Nearly two-thirds of Americans have access to both health and retirement benefits

Approximately 64% of civilian employees in the U.S. had access to both an employer-sponsored health plan and an employer-sponsored retirement plan in 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The July 2010 Program Perspectives on Combined Benefit Plans also found that another 15% of employees had access to either a health care plan or retirement plan, but not both. The remaining 20% of civilian workers did not have access to either a health care or a retirement plan.

The results in the BLS report confirm commonly-held perceptions about the demographics of access to employer-provided benefits in America (presumably the Affordable Care Act will change this picture on the health care side).

Full-time workers have better access to benefits than part-time workers.  Seventy-seven percent of full-time civilian workers had access to both retirement and health care benefits, while only 20% of part-time workers did. In addition, 56% of part-time workers did not have access to either health or retirement benefits, while only 9% of full-time workers lacked access to either benefit.

Union workers have better access than non-union workers. Approximately 89% of union workers had access to both retirement and health care benefits, while 59% of nonunion workers had access to both.

Larger employers offer more benefit plans than smaller employers. BLS found that 86% of employees in establishments with 500 or more workers had access to both retirement and health care plans, while about 40% of workers in establishments with 1 to 49 workers had similar access.

These statistics are from BLS's National Compensation Survey: Employee Benefits in the United States, March 2009. For more information, visit http://www.bls.gov/ebs/#bulletins.