Benefit Allowance

When lawyers meet on Tinder, this is the kind of thing they end up negotiating about later in the evening. It's also a relevant concept related to health benefits.

Rather than providing health insurance through the company, an employer might instead make funds available for employees to purchase their own coverage on the open market. This is called a "benefit allowance."

For the employers, it can ease the bureaucratic requirements of maintaining some benefits, eliminating the need to act as the middleman between the employee and their insurer. For employees, it can mean additional choice.

Often, the company provides a basic vanilla group health package, and then compliment this with a benefit allowance that employees can use to customize their coverage from there.