Charlotte employers are expanding fertility service benefits
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Some of Charlotte’s largest companies are turning their attention to workers who want to grow their families.
To attract and retain talent, companies are offering fertility support services, as Axios’ Erica Pandey recently wrote. This includes a range of treatments, from egg freezing to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) to intrauterine insemination (IUI).
Among Charlotte’s largest employers:
- Wells Fargo, which has roughly 27,000 workers here, covers a variety of infertility and fertility services and treatments — including as artificial insemination, IVF and surgical treatment of infertility.
- Duke Energy, which employs about 6,000 in Charlotte, offers employees fertility treatments such as IVF, egg retrieval and egg freezing.
- Lowe’s, which has more than 12,500 employees in the region, covers treatments such as IUI, IVF and frozen embryo transfer.
- Atrium, with about 38,000 employees in the Charlotte region, offers infertility coverage through its Reproductive Medicine and Infertility unit at 100%, after deductible, with a $25,000 lifetime maximum.
Why it matters: Offering fertility benefits is becoming more common in a competitive labor market and as young workers delay child-bearing.
Facebook was among the first big names to start offering egg freezing in 2014, a “hot new perk,” as Business Insider described it a few years later.
By the numbers: In 2020, 11% of U.S. employers with 500 employees or more covered egg freezing, up from 5% in 2015, according to a recent Mercer report. In 2020, 27% of employers that size covered IVF, up from 24% five years prior.
- Among larger employers (those with 20,000 or more workers) in 2020, 42% covered IVF and 19% covered egg freezing.
Local companies are following the trend.
Last summer, Red Ventures began partnering with a company called Progyny to offer employees a range of services, including IUI, IVF with fresh or frozen embryos, the ability to freeze and store multiple embryos, tissue freezing for future use and surrogacy embryology support.
- Red Ventures also offers a lifetime benefit of $20,000 for surrogacy expense reimbursement.
“The journey to become a parent can be physically, emotionally, and financially challenging,” said Brenda McCracken, global benefits director at Red Ventures.
Adoption reimbursements: The bulk of Charlotte’s biggest employers also offer adoption assistance. Among them: Duke Energy (a reimbursement of up to $5,000), Wells Fargo (also up to $5,000), Lowe’s ($5,000) and Novant (up to $3,500 per child).
- Truist, which also offers coverage for fertility treatments like IVF and egg-freezing, increased its adoption benefit from $2,500 to $10,000 as of the first of this year.
- Charlotte-based Bank of America offers a lifetime max of $20,000 that can go toward any of the following: adoption, fertility and/or surrogacy expenses.
- Ally, also a company that covers a range of fertility services like IVF, offers employees $35,000 in surrogacy benefits and $35,000 in adoption benefits.
Zoom out: Bolstering fertility benefits helps employees from different backgrounds — including LGBTQ+ and single parents, as Pandey notes. Employers see them as important from a diversity, equity and inclusion perspective.
Bottom line: Expect offering fertility benefits to become the standard at work, Pandey writes.
“Young professional women ask about it in the interview process, and employees will leave if there’s not a fertility benefit when they want it,” Gina Bartasi, founder and CEO of fertility care provider Kindbody, told Wired a few months ago.