list at 31%, closely followed by above-statutory pension contributions (31%) and private medical insurance (30%). Hybrid working support came in at 22%, wellbeing allowances at 21%, and high street discounts at 21%.

Two observations are worth drawing out. First, the top of the list is dominated by benefits that blur the voluntary and core categories, suggesting employees still struggle to distinguish between what they are entitled to and what they can choose. That is a communication challenge employers need to own. Second, high street discounts appear at the same desirability level as wellbeing allowances, which speaks to the practical, cost-of-living-driven priorities shaping employee expectations right now.

The personalisation dimension matters here. One of the most compelling arguments for a robust voluntary benefits offering is the ability to serve a multigenerational workforce without the cost of running separate core benefits schemes for different cohorts. Gen Z employees gravitating toward flexibility and mental health support, Gen X employees focused on healthcare and financial planning, and Millennials with growing family commitments can all find what they need within a well-structured voluntary suite. That is not possible with a single standardised core package.

The Employment Rights Bill Context

Any honest review of the 2026 voluntary benefits landscape needs to acknowledge the Employment Rights Bill. Changes that came into effect in April 2026 expanded the statutory floor significantly: day-one rights to unpaid parental leave, enhanced statutory sick pay provisions, and strengthened collective redundancy protections. These are welcome changes, but they also compress the distance between what employers must offer and what the law requires.

Voluntary benefits are, in this environment, the clearest space for genuine employer differentiation. Once every employer meets the new statutory baseline, the voluntary layer becomes the battleground for talent. HR leaders who treat voluntary benefits as a box-ticking afterthought will find their EVP eroding against competitors who are curating and communicating their offering actively.

A Practical Checklist for HR Teams

Before Q4, consider working through the following:

Audit what you currently offer. List every voluntary benefit available to employees, alongside the current uptake rate where data is available. If uptake data does not exist, put in place the mechanism to capture it.

Check your benefits eligibility rules. As workforce structures grow more complex with part-time, hybrid, and contractor arrangements, eligibility criteria can inadvertently exclude large groups of employees. Review who can actually access each benefit and whether the criteria still make sense.

Review your communications calendar. Identify the last time each voluntary benefit was actively promoted to staff. If the answer is more than six months ago, schedule a comms refresh for August or September.

Assess the platform experience. Employees will not use what they cannot easily find. If your voluntary benefits sit across multiple portals or require separate logins, consolidation on a single online platform should be a Q3 priority.

Seek employee input. A short survey asking which benefits employees value most, which they have never used, and what they wish was available costs very little and generates exactly the insight reward teams need to make smarter decisions.

Making the Case to the Board

The ROI case for voluntary benefits is strong and, given their largely cost-neutral structure, does not require a large financial investment argument. The data points HR leaders need to make the case are straightforward: 62% of employees prioritise benefits when choosing an employer; staff who feel their benefits meet their needs report higher engagement scores; and the cost of replacing a leaver (estimated at 30-200% of annual salary depending on role complexity) makes even modest improvements in retention measurably valuable.

If you want to see how a structured, employee-centric approach to voluntary and optional benefits can be implemented in practice, Each Person provides a platform designed specifically for UK employers looking to make their benefits offering more visible, more personalised, and more engaging.

The employers who will differentiate in 2026 and beyond are not necessarily those with the biggest benefits budget. They are the ones communicating what they already have, making it easy to access, and measuring whether it is working. July is the moment to start.