ICHRA in Canton, Ohio 2026: Stark County 41.1%

Does ICHRA beat small group in Canton, Ohio?

Yes, though it's a more modest "yes" than most of the Ohio counties we've covered so far. 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 Stark County, the Ohio county that contains Canton, the 2026 individual-market benchmark premium runs an estimated 41.1% 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 41.1% ranks 80 out of Ohio's 88 qualifying counties, below the statewide qualifying average of 54.9% and well below what Cincinnati (Hamilton County, 62.3%) or Columbus (Franklin County, 59.6%) show for 2026. What makes Stark worth its own guide isn't the headline percentage — it's scale and industry mix. At 374K residents, it's Ohio's 8th-largest qualifying county, and its economy runs on manufacturing more than any of the tourism, government, or logistics economies we've covered in Sandusky, Columbus, or Albany, Georgia. That mix creates a specific, common problem for the small shops and family businesses that make up most of Stark County's employer base: getting a small-group policy issued at all, at any price.

Of the 1,309 counties nationwide in our dataset, 88 are in Ohio, and every one of them clears the $100-a-month gap we use as the floor for including a county at all. Stark clears it too, at $391.03 a month — a real gap, just a proportionally smaller one than the widest counties in the state. The question that matters for a Canton-area employer isn't whether the county "qualifies" in the abstract; every Ohio county does. It's what this specific gap is worth to a specific headcount, and whether it solves the actual problem a Stark County employer runs into with group coverage. That's what the rest of this guide works through.

Why Stark County sits near the bottom of Ohio's range

A statewide average tells you almost nothing about any one county, and Stark makes that point from an unusual angle: it's a large county with a below-average percentage. Ohio's 88 qualifying counties average 54.9% savings, and the distribution runs from the high 30s up into the low 60s. Stark sits at 41.1%, with only 8 of Ohio's other 87 qualifying counties running lower — Summit County (Akron), at 38.8%, holds the state's narrowest spread, and Tuscarawas County, just south of Stark, comes in at 42.3%.

The reason isn't anything about Canton's economy or workforce quality. It comes down to how carriers filed their 2026 rates for this specific rating area. Stark's individual-market benchmark is $561.03 a month, on the higher side of Ohio's range, while its small-group benchmark, $952.06, sits closer to that individual figure than it does in a county like Erie (Sandusky) or the Cincinnati-suburb rating area that includes Hamilton, Butler and Warren counties. A rating area where both benchmarks run comparatively high, rather than one where the individual benchmark runs unusually low, produces a narrower percentage spread even when the dollar gap is still real.

Here's the part a percentage-only ranking hides: Stark is Ohio's 8th-most-populous qualifying county, larger than Summit (Akron) by headcount and far larger than most of the counties that outrank it on percentage. A narrower spread applied across a bigger employer base can still add up to comparable aggregate dollars for the county as a whole, even if any single employer's per-employee number looks less dramatic on a chart.

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

Canton's manufacturing economy, in the numbers

Canton's identity outside Ohio mostly runs through the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the McKinley Presidential Library, but its employer base is built on manufacturing, and that's the part of the local economy this article is actually about. Per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), Stark County's private-sector employers reported an annual average of 157,374 jobs across 9,576 establishments in 2025, at an average annual pay of $57,361. Within that total, manufacturing (NAICS 31-33) accounted for 23,966 jobs across 550 establishments — roughly 15% of the county's private employment — at a considerably higher average annual pay of $73,600.

The Timken Company, a Fortune 500 manufacturer of bearings and engineered industrial products, is headquartered in Canton and is the sector's best-known name here, but that 550-establishment count is the more important number for this article. It means Stark County's manufacturing base isn't one large employer and a supporting cast; it's hundreds of independent shops, tool-and-die operations, metal fabricators, and industrial suppliers, most of them small enough to be shopping for their own group health policy the same way any other small employer does.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Stark County, Ohio (area code 39151), 2025 annual averages.

Why 2026 and 2027 renewals keep landing high

For Canton-area employers who already carry a small-group plan, the renewal letter has been getting heavier for two straight years, and that's not a Stark County quirk. Nationally, small-group insurers filed a median proposed premium increase of 14% for the 2027 plan year, across 295 insurers filing in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker's August 6, 2026 brief. Fifty-nine percent of those small-group insurers proposed increases between 10% and 20% — not a handful of outlier carriers, the median. Insurers cited rising medical prices and utilization, specialty drug and GLP-1 medication spending, and healthier small groups shifting into level-funded, self-insured arrangements as the main drivers behind the increases.

The pressure sits on top of an already-expensive baseline. KFF's 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey found average annual premiums nationally of $9,325 for single coverage and $26,993 for family coverage in 2025, with premiums rising 5% for single coverage and 6% for family coverage that year alone. The same survey found that only 59% of small firms (10 to 199 workers) offered health benefits to any employees in 2025 — a meaningful share of the smallest employers in this exact size band, the ones a Stark County manufacturer or metal shop most resembles, offer no coverage at all.

None of that changes the underlying mechanic that makes ICHRA work in a county like Stark: what matters isn't whether either market's prices went up in isolation, it's whether individual rates rose relative to small-group rates in the same county and rating area. Stark's small-group carriers have been filing real increases, and the individual market hasn't widened its advantage here the way it has in a county like Erie or Butler — which is exactly why Stark's percentage sits where it does.

How an ICHRA (now also called CHOICE) actually works

Before the Stark 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 a dozen different households; 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 county and 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 of the small manufacturers and shops described above are well under that threshold.

