August 30, 2025
ARC annually develops an auxiliary data set for the Department of Labor that appends to the March Current Population Survey (CPS). While the March CPS is the data source most often used for estimating health insurance coverage in the U.S. population, it lacks information about access to employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) as well as details about the coverage such as funding and plan type. The auxiliary dataset allows users to create custom tabulations of these characteristics or to reference the published set of tables.
For ESI, highlights include the following:
- Self-insurance continues to be an important source of coverage with 56% of employees in self-funded plans.
- While smaller employers (size <200) are less likely to report offering explicitly self-funded coverage, a type of self-funded coverage, level-funding, is not uncommon with 38% of employees enrolled in ESI in level-funded plans and 45% reportedly enrolled in either self or level funded plans.
- Preferred Provider Organization (PPO) plans continue to be the most common plan type for those with ESI, with nearly 50% of enrollees.
- Finally, actuarial values for active workers with coverage in their own name remain stable with average plan richness of 86%.
In addition to the data, ARC also produces an annual Bulletin for EBSA as well as Technical Documentation supporting the additional variables, which are imputed from a variety of sources. The newest data appends to the 2024 March CPS and are available (along with previous auxiliary data sets back to 2011) here.