Employee health benefits in Europe: what do companies actually offer?

Private health insurance. Dental cover. Income protection. Life insurance.

The range of health-related benefits employers can offer is wide – and what's standard, expected, or irrelevant varies enormously depending on which European market you're hiring in.

Ravio's benefits dataset – drawn from hundreds of European tech companies – shows what employers are actually offering across Europe, country by country. Here's what it shows.

How common is private health insurance across Europe?

Across European tech as a whole, 47% of employers offer private health insurance to employees (Ravio benchmarks, June 2026).

But that average masks enormous variation by country:

France at 98% is the standout figure. 

But whilst this might seem like employer generosity, in reality since 2016, all French employers have been required to offer complementary health insurance (mutuelle santé) to employees – employer private health top-up is not optional.

This is why understanding local legislations and norms, alongside market benchmarks, is a must. 

The UK at 56% reflects what has become a structural shift in how UK employers view private health insurance in recent years. NHS waiting lists have become unmanageable, which means that private health insurance has moved from differentiator to near-standard.

The Netherlands is the lowest at 6%, but this is because individuals are required by law to hold health insurance, purchased by the employee directly rather than through their employer – making employer-provided cover uncommon.

The practical implication is that whether offering private health insurance is a differentiator or a floor depends entirely on which market you're hiring in.

In France it's the minimum. In Belgium and Ireland it's expected. In Germany and the Netherlands, it may not be the right lever at all.

What other health-related benefits do employers offer?

Private health insurance is only part of the picture. Ravio's data also covers a range of supplementary insurance types, and here the country-level variation is equally striking.

A few patterns stand out.

• Germany sits at or near the bottom across almost every supplementary insurance type. This is a direct consequence of how German healthcare works: around 88% of employees are covered by the statutory GKV system (which also covers spouses and children), with contributions shared equally between employer and employee. The incentive for employers to layer private insurance on top is minimal. 
• Belgium shows relatively broad supplementary coverage across dental (17%), income protection (17%), and life insurance (11%). Benefits are particularly common in Belgium overall, due to a very high income tax burden, meaning that  tax-advantaged benefits like group insurance and hospitalisation coverage are a common way for employers to increase total compensation value. Further, Belgium’s public health system requires all residents to have statutory mutual health insurance, but it typically only reimburses 50-75% of costs, leaving employees out of pocket without additional support. 
• Income protection is notably high in Nordic markets. Sweden leads at 37%, Norway at 24%. This reflects both a cultural emphasis on long-term financial security and the influence of collective bargaining agreements in Scandinavian labour markets, where supplementary insurance provisions are more commonly negotiated at sector level.
• Dental insurance is more common in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, at 24%. Given that NHS dental provision has contracted sharply in recent years, this isn't surprising – dental cover has become a valued benefit in a way it isn't in countries with stronger public dental provision.

Building a competitive health benefits package: what the data suggests

The data points to two things Reward professionals need to hold in mind when benchmarking health benefits across European markets.

1. First: understand the statutory baseline before benchmarking "above" it. In France, offering private health insurance is a legal requirement, not a competitive move. In Germany, not offering private health insurance is entirely normal. In the UK, not offering it is now a gap. The starting point differs so significantly by country that any like-for-like comparison needs this context.
2. Second: the supplementary layer is where the competitive differentiation happens in high-provision markets. In markets where private health insurance is already standard or legally mandated, the benefits conversation moves to what's offered on top – dental, income protection, critical illness, mental health support. This is particularly relevant in France and Belgium where the baseline is already high.

Ravio's benefits benchmarking data allows companies to see exactly where their health benefits offering sits relative to companies of a similar size and stage in each hiring market – which is a more useful benchmark than the statutory minimum or a global average.