Stark County's rate spread, in dollars

Here is the actual 2026 benchmark comparison for Stark County, the county that contains Canton, Massillon, Alliance, North Canton and Louisville. The individual-market benchmark premium is $561.03 a month. The small-group benchmark premium, built from comparable small-group plan filings for the same rating area, is $952.06 a month. That's a gap of $391.03 a month, or $4,692 a year, per employee, an estimated 41.1% in favor of the individual market.

Put next to its immediate neighbors, Stark's number holds up as genuinely representative of northeast-central Ohio rather than an outlier in either direction: Wayne County, home to Wooster, runs 46.1%; Carroll County runs 48.6%; and Columbiana and Mahoning counties, sharing a rating area to the east, both run 58.9%. Stark sits in the middle of that specific cluster, not at either extreme.

See the full Ohio savings breakdown for every qualifying county, the national savings map to look up a specific county by name, or the Stark County employer decision page for the same benchmark broken out by metal tier and local industry mix.

Why participation minimums bite hardest for small manufacturers

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. Ohio law gives carriers that authority directly: under Ohio Revised Code 3924.03(E)(1), a small-group carrier may establish "employer contribution rules or group participation rules," defined in the statute as "a requirement relating to the minimum number of employees or dependents that must be enrolled in relation to a specified percentage or number of eligible individuals." The statute doesn't set a state-mandated ceiling on how high that requirement can run; it leaves the specific threshold to each carrier's own underwriting rules. We've written a full breakdown of exactly how that calculation works in our participation requirements guide.

That mechanic matters more for a Stark County manufacturer than it would for a large single employer, for a structural reason the BLS data above makes concrete: 550 manufacturing establishments across 23,966 jobs works out to an average of roughly 44 employees per establishment, and plenty of Stark County shops run smaller than that average. A ten-person tool shop or metal fabricator with a couple of part-timers, a spouse already covered through a partner's plan, or a new hire still inside a waiting period can fail a carrier's participation math even though every employee technically has coverage somewhere.

An ICHRA (or CHOICE Arrangement, per HealthCare.gov's current naming) sidesteps the mechanic entirely, and current federal guidance on this point is specific rather than a blanket claim. Per HealthCare.gov, if an employer offers a CHOICE Arrangement on its own, with no traditional group plan running alongside it, there is no participation-percentage requirement at all. 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.

Ohio's pending state credit: what HB 133 would add

Two states, Indiana and Mississippi, already pay small employers a state income tax credit for offering an ICHRA, and Ohio is the closest to becoming a third. House Bill 133, sponsored by Representative Meredith Craig, passed the Ohio House unanimously on June 4, 2025, per the official Ohio House of Representatives bill page. As of this article, per the Ohio Senate's own legislation tracker, the bill remains in the Senate Ways and Means Committee and has not been reported out, passed by the Senate, or signed by the Governor. It has not yet become law, and an Ohio employer should not plan its 2026 budget around a credit that hasn't passed.

The county math in this article doesn't depend on that bill passing. Stark County's 41.1% estimated gap is real for the 2026 plan year whether or not Ohio ever enacts a state credit on top of it; a future credit would be additive, not a precondition. Our full guide to state ICHRA tax credits covers how Indiana's and Mississippi's enacted programs actually work, in case Ohio's bill becomes a useful template to watch.

A worked example for a Canton-area employer

Here's what the Stark County numbers look like applied to a real headcount. Assume a 12-employee Canton-area company — a metal shop, a small manufacturer, or a family-owned service business — currently renewing a small-group plan priced at this year's Stark County benchmark.

The same arithmetic scales down cleanly to the kind of company that opened this article's short version: a six-person tool-and-die shop that couldn't hit a carrier's group participation minimum because two employees are covered through a spouse's plan and one is still in a 90-day waiting period at a prior job. That company could fund an ICHRA at the $561.03 individual benchmark and offer a real, tax-free benefit for about $ 3366 a month in total contributions, offered to every eligible employee regardless of how many already have coverage elsewhere, since there's no enrollment percentage to clear.

At the other end of the size range, a 55-employee Stark County manufacturer 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 55 employees; 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 Stark County

Ohio does not layer state-specific ICHRA rules on top of the federal framework beyond the participation-rule authority covered above. The same IRS, Department of Labor and HHS final rule that governs ICHRA everywhere applies here, and the setup sequence is the same one that applies in any other state. What determines whether a Canton-area rollout goes smoothly:

1. Pull your census by county, not by office address. A company headquartered in Canton with staff living in Wayne, Carroll, Columbiana, or Tuscarawas County shares a similar but not identical rate comparison; confirm each employee's actual home county rather than assuming.
2. Check whether you're offering ICHRA alone or alongside a group plan. That decision determines whether any class-size minimum applies at all.
3. 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.
4. Define employee classes carefully, if you use them. A shop-floor-versus-office split is a legitimate class distinction, but class rules carry minimum-size requirements when paired with group coverage.
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. Employees who have never shopped the individual marketplace on their own need guidance, once, at enrollment.

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 "qualifies" for our 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.

Stark County's population figure (374K) comes from the same underlying county dataset used across the site. The employment figures in the manufacturing-economy section — 157,374 total private jobs across 9,576 establishments at $57,361 average pay, and 23,966 manufacturing jobs across 550 establishments at $73,600 average pay — come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Stark County, Ohio (area code 39151), 2025 annual averages, a separate federal dataset from our own county premium comparison. The participation-rule citation comes from Ohio Revised Code 3924.03(E)(1), as currently codified. The national small-group premium and coverage figures (Peterson-KFF and 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. Ohio House Bill 133's status comes from the official Ohio House and Ohio Senate legislation pages. 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 county 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 Canton-area employers actually ask