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If your employees don’t know about your commuter benefits, they (and you!) are missing out on their full value. Learn why ongoing promotion is the key to boosting enrollment, saving money, and supporting your workplace goals.
A benefit no one knows about isn’t much of a benefit at all.
Your employees could have access to the gold standard of commuting, but if they don’t hear about it, is it actually a competitive offering? Here's why it's important to keep promoting your commuter benefits, and how to measure the success of your efforts.
For most employees, when their employee offers “commuter benefits”, their employer is giving them the opportunity to set aside a portion of their income before it is taxed for use on qualified commuting expenses. For many employees, their employer might subsidize part or all of their commuting expenses, and these subsidies are exempt from income taxes up to the federal limit.
In 2025, employees could receive $325 a month without tax for parking and another $325 a month for transit and vanpool. Most Americans pay about 30% of their income in taxes, so participating employees who use pre-tax dollars to pay for $325 in transit expenses, for example, can save $96 each month on taxes. If they’re also putting aside $325 in parking expenses, they could be saving up to $2340 a year! But only if their employers offer these benefits, and only if the employees know how to enroll.
There are two primary reasons employers love to offer commuter benefits to their employees.
Most benefits are easy to set up and forget about. Retirement is a long way away for a 30-year-old employee, and there’s little to do after setting up monthly contributions. But commutes are different – employees commute every day (or at least a few times a week). And your employees’ commuting needs change over time – moving to a new home, trying a more active lifestyle, even the changing of the seasons. The commuter benefits that made sense on an employee’s first day may no longer fit a year or two down the road.
Consider David, a new hire at an accounting firm just outside downtown. Before he took the job, he’d been commuting out into the suburbs, driving several miles each day. At the time, driving felt most comfortable, and he signed up for free parking by his new office. But a few years go by. David moved downtown, and started using public transit to get around. Suddenly, his parking space is going to waste, and he’s paying out of pocket for a monthly transit pass. Because David only got one email about parking and transit benefits on his first day, today he doesn’t even know other benefit options exist. If only his employer knew he wanted to change his enrollments, they could both be saving money.
At a minimum, employees should be hearing about their commuter benefit options twice a year. The ideal times are:
Simple: look at your enrollment rates. If your office is well-served by transit, your commuter benefit package is generous, and your enrollment is low – there’s more you could be doing to promote your program.
Jawnt recently onboarded a new employer – a biotech company with a few thousand employees. This year, the company moved from a suburban location to a new office building closer to downtown. Employees were accustomed to parking for free at their old office, so the HR team thoughtfully constructed a new transit benefits package that would get employees excited about taking transit. Any time the company communicated internally about the move, they brought up the new transit benefits. Employees were encouraged to enroll in their benefits before the big move, and enroll they did – 75% of employees signed up for transit benefits in the first month.
This employer’s experience is typical. Jawnt has found that among all the employers we support, 60% of employees are enrolled in transit benefits. Enrollment exceeds 90% at over a third of these employers. This means that these employers have designed a benefits package that’s attractive to employees, and these employers have communicated about the benefits so that interested employees have been able to enroll.
Digging further into the numbers, enrollment tends to be a little higher at very small organizations (77% under 100 employees), and decreases slightly for medium (58%) and larger (51%) organizations. This may be partially due to the physical distribution of office spaces by size – it’s easier for small teams to find suitable space near transit downtown, while much larger teams may be drawn to the relatively more affordable, but less transit-rich, suburbs.
If your organization offers transit benefits, and you feel the offerings are competitive and transit is adequate to your location, but you’re seeing enrollment below these averages, consider increasing your internal communications around these benefits.
What’s a reasonable target enrollment for your organization? That depends on where your employees live, where your office is based, and how many employees will find transit to be good fit for their specific needs.
Jawnt offers a complementary Transit Competitiveness Analysis, where we use anonymized employee ZIP codes to estimate the percentage of your employees that would want to enroll in a transit benefit program. For example, maybe 45% of your employees live near transit, and 15% live out in the suburbs, and 40% could go either way. Let us help set a reasonable benchmark for your program, and understand what could be done to increase employee participation and satisfaction.
Learn more about our Transit Competitiveness Analysis and get started today.
