ICHRA in Mansfield, Ohio 2026: Richland County 52.3%

Does ICHRA beat small group in Mansfield, Ohio?

Yes, but it's a more modest win than several of the Ohio counties we've already covered. 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 Richland County, the county whose seat is Mansfield, Ohio, the 2026 individual-market benchmark premium runs an estimated 52.3% 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 52.3% sits below the statewide average of 54.9%, ranking 63 out of Ohio's 88 counties by percentage — squarely in the bottom half. The dollar figure tells a slightly better story: $10,123 per employee per year ranks 33 of Ohio's 88 counties, because Richland's small-group benchmark itself runs higher than many Ohio counties even as the percentage gap is middling. Of the 1,309 counties nationwide in our dataset, 88 are in Ohio, and all 88 of them clear the $ 100-a-month gap we use as the floor for calling a county "qualifying" at all — Ohio is one of a small number of states where every county clears that bar, a point our statewide Ohio guide covers in more depth.

Why Richland County doesn't share its number with most neighbors

Our earlier guide to Ohio's rating areas explains a pattern that holds across much of the state: carriers file one benchmark price for a whole cluster of counties at once, a federally defined geography called a rating area, so several counties end up showing the identical number to the cent. Our Clark County (Springfield) guide is a clean example of that: one rate area ties five counties together. Richland County is the opposite case. Checked against every other Ohio county in our dataset, Richland's individual benchmark ($ 768.09) and small-group benchmark ($1611.69) match exactly 1 other county: Crawford County, directly to Richland's west.

That matters for a Mansfield employer with a mixed-county workforce. Staff commuting in from Bucyrus or elsewhere in Crawford County see the identical 52.3% figure. Staff commuting from Ashland (56.4%), Mount Vernon in Knox County (48.3%), Mount Gilead in Morrow County (62.7%, covered in our separate Morrow County guide), Wooster in Wayne County (46.1%), or Norwalk in Huron County (63.0%) all see a different number entirely. Don't assume a Richland County figure applies company-wide just because your office sits in Mansfield; pull each employee's home county and check it separately, which is exactly what the table below does for Richland's closest neighbors.

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

Mansfield: a manufacturing county betting on a $74 million expansion

Mansfield built its identity on heavy manufacturing — stoves, tires, steel, and the Ohio State Reformatory, the hulking 1896 prison that housed inmates until 1990 and now draws tourists as the filming location for The Shawshank Redemption. Per the Richland Source's reporting (December 3, 2024) on figures presented to Mansfield City Council and the Richland County Commissioners by Destination Mansfield-Richland County president Lee Tasseff, tourism generated $457 million in total economic impact across the county in 2023, including $58.9 million in local tax revenue and $13.4 million in visitor-generated tax revenue from outside the county, supporting more than 5,200 jobs countywide. That's a meaningful tourism economy for a county this size, but it isn't the sector carrying the county's wage base.

Manufacturing is. On March 2, 2026, Newman Technology, Inc. — a Japan-based Tier 1 automotive parts manufacturer that has run a Mansfield plant for nearly 40 years — appeared before the Ohio Tax Credit Authority requesting a tax exemption for an expansion project in the City of Mansfield. Per the Authority's own published meeting minutes, the board approved a 1.225% tax exemption for six years in exchange for Newman's commitment to create 70 new full-time-equivalent jobs, generating $3,552,062 in new annual payroll, while retaining $44,986,498 in existing annual payroll at the site through December 31, 2028. The credit runs from January 1, 2026 through December 31, 2031, with annual reporting required until the end of 2034. Richland Source, the local newsroom that first reported the project on the same day as the Authority's vote, described it as a $74 million expansion adding new stamping-press capacity to the existing plant.

That single project is a meaningful addition against a private-sector base of 41,445 jobs countywide. Per the Richland Area Chamber & Economic Development's own published list of notable employers, Mansfield's largest private employers today span healthcare and manufacturing: OhioHealth (2,500 employees), Charter Next Generation (1,200, flexible packaging), Avita Health System (775), Newman Technology (roughly 625 at the existing plant, before the new hires), ArcelorMittal Tubular Products Shelby (550, steel), The Gorman-Rupp Company (525, a Mansfield-headquartered global pump manufacturer), Adena Corporation (525, construction), Techniplas (500, plastics manufacturing), and Cleveland-Cliffs (300, steel manufacturing, at the site long known locally as the AK Steel works). The county's own Air National Guard unit, the 179th Cyberspace Wing, based at Mansfield Lahm Airport, adds roughly 400 full-time and 800 part-time positions that don't show up in private-sector payroll counts at all.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Richland County, Ohio (area code 39139), 2025 annual averages.

