British Columbia’s largest employee benefits com- panies are finally reporting some positive results after years of stagnation, according to data collected on Business in Vancouver’s list of the biggest employee benefits companies in B.C. (page 14).
Median employment grew 43 per cent in 2021 after little change in the three preceding years, ac- cording to company data avail- able to BIV.
Despite a 9.3 per cent year-over- year decline in median employ- ment in 2022, the median is 30 per cent above where it was three to five years ago.
Over the past two years, average B.C. employment rose 118.3 per cent to 68.4 employees in 2022 from 31.4 employees in 2021. In the previous three years, average employment at the industry’s biggest firms hovered around 30 employees.
The recent surge in average em- ployment came from the addition of Pacific Blue Cross’s (No. 2) 773 employees to the list in 2021.
Employment at some long-time staples on the list followed the median trend. At GroupHealth Benefit Solutions (No. 3), em- ployment peaked in 2020 and 2021 at approximately 230 em- ployees, then fell 7.8 per cent in 2022. Despite the decline over the past year, the company is still larger than it was five years ago.
S+F Group Benefits Inc. (No. 10) had the largest five-year growth on the list, doubling its employee base over the past five years.
Hub International (No. 1) was excluded from average and median calculations because of a change in how it reported data to BIV.
