A new survey recently released by Mellon’s Human Resources & Investor Solutions business reveals that more employers are providing domestic partner benefits for their workers, PR Newswire reported.
Mellon’s ‘Nontraditional Family Benefit Coverage Survey,’ which was completed in the fourth quarter of 2004, studied more than 550 American employers. The companies averaged more than 5,000 employees.
It turned out that 31 percent of the respondents offer domestic-partner benefit coverage, as opposed to the 19 percent of subjects who offered the same type of coverage in 2001. The results showed that 60 percent of those offering the benefits have offered it for less than five years. Moreover, large employers are more likely to offer domestic-partner coverage than small and mid-size businesses, with about half of the larger respondents offering benefits. Among all organizations, the most frequently offered benefits are medical, dental, and prescription drug coverage.
For this study, ‘domestic partners’ were defined as either opposite- or same-sex unmarried partners.