ICHRA in Brunswick, Georgia 2026: Glynn County 49.2%

Does ICHRA beat small group in Brunswick, Georgia?

Yes, and by one of the widest margins in the state. An ICHRA (Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement) is an IRS-defined arrangement that lets an employer set a fixed monthly reimbursement amount and let each employee buy their own individual-market plan with it, tax-free. In Glynn County, the Georgia county that contains Brunswick, St. Simons Island, Sea Island and Jekyll Island, the 2026 individual-market benchmark premium runs an estimated 49.2% below the small-group benchmark premium, according to a county-by-county comparison built from Ideon rate data and cross-verified against CMS public-use marketplace files.

That 49.2% ranks 55 out of Georgia's 158 counties by percentage, and it sits well above the statewide average of 37.2%, far above what metro Atlanta shows for 2026 (Fulton County runs just 11.5%). Brunswick and the Golden Isles run on a genuinely distinct economy from the rest of coastal Georgia: a deepwater port, a regional hospital system, and — dominating the job count — tourism. That combination, a real rate spread plus an employer base stacked with small, seasonal businesses that group insurance underwrites badly, is what makes Glynn County worth its own guide rather than a line in a statewide roundup.

Of the 1,309 counties nationwide in our dataset, 158 are in Georgia, and 131 of them clear the $100-a-month gap we use as the floor for calling a county "qualifying" at all. Glynn clears it comfortably, at $ 588.77 a month. The question that matters for a Glynn County employer isn't whether the county "qualifies" in the abstract, it's what this specific gap is worth to a specific, often seasonal headcount, and whether it solves the actual problem a Golden Isles employer runs into with group coverage. That's what the rest of this guide works through.

Why Glynn, Camden, McIntosh, Wayne, Brantley and Pierce share the exact same number

Look closely at the numbers behind this article and you'll notice something that looks like a typo but isn't: Glynn County's individual benchmark ($608.92), small-group benchmark ($1197.69), and 49.2% savings figure are identical, to the cent, to Camden, McIntosh, Wayne, Brantley and Pierce counties, plus Charlton and Ware counties farther inland. That's not a coincidence and it's not our dataset repeating a number by mistake.

The ACA marketplace and small-group insurance markets don't price coverage county by county. They price it by rating area, a set of geographic zones each state defines (subject to federal rules) that carriers use to file one set of benchmark rates covering every county inside that zone. Georgia's insurance regulators grouped Glynn, Camden, McIntosh, Wayne, Brantley, Pierce, Charlton and Ware counties into the same Southeast Georgia rating area for 2026, so any carrier filing a plan in that zone filed one price, not eight. A Brunswick employer and an employer in St. Marys (Camden County) or Jesup (Wayne County) are looking at the exact same underlying math, even though they sit in different counties and, in some cases, serve entirely different local economies — port and logistics in Camden, timber and agriculture in Wayne, tourism in Glynn.

Here's why that matters practically: if you're a Glynn County employer and a broker quotes you a small-group renewal that looks meaningfully different from the $1197.69 benchmark used here, ask whether that's a plan-design difference (richer benefits, a different metal tier) or a genuine rating-area mismatch, because it shouldn't be the latter. And if your business has locations or seasonal staff split across this rating area's eight counties, the ICHRA math doesn't get more complicated the way a multi-county group quote sometimes does, since the benchmark comparison is identical across all eight.

Source: src/data/qualified_counties.json, 2026 plan year (Ideon rate data, cross-verified against CMS public-use marketplace files). Estimates, not quotes.

Brunswick and the Golden Isles' seasonal economy, in the numbers

Glynn County doesn't run on one dominant employer the way some qualifying counties do; it runs on tourism, split across a large number of small operators. Per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) for Glynn County (area code 13127), 2025 annual averages, the county's private-sector employers reported 3,258 establishments employing 35,763 people at an average annual pay of $52,838. Within that total, Accommodation and Food Services (NAICS 72) alone accounted for 370 establishments and 7,527 jobs — more than a fifth of all private employment in the county — at a considerably lower average annual pay of $32,888. Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation (NAICS 71) added another 79 establishments and 1,338 jobs.

