A benefits package for a 25-employee company is the set of health, retirement, leave, and supplemental offerings that sits on top of wages, and at this size it is usually the deciding factor between your offer and a bigger company's.

Twenty-five employees is an awkward, important moment: you are under the ACA's 50-FTE mandate, so nothing but the market forces you to offer health coverage, and yet you are recruiting against companies that do. The good news is that a genuinely competitive package at this size costs less than most owners fear, if the money goes in the right order.

The spending order that actually retains people

Benefits dollars are not equal. The sequence that buys the most retention per dollar, consistently, is: health insurance first, retirement match second, PTO structure third, everything else after.

Companies get this backwards by adding cheap, visible perks (snacks, stipends, wellness apps) while the health plan stays thin, and employees do the math on their paycheck deductions every month even if they never mention it.

Health insurance: the anchor

Colorado small-group plans in 2026 run roughly $450 to $750 per employee per month for employee-only coverage depending on metal tier and network. The most common structure at 25 lives: employer pays 70 to 80% of the employee premium and 0 to 50% of dependents.

Budget realistically: 25 employees at a $600 average premium with a 75% employer share is about $135,000 a year, the largest number in this article, and the reason to work with a broker on level-funded plans, which at healthy-group sizes like this often price 10 to 20% under fully-insured equivalents and refund a portion of unused claims.

One caution: a QSEHRA or ICHRA (reimbursement arrangements instead of a group plan) can work below 15 employees, but at 25 a group plan is what candidates read as a real company.

Retirement: cheaper than you think, and partly mandatory

Colorado requires employers with five or more employees to either offer a retirement plan or enroll workers in the state's Colorado SecureSavings program. SecureSavings satisfies the mandate at no employer cost, but a 401(k) with a match is the recruiting tool.

A safe-harbor match (typically 4% of pay for full participation) costs about $65,000 a year at a $65,000 average salary if everyone maxes the match, in practice participation runs 60 to 80%. SECURE 2.0 tax credits offset up to $5,000 a year of setup and administration costs for the first three years, plus a per-employee contribution credit. Administration itself runs $2,000 to $5,000 a year with modern providers.

PTO and leave: mostly structure, not money

Colorado has already set your floor: HFWA sick leave (48 hours a year) and FAMLI paid family leave exist at every size. What you are designing is the vacation layer, and the market at 25 employees is 15 days plus holidays, moving toward flexible policies.

Two Colorado-specific notes: accrued vacation is earned wages here and must be paid out at separation, use-it-or-lose-it clauses are unenforceable, which makes unlimited-PTO policies quietly attractive to employers (nothing accrues, nothing pays out), and makes capped-accrual design worth an hour of professional attention either way.

The supplemental layer

Dental and vision add roughly $30 to $60 per employee per month combined and are cheap credibility. Employer-paid life and disability insurance runs $15 to $40 a month per employee and is the most underrated line in the package, because it is what employees remember when something goes wrong.

Add these after the anchor pieces, not instead of them.

What this means for your business

A complete, competitive package at 25 employees, 75% health premium share, safe-harbor 401(k), dental/vision/life, runs roughly $180,000 to $220,000 a year, call it $7,000 to $9,000 per employee. Against the cost of turnover, typically half to two times salary per departure, the package pays for itself by preventing three or four exits a year.

The design work, carrier selection, contribution modeling, plan documents, compliant PTO language for your policy set, is where outside benefits help earns its fee: the same spend, structured well, reads as a dramatically better offer letter.