Per-Hour ICHRA Contributions Give SMBs A Benefits Model That Scales With Actual Labor

Traditional group health benefits assume a stable workforce of salaried employees working consistent hours at a single employer, month after month. That assumption has been wrong for a large portion of the American workforce for years, and the gap is widening. Restaurants, gyms, franchises, and other hourly-intensive small businesses operate with variable schedules, part-time staff, and employees who split time across multiple jobs. A fixed monthly benefits contribution doesn't fit that reality. It overcharges the employer during slow weeks and underdelivers during busy ones. The ICHRA model is flexible enough to solve this, but only when the contribution structure is designed around how these businesses actually operate.

Sven Jensen is the Founder and CEO of Pro-Tier, an ICHRA platform built specifically for small and medium businesses that have historically been unable or unwilling to offer employee benefits. He spent over a decade in finance and operations across Wall Street, venture capital, and technology startups before founding Pro-Tier out of frustration with the benefits solutions available to the companies he was running. His background as a former CFO who had to implement benefits for businesses of different sizes and structures shaped the platform's design around simplicity, flexibility, and minimal administrative burden.

"Traditional benefits are built for salaried people. If you're a restaurant and 85% of your employees are paid hourly, and some of them work 10 hours this week and 40 hours the next week, the traditional model just does not work at all," he says. That mismatch between how benefits are structured and how hourly work actually functions is the problem his platform was built to solve.

Per-hour contributions change the math

Jensen's model ties ICHRA contributions directly to hours worked rather than applying a flat monthly amount. If a full-time employee working 120 hours a month would receive $360 in benefits funding, that translates to $3 per hour. An employee who works 10 hours in a given week receives $30. One who works 40 hours receives $120. The contribution per hour stays consistent by role, satisfying ICHRA's equal-treatment requirements, but the total cost to the employer scales proportionally with labor. "Business owners love it because their benefits cost is now based on how much that person is working for them, and employees understand that the more they work, the more they get," he explains. "They actually allocate more hours to the businesses that offer them benefits."

The behavioral effect is significant. In an industry where employees routinely split hours across multiple employers, a per-hour benefits contribution gives the offering employer a structural retention advantage without requiring a full-time commitment from the worker. The employee is incentivized to consolidate hours where the benefits are strongest.

Multi-employer contributions for split-schedule workers

The model extends further for workers who hold jobs at more than one business. Jensen describes a scenario common in food service: a worker splits time between two restaurants, neither of which can justify the cost of full-time equivalent benefits. Under a per-hour ICHRA model, both employers can contribute prorated amounts toward the same individual marketplace plan. "An individual can buy a healthcare plan on the marketplace and have more than one company contribute ICHRA subsidies toward that plan," Jensen says. "They prorate it based on hours worked. For people who work more than one job, there should be a way for each business to contribute based on how much they work for you."

This approach directly addresses a structural gap in how hourly workers access coverage. Without employer contributions, many of these workers either go uninsured or rely on government-funded programs. Jensen points to the broader societal cost of healthcare liability shifting to the taxpayer when small businesses don't offer benefits. Per-hour ICHRA contributions create a mechanism for employers to participate proportionally, even when no single employer provides full-time hours.

Benefits as a recruiting and retention tool

For the small businesses Pro-Tier serves, the decision to offer benefits isn't usually blocked by cost, but by complexity. Jensen says most of his clients don't have HR departments. The decision-maker is the owner or general manager, and previous attempts to explore group plans or PEOs ended in frustration. "Almost all of them, if they've looked at benefits in the past, have just been super frustrated with every single vendor out there. It's unnecessarily expensive and cumbersome to implement. These businesses aren't avoiding benefits because they can't afford it. They're avoiding it because the process is so complicated and intimidating that they throw in the towel."

When the administrative barrier is removed, he asserts, the business case becomes clear. Instead of spending money on constant recruiting and training to replace churning staff, employers spend it on benefits that make employees want to stay. Jensen reports that Pro-Tier clients in the fitness industry have seen employee churn drop by more than 30%. "If you offer benefits and your employee retention improves, you're spending more time upskilling your staff and improving how they relate with customers rather than recruiting and training them from scratch," he notes. "Any business that can maintain that employment consistency is almost always more profitable."

Portability aligns with how work actually functions

The final structural advantage Jensen emphasizes is portability. Because ICHRA funds individual marketplace plans rather than employer-sponsored group coverage, an employee who leaves a job can maintain their plan in an individual capacity. There's no COBRA requirement to navigate. The coverage doesn't lapse because of a job change. "The world has chosen to be flexible. Nobody works somewhere for 25 years and collects a gold watch anymore. Historical benefits just don't work with that." For hourly workers especially, that portability removes one of the most stressful consequences of job transitions: losing health coverage during the gap between employers. It also makes the ICHRA model more attractive to workers who know their schedules and employers may change, because the plan they choose stays with them regardless of which business is contributing toward it. 

Jensen sees that alignment between benefits design and workforce reality as the defining question for every employer still relying on a structure that assumes yesterday's working conditions. "We're orienting our business around what work looks like in 2026, not what it looked like in 1950," he says.