The Georgia Department of Labor's Brunswick, GA Metropolitan Statistical Area profile (covering Glynn, Brantley and McIntosh counties together, updated September 2026) tells the same story at the regional level: for the first quarter of 2026, Accommodation and Food Services was the area's single largest industry by employment, with 410 firms and 7,740 jobs, 16.1% of all covered employment, at an average weekly wage of just $642 — the lowest of any major industry in the profile. Health Care and Social Assistance was close behind at 7,173 jobs across 358 firms, anchored by Southeast Georgia Health System (listed in Georgia Department of Labor records under its former name, Glynn-Brunswick Memorial Hospital). The same profile's establishment size-class table shows 2,403 of the area's 3,868 covered establishments employ 0 to 4 people, and another 617 employ 5 to 9 — together, more than three-quarters of all establishments in the area. This is a small-business economy, not a big-employer one.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Glynn County, Georgia (area code 13127), 2025 annual averages.

Why a seasonal, small-business workforce breaks group insurance math

Group health insurance was built around a stable headcount: the same employees, enrolled once a year, staying enrolled all year. A tourism-driven economy like Glynn County's doesn't work that way. A restaurant on St. Simons Island might run a skeleton crew in January and triple its staff by June. A Jekyll Island retail shop might rely on college students home for the summer. An inn might keep two full-time managers and a rotating cast of part-time housekeeping and front-desk staff who turn over every season. None of that is unusual for a $32,888-average-pay, 370-establishment industry — it's the normal shape of hospitality employment, and the Georgia Department of Labor's own data confirms it's the largest single employment category in the county.

A group health plan penalizes exactly that shape of workforce. Carriers price a group policy assuming a knowable, relatively stable pool of enrollees, and they protect that pricing with a participation requirement — a minimum share of eligible employees who must actually enroll before the carrier will issue the policy. A seasonal business with rotating part-time staff, employees covered through a spouse's plan, and new hires still inside a waiting period is structurally likely to miss that bar, even when every employee technically has coverage somewhere. It's not that hospitality employers don't want to offer a benefit; it's that the group-insurance underwriting model assumes a workforce most tourism businesses don't have.

This is the pain point this guide is written for: an owner who has looked at group coverage, run into the participation math or the price, and concluded there's nothing realistic to offer — when in fact the individual market in Glynn County is priced low enough, relative to small group, that a modest fixed monthly contribution goes a long way, without requiring the employer to hit any participation threshold at all.

See the full Georgia savings breakdown for every qualifying county, the national savings map to look up a specific county by name, or the statewide Georgia ICHRA guide for how Glynn County's number fits into the bigger picture.

How an ICHRA (now also called CHOICE) actually works

Before the Glynn County numbers mean anything, it helps to be precise about what's being compared.

An ICHRA is an employer-funded health reimbursement arrangement created by a 2019 final rule from the IRS and Treasury, the Department of Labor, and HHS, published at 84 Fed. Reg. 28888 on June 20, 2019, applicable to plan years beginning on or after January 1, 2020. Instead of choosing one group health plan for everyone, the employer sets a fixed monthly reimbursement amount, and each employee uses that money to buy an individual-market plan of their own choosing, then submits proof of coverage (called substantiation) to get reimbursed tax-free. The employer isn't picking a plan for dozens of households with different doctors, different needs and, in Glynn County's case, wildly different work schedules across the year; the employer is funding a budget, and the employee is doing the shopping.

Worth naming directly: as of this article's publish date, HealthCare.gov's own page on this arrangement is titled "CHOICE Arrangements," and states plainly that CHOICE Arrangements are "formerly known as the Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements, or ICHRAs." That's an administrative renaming on federal consumer-facing pages, not a change to the 2019 final rule or to any compliance requirement described in this article. We use "ICHRA" throughout this site, since that's still the term used in the regulations themselves.

The comparison behind every number in this article rests on two specific prices for a given rating area. The individual-market benchmark premium is the second-lowest-cost silver-level plan available in that rating area to a representative 40-year-old enrollee. "Silver" is one of four ACA metal levels (bronze, silver, gold, platinum) describing how costs split between premium and out-of-pocket spending, not the quality of care. This is the same benchmark the federal government uses to calculate premium tax credits, which is why it's a defensible number to build a comparison on rather than one insurer's list price. The small-group benchmark premium is the equivalent figure built from comparable small-group plan filings for that same rating area. When the individual benchmark is lower, the county "qualifies," and the gap between the two is the estimated per-employee savings if the employer funds ICHRA at that benchmark level.

