How is your business helping
with cost of living pressure?

It's a question I put to a lot of leadership teams at the moment, and most of them answer it the same way: a pay review, maybe a bonus pool, maybe both. Fair pay matters, and I'd never argue otherwise. People deserve to be paid properly for the work they do. What I think gets missed in that conversation is the maths behind what a pay rise actually delivers to someone's weekly budget, compared with what it costs the business to deliver it.

I want to walk through those numbers, because once you see them side by side, the case for rethinking how a business supports its people through cost of living pressure becomes fairly hard to ignore.

The real cost of a 1% pay rise.

Take a business with 100 staff. A 1% pay rise sounds modest on paper, but once you add the 12% superannuation guarantee on top, that rise costs the business around $121,000 a year, based on current ABS wage data.

Now look at what each employee actually sees from that spend. About $21 a week before tax. Once tax is applied, that drops to roughly $14 a week in their pocket. With inflation sitting around 4% and wages growing at 3.2%, a 1% rise barely moves the needle at the checkout or the bowser. The business has spent six figures, and the individual outcome is a coffee and a bit of change.

Again, this isn't an argument against pay rises. It's a question about whether pay alone is the most efficient lever available for actually easing cost of living pressure on your people, or whether it's simply the lever everyone reaches for because it's familiar.

What the same business gets from Beny.

Compare that to the cost of giving the same 100 staff access to Beny. At $2.50 per employee per month, the total cost to the business is about $3,000 a year, roughly 2.5% of what that 1% pay rise cost.

For that spend, active Beny users save around $1,300 a year on groceries, fuel and everyday essentials. That works out to about $25 a week, straight back into their pocket, and because it comes through savings on everyday spending rather than a wage increase, it's already after tax. Dollar for dollar, an active employee is getting almost double the take-home value compared with the 1% pay rise, for a fraction of the cost to the business.

That gap is the whole point. A pay rise has to clear payroll tax, income tax and super obligations before an employee sees a cent of it. A saving on something they were already going to buy this week doesn't carry any of that friction. It shows up at full value, in the moment the cost of living pressure is actually being felt.

The number nobody puts next to the pay review.

There's a second piece of maths that rarely makes it into the same conversation as pay reviews, and it's arguably the more important one for the bottom line: staff turnover.

At the Australian average turnover rate of around 15%, a 100-person business loses about 15 people a year. Using a conservative estimate of $35,000 per departure to cover recruitment, onboarding and lost productivity, noting that in recruitment we used to estimate closer to one and a half times salary, that's over $500,000 walking out the door annually.

Retention doesn't need to be solved entirely by a benefits platform to make the case. Keep just one of those fifteen people because they felt genuinely supported through a difficult cost of living period, and Beny has paid for itself more than ten times over. That's not a marginal return. That's one retained employee covering more than a decade's worth of the platform's cost on its own.

Pay matters. So does what happens around it.

None of this is an argument that benefits should replace fair pay. They shouldn't, and no business should treat a platform like Beny as a substitute for paying people properly. The argument is narrower and, I think, more useful than that. For a fraction of the cost of a pay rise that barely registers at the checkout, smart benefits can put more real, after-tax value back into an employee's pocket, in the exact categories where cost of living pressure is actually being felt, while meaningfully improving the economics of retention at the same time.

So the question I'd leave any executive team with is the one I opened with. How is your business actually helping staff with cost of living pressure right now, beyond the next scheduled pay review? If the honest answer is "we haven't really looked at it that way," the maths above is a reasonable place to start.