Why a Richland County employer feels group pricing the hardest

A 12-person machine shop supplying the automotive-parts plants along Possum Run Road, a family dental practice near downtown Mansfield, or a small electrical contractor serving Ontario and Lexington all share a version of the same problem. None of them is large enough to negotiate group-insurance pricing the way a 2,500-employee hospital system can, and none has the kind of stable, uniformly full-time payroll that small-group underwriting assumes. A fabrication shop might run lean on office staff while carrying a skilled-trades crew that's exactly the kind of worker an owner most wants to retain, especially with manufacturing wages in the county averaging $65,841 a year — a number about to face new competition from Newman Technology's expansion and whatever other Mansfield manufacturer follows its lead.

Group health insurance is priced and underwritten around a knowable, largely stable enrolled population. A carrier protects that pricing with a minimum enrollment share among eligible employees before it will issue a policy, and the exact bar is set by the carrier, not capped by Ohio statute (more on that below). For a small Richland County employer with a mix of full-time shop staff, part-time administrative help, and employees already covered through a spouse's plan, clearing whatever bar a given carrier happens to set is a real obstacle — one that has nothing to do with whether the employer wants to offer a benefit and everything to do with a workforce shape group underwriting wasn't built for.

This is the pain point this guide is written for: an owner who priced group coverage, ran into either the participation math or a renewal number that jumped without warning, and assumed there was nothing realistic to offer. Richland County's individual market isn't the cheapest in Ohio relative to small group — that honest framing matters — but a 52.3% gap is still a real number, and for a lot of small Mansfield employers it's the difference between offering something and offering nothing at all.

See the full Ohio savings breakdown for every qualifying county, the national savings map to look up a specific county by name, or the Ohio vs. Georgia comparison for how Richland's number fits into the bigger multi-state picture.

How an ICHRA (now also called CHOICE) actually works

Before the Richland 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 in the Federal Register on June 20, 2019 (84 Fed. Reg. 28888), 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 workforce of households with different doctors and different needs; 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 geography. The individual-market benchmark premium is the second-lowest- cost silver-level plan available 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 the same geography. 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 Richland County machine shops, clinics and small contractors, running well under 50 employees, sit comfortably under that threshold, though a growing supplier crossing 50 heads should model it before setting a contribution.

Richland County's rate spread, in dollars

Here is the actual 2026 benchmark comparison for Richland County, the county whose seat is Mansfield, Ohio. The individual-market benchmark premium is $768.09 a month. The small-group benchmark premium, built from comparable small-group plan filings for the same geography, is $1611.69 a month. That's a gap of $843.60 a month, or $10,123 a year, per employee, an estimated 52.3% in favor of the individual market.

That number is lower than several Ohio counties we've already covered — Erie County (Sandusky) estimates 63%, Morrow County (Mount Gilead) estimates 62.7%, and Butler and Hamilton counties both estimate above 61% — because Richland's small-group benchmark ($1611.69) runs lower than those counties' small-group benchmarks even though its individual benchmark isn't especially cheap by Ohio standards. In practical terms: Richland's small-group market is already somewhat competitively priced relative to the rest of Ohio, which narrows the gap ICHRA has to close. That's a different story from a county where small-group pricing has run away from the individual market, and it's worth knowing before you assume every Ohio county tells the same story this site's Ohio posts have told so far.

Ohio's group participation rule, and why there's no state-set ceiling

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 defines this mechanic in Ohio Revised Code § 3924.03(E)(1), which states that "'group participation rule' means 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 or employees of an employer." The same subsection permits a small-group carrier to establish such a rule "as allowed under the law of this state," but the statute itself does not cap the percentage a carrier is allowed to require.

In practice, that means a Richland County employer shopping small-group coverage may see a different minimum-participation requirement from one carrier to the next, and that requirement isn't published anywhere in one place the way a statutory cap would be; it has to be confirmed plan by plan. A 10-person machine shop with a couple of part-timers, a new hire still inside a waiting period, or an employee covered elsewhere can end up short of whatever bar a given carrier happens to set, even though every one of those employees technically has coverage somewhere.