Two more terms matter once an employer is actually deciding whether to switch. The affordability safe harbor is the test that decides whether the ICHRA offer counts as "affordable" under IRS rules — for plan years beginning in 2026 that test runs against a Required Contribution Percentage of 9.96% of household income (IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-25), rising to 10.22% for plan years beginning in 2027 (IRS Rev. Proc. 2026-26). Get the contribution amount wrong relative to that threshold and an ALE (applicable large employer, generally 50 or more full-time-equivalent employees) can trigger an employer-mandate penalty. Most Glynn County hospitality and retail operators, running under 50 employees, sit well under that threshold, though a larger resort operation may not.

Glynn County's rate spread, in dollars

Here is the actual 2026 benchmark comparison for Glynn County, the county that contains Brunswick, St. Simons Island, Sea Island and Jekyll Island. The individual-market benchmark premium is $608.92 a month. The small-group benchmark premium, built from comparable small-group plan filings for the same rating area, is $1197.69 a month. That's a gap of $588.77 a month, or $7,065 a year, per employee, an estimated 49.2% in favor of the individual market.

Put next to the rest of coastal Georgia, Glynn's number is the shared rating-area figure for Camden, McIntosh, Wayne, Brantley and Pierce counties as well, while Liberty County (the Fort Stewart and Hinesville area, closer to Savannah) sits in a different rating area at only 31.3%. Chatham County (Savannah) shows the identical 31.3%. Metro Atlanta is a different story entirely: Fulton County shows just 11.5%. Glynn County's gap is real, sourced, and among the widest in the state, but it is not universal even within a two-hour drive up the coast.

Georgia's group participation rule, and why it still bites in a tourism economy

Small-group health insurance isn't sold to individual employees one at a time; it's underwritten as a pool, and a carrier can require a minimum share of a company's eligible employees to actually enroll before it will issue the policy at all. Georgia regulates that authority more tightly than some states: under Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. R. 120-2-10-.12(9)(b), a small-group carrier cannot require more than 100% of eligible employees to participate for groups of three or fewer, and cannot require more than 75% of eligible employees for groups of four to fifty. That's a real cap, not a suggestion, and it's more employer-protective than a rule that simply lets carriers set their own bar with no ceiling.

Even a capped 75% requirement still bites hard for a Golden Isles hospitality business. A 16-person restaurant with a summer-only prep cook, two servers still in a 90-day new-hire waiting period, and a bartender covered through a spouse's employer plan can fail that 75% mark even though every one of those employees technically has coverage somewhere. That isn't a hypothetical extreme; per the Georgia Department of Labor's own data above, the average covered establishment in the accommodation-and-food-services category runs about 20 employees (7,740 jobs across 410 firms), and that average hides plenty of operations running smaller and leaner, exactly where a firm participation floor is easiest to miss.

An ICHRA (or CHOICE Arrangement, per HealthCare.gov's current naming) sidesteps the mechanic entirely when it's the only benefit offered. Per HealthCare.gov, there is no participation-percentage requirement at all in that case. A minimum class size only applies when an employer offers a CHOICE Arrangement to one employee class while also offering a traditional group plan to a different class: 10 employees for employers with fewer than 100 total employees, 10% of the total workforce for employers with 100 to 200 employees, and 20 employees for employers with more than 200. Those class-size rules exist to keep the two benefit types properly separated when both are in use; they don't apply at all to an employer offering only a CHOICE Arrangement, which describes most Glynn County small businesses.

A worked example for a Golden Isles employer

Here's what the Glynn County numbers look like applied to a real headcount. Assume a 14-employee Glynn County company — a boutique inn, a mid-size restaurant, or a professional-services firm near the port — currently renewing a small-group plan priced at this year's Glynn County benchmark.

The same arithmetic scales down cleanly to a smaller case: a 6-person gift shop on St. Simons Island that never seriously priced group coverage because the owner assumed a business that small couldn't offer anything worth having. At the $608.92 individual benchmark, funding an ICHRA for all six employees costs about $ 3654 a month in total contributions — a real, tax-free benefit offered to every eligible employee regardless of how many hours they work per season, since there's no enrollment percentage to clear and no group underwriting to qualify for.

At the other end of the size range, a 55-employee resort-adjacent operation crosses into ALE territory under the employer mandate, which changes the calculus without changing the underlying county math. The same benchmark comparison applies, but an ALE has to run the affordability safe-harbor test — against the 9.96% threshold for 2026 or 10.22% for 2027 — carefully for every employee class, since an ICHRA offer judged "unaffordable" for even a handful of lower-paid employees can trigger a penalty. That's not a reason to avoid ICHRA at that size; it's a reason to model the affordability test before setting a contribution amount, which our eligibility guide walks through in detail.

