Hour banking works to the advantage of both contractors and employees. It provides contractors with a way to avoid overpaying health and specialty benefit premiums, and at the same time it provides employees with a method for extending coverage during work stoppages.

Get a Per-Hour Rate for Health Coverage.

If your work includes multiple job sites, multiple trades, multiple fringe rates, private and public work and multiple carriers to pay, doing the backward math to determine how much fringe to take credit for from your monthly premium spend can be daunting. Hour banking reduces this accounting hassle by giving you a per-hour rate for health coverage.

Here's how it works: benefits are provided and tracked in hourly increments based on the hours an employee works. This makes it possible for employers to account for all hours worked as well as their corresponding fringes. This significantly simplifies your accounting process and reduces the chance of overpayment of benefits. Having a per-hour cost for benefits is also a great strength when you're preparing bids.

Your company will benefit from hour banking if:

• Your accounting is complicated by multiple job sites, trades and fringe rates
• The nature of your work is seasonal
• You have rapid increases or decreases in the number of employees

Banking Hours for the Future.

Hour banking also allows your employees to "bank" hours during peak work periods, then use these excess hours to maintain benefits coverage during slow periods and work stoppages.

Hour banking allows employees to:

• Accumulate hours of work credit for excess hours worked
• Reduce their possibility of ineligibility
• Have benefits protection during layoffs and inclement weather
• Bank 3-6 months of health benefits