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 — generally, employers of any size can offer one if they have at least one employee who isn't a self-employed business owner or the owner's spouse. 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 Richland County small businesses.

A worked example for a Richland County employer

Here's what the Richland County numbers look like applied to a real headcount. Assume a 14-employee Richland County company — a tool-and-die shop supplying a Tier 1 automotive plant, a dental or physical-therapy practice near downtown Mansfield, or a small electrical contractor serving Ontario and Lexington — currently renewing a small-group plan priced at this year's Richland County benchmark.

The same arithmetic scales down cleanly to a smaller case: a 5-person specialty machine shop near the Newman Technology plant that never seriously priced group coverage because the owner assumed a business that small couldn't offer anything worth having. At the $ 768.09 individual benchmark, funding an ICHRA for all five employees costs about $3840 a month in total contributions — a real, tax-free benefit offered to every eligible employee, since there's no enrollment percentage to clear and no group underwriting to qualify for.

At the other end of the size range, a growing Richland County supplier that crosses 50 employees moves 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 Richland County

Ohio doesn't layer a statewide participation cap on top of the federal framework the way some states do, but the underlying setup sequence is the same one that applies everywhere. What determines whether a Richland County rollout goes smoothly:

1. Pull your census by county, not by office address. A business headquartered in Mansfield with staff commuting in from Bucyrus (Crawford County) will see the same benchmark numbers — but staff commuting from Ashland, Knox, Morrow, Wayne or Huron counties see a different percentage entirely, so check each employee's home county rather than assuming the Richland number applies to everyone.
2. Decide how you'll define your eligible class. An hours-based eligible class (for example, employees regularly scheduled 30+ hours a week) is a legitimate way to extend a benefit to full-time shop or administrative staff without promising it to every part-time or seasonal 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. Shop-floor and administrative staff who've never shopped Ohio'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 geography. 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.

Richland County's population figure (125K) comes from the same underlying county dataset used across the site. Mansfield's city population (47,663) comes from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey 2020-2024 five-year estimate, via Census Reporter. The employment figures in the economy section — 41,445 total private jobs across 2,745 establishments at $51,374 average pay, 9,401 manufacturing jobs across 184 establishments at $65,841 average pay, 8,307 health care and social assistance jobs across 367 establishments at $57,637 average pay, 5,952 retail-trade jobs across 398 establishments at $32,634 average pay, 4,786 accommodation-and-food-services jobs across 246 establishments at $20,042 average pay, and 5,266 local-government jobs across 122 establishments at $53,452 average pay — come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Richland County, Ohio (area code 39139), 2025 annual averages, a separate federal dataset from our own county premium comparison, fetched directly from BLS's public CEW API. The total covered (all ownerships) figure of 48,532 jobs across 2,907 establishments comes from the same BLS source. The Newman Technology tax-credit figures (70 jobs, $3,552,062 new payroll, $44,986,498 retained payroll, 1.225% for six years) come from the Ohio Department of Development's own Ohio Tax Credit Authority meeting minutes for March 2, 2026; the $74 million project-cost figure comes from Richland Source's reporting the same day, since the state minutes themselves don't state a total capital-investment figure. The notable-employer list and employee counts come from the Richland Area Chamber & Economic Development's own published page. The tourism figures ($457 million total impact, $58.9 million local tax revenue, $13.4 million outside-county visitor tax revenue, 5,200+ jobs) come from Richland Source's December 3, 2024 reporting on a public presentation by Destination Mansfield-Richland County to Mansfield City Council and the Richland County Commissioners; we could not independently locate the underlying tourism-economics methodology this session, so we attribute those figures to that local reporting rather than to a named research firm. The Ohio participation-rule citation comes directly from the text of Ohio Revised Code § 3924.03(E)(1), as published by the Ohio Legislative Service Commission at codes.ohio.gov. The national small-group premium figure (Peterson-KFF), the Ohio individual-market figures (healthinsurance.org), 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 geography that qualifies for 2026, and even a two-county match like Richland and Crawford, is not guaranteed to hold its current percentage, or stay matched, for 2027 if a carrier enters or exits that rate area.

Questions Richland County employers actually ask