Setting up an ICHRA in Glynn County

Georgia layers its own participation-cap rule on top of the federal framework, but the underlying setup sequence is the same one that applies in any other state. What determines whether a Glynn County rollout goes smoothly:

1. Pull your census by county, not by office address. A business headquartered in Brunswick with staff living in Camden, McIntosh, Wayne, Brantley or Pierce County shares the same rate comparison; confirm each employee's actual home county rather than assuming.
2. Decide how you'll define your seasonal or part-time class. An hours-based eligible class (for example, employees regularly scheduled 20+ hours a week) is a legitimate way to extend a benefit to seasonal staff without promising it to every one-week fill-in hire.
3. Check whether you're offering ICHRA alone or alongside a group plan. That decision determines whether any class-size minimum applies at all.
4. Model affordability before you set a contribution. The reimbursement level decides whether an employee keeps or waives premium tax credit eligibility, against the 9.96% (2026) or 10.22% (2027) Required Contribution Percentage.
5. Send the required notice on time. Eligible employees need written notice at least 90 days before the plan year starts, with specific required content.
6. Budget for onboarding support, especially at hiring surges. Seasonal hires who've never shopped Georgia's individual marketplace need guidance once, at enrollment, not a lengthy annual open-enrollment process.

See our full ICHRA setup timeline for the detailed rollout plan, including the exact notice content requirements, and our eligibility guide for the affordability test itself.

The honest limits of this data

How these numbers are calculated

Every county figure in this article comes from the same dataset that powers our savings map, not a survey or a sales estimate. For each county, we compare a 2026 individual-market benchmark premium — the second-lowest-cost silver plan available to a representative enrollee, the same benchmark the federal government uses to calculate premium tax credits — against a small-group benchmark premium built from comparable small-group plan filings for that rating area. Both figures come from Ideon, a licensed insurance rate-data provider, and are cross-verified against CMS public-use marketplace files before publication. A county appears in our location-page dataset when the individual benchmark sits below the small-group benchmark by at least $100 a month; the percentage and dollar figures in this article are the gap between those two numbers, expressed as an annual per-employee figure at 12 times the monthly difference.

Glynn County's population figure (85K) comes from the same underlying county dataset used across the site. The Georgia Department of Labor's Brunswick, GA MSA Area Labor Profile, updated September 2026 and citing the U.S. Census Bureau, separately lists Glynn County's 2025 annual population at 90,306, up from 86,540 in 2024 — a close, independently sourced check using a different methodology and reporting year from our own county dataset. The employment figures in the economy section — 35,763 total private jobs across 3,258 establishments at $52,838 average pay, 7,527 accommodation-and-food-services jobs across 370 establishments at $32,888 average pay, 6,794 health-care jobs across 335 establishments at $68,490 average pay, and 1,338 arts-and-recreation jobs across 79 establishments at $38,930 average pay — come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Glynn County, Georgia (area code 13127), 2025 annual averages, a separate federal dataset from our own county premium comparison. The regional industry-mix figures (410 accommodation-and-food-services firms, 7,740 jobs, $642 average weekly wage; the 2,403-establishment and 617-establishment size-class rows; and the top-employer list) come from the Georgia Department of Labor's Brunswick, GA Metropolitan Statistical Area Area Labor Profile, Version 4.0, updated September 2026, covering Glynn, Brantley and McIntosh counties together. The Port of Brunswick description comes from the Georgia Ports Authority's own website. The participation-rule citation comes from Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. R. 120-2-10-.12(9)(b), as mirrored by Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute. The national small-group premium figure (Peterson-KFF), the Georgia individual-market figures (healthinsurance.org), the national family premium figure (KFF), the IRS affordability percentages (Rev. Proc. 2025-25 and 2026-26), and the HealthCare.gov participation and naming details each come from separately published, independent sources, described and cited where they appear. We've kept these data sources clearly separate throughout this article rather than blending them into one number.

Three limitations are worth stating plainly. First, benchmark premiums are built around a representative enrollee profile, so an unusually young or unusually old workforce will see a different real-world spread than the county figure implies. Second, these are benchmark plans, not every plan on the market; an employee who chooses a richer or leaner plan than the benchmark will see a different premium, though the relative spread tends to hold directionally. Third, rates are filed and refreshed annually, so a rating area that qualifies for 2026 is not guaranteed to qualify, or to keep its current percentage, for 2027 if a carrier enters or exits that market.

Questions Glynn County employers actually ask