No published source reports how much of a small-group health insurance premium a Tennessee employer pays. The federal survey that measures employer-sponsored coverage state by state — the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Medical Expenditure Panel Survey–Insurance Component — reports the employee side of the premium, in dollars and as a percent. It does not report the employer side, and this page will not manufacture one out of the side it does report. What follows is what the survey actually publishes for Tennessee, with the qualifiers it attaches, and then the things that genuinely decide an employer’s contribution for one particular group.
What the Tennessee table is, and what it counts
The source is a single workbook AHRQ publishes for each state. The Tennessee edition names itself in its first cell: Table II. State of Tennessee, private-sector data by firm size, 2025. The column this page draws on names itself too:
. The survey is annual, the U.S. Census Bureau is the data collection agent, and the sample is drawn from the Census Bureau’s Business Register and is, in AHRQ’s words, “specifically designed to make national and state estimates each year.”Less than 50 employees
The unit being counted is not the company. AHRQ’s own MEPS-IC Questionnaire Glossary defines it: “ESTABLISHMENT - A particular workplace or physical location where business is conducted, or services or industrial operations are performed. Also known as a site.” The size band, though, is measured on the whole company — “Firm size is the total number of employees for the entire firm as reported on the sample frame” — and the MEPS-IC Technical Notes tie the two together: “An establishment is generally a single physical location; a firm can consist of just a single establishment or multiple establishments.”
So the column counts Tennessee worksites that belong to small firms. A single Nashville site owned by a company small enough to fall inside the band is in it. A single Nashville site owned by a company far above the band is not, however small that one site happens to be.
The figures the survey publishes for the employee side
Two rows in that column answer as much of this page’s question as any published source answers.
The first is stated in dollars. Its row label reads Average total employee contribution (in dollars) per enrolled employee for single coverage at establishments that offer health insurance, and for 2025 it reports $986, with a published standard error of 241.11.
The second is stated as a percentage. Its row label reads Percent of total premiums contributed by employees enrolled in single coverage at establishments that offer health insurance, and for 2025 it reports 11.8%, with a published standard error of 3.12%.
Neither figure carries AHRQ’s unreliability marker. The legend for that marker reads, in the agency’s own words, “* Figure does not meet standard of reliability or precision,”
and a second marker covers estimates suppressed “due to small number of observations in cell or high standard error.” Neither applies to these two rows, which is worth saying plainly: they are published, unflagged estimates rather than something reconstructed.
The row label is the fine print
Both row labels end with the same clause: at establishments that offer health insurance. That is the population being measured. The estimates describe Tennessee worksites that already have a plan, not Tennessee worksites generally, and the difference is not decorative — an average taken across employers who offer says nothing about employers who do not.
Further qualifiers travel with these numbers. One is that the column is a survey size band and not a legal test. Tennessee runs its small-group market on the federal small-employer definition, which its insurance regulator adopted in a published bulletin, and that federal test counts an average over the preceding calendar year. The survey’s band comes from a headcount on a sample frame. They sit close together and they are not the same instrument.
Another is that these are state-level estimates with sampling error attached, which is why the standard errors above are printed alongside them rather than tucked away. A state estimate is a measurement of a population, and it carries a margin. It is not a quote, a benchmark, or a prediction about any one business in Memphis, Knoxville or Johnson City.
Why there is no employer figure on this page
The obvious move, having published an employee percentage, is to publish its opposite and call that the employer share. This page does not make that move, and the reason is not caution for its own sake.
MEPS-IC measures and publishes the employee contribution and the employee percentage. There is no employer contribution row and no employer percentage row in the Tennessee table. A number produced by operating on a published estimate is not itself a published estimate: it has no row label, no defined population, no standard error, and no agency standing behind it. Printed in a sentence about Tennessee employers, it would look exactly like a measurement while being a piece of arithmetic performed on a page.
The same objection rules out the other tempting shortcut, which is to take two published estimates from the same column and treat the difference between them as an employer cost. The difference between two published estimates is not a published estimate either.
So the honest answer to the title question is that the authorized source reports the employee side and no employer share exists to cite. That is not a gap in this page. It is the finding.
What actually sets an employer’s contribution
The number a Tennessee employer pays toward a premium is not a statewide average at all. It is the product of two decisions, and both of them are visible on a specific quote.
The first is the employer’s own. How much of the employee-only premium to fund, whether to fund anything toward dependent tiers, and whether that changes at renewal are plan design choices, made by the business, subject to what it can carry.
The second is the issuer’s. Minimum employer contribution requirements are real and they sit alongside minimum participation requirements. Federal regulation acknowledges them where it acknowledges guaranteed issue: 45 CFR 147.104 obliges an issuer in the small group market to accept an employer that applies, but it does so “subject to paragraphs (b) through (d) of this section,” and paragraph (b) speaks of a small-group plan “that cannot comply with employer contribution or group participation rules for the offering of health insurance coverage, as allowed under applicable State law.” Those rules are not set at one national level. Where a state sets one it governs; otherwise issuers in that state apply what is customary there. A group that cannot meet them is not simply declined — the issuer may restrict it to a defined annual enrollment window instead.
That is the whole of what an acceptable source establishes about contribution requirements: that they exist, that they are a condition on guaranteed issue rather than an exception to it, and that they are a state-and-issuer question. No retrieved source describes how they are structured, so nothing further is written here and no percentage is offered.
Single coverage and family coverage are different rows
Both Tennessee figures above name single coverage inside their own row labels. That is a scope statement, not a style choice.
Family coverage is measured on its own rows of the same table, with its own estimates and its own standard errors. An employer who funds a generous share of the employee-only premium and a much thinner share of the family tier is doing something ordinary, and nothing in the single-coverage rows describes it. If your question is about dependent coverage, the single-coverage employee share is not the answer to it, and stretching one to cover the other is the kind of quiet extrapolation that makes a page wrong without making it look wrong.
Pre-tax contributions change what the employee feels, not what the employer pays
One mechanism is routinely confused with the employer share, and it is worth separating.
A cafeteria plan under Section 125 lets employees take certain qualified benefits on a pre-tax basis. IRS Publication 15-B describes it this way: “A cafeteria plan, including an FSA, provides participants an opportunity to receive qualified benefits on a pre-tax basis. It is a written plan that allows your employees to choose between receiving cash or taxable benefits, instead of certain qualified benefits for which the law provides an exclusion from wages.” Accident and health benefits are on the list of qualified benefits that a cafeteria plan can include.
The practical consequence for a small Tennessee employer is the two words written plan. Without a plan document in place, employee premium contributions come out of pay after tax; with one, they can be taken before tax. What that changes is the employee’s take-home effect. It moves no part of the premium from one party to the other, and an employer who has adopted a Section 125 plan has not thereby increased the share of the premium it funds.
What these Tennessee figures do not say about your business
They are not your odds. They are not a benchmark your renewal should be measured against. They are not a statement about your industry, your county, your city, or a firm of your size within the band. They are not a quote and they are not a rate.
They are two published estimates, for a defined population, in a defined year, each with a published standard error, and each scoped by a row label that says so. Used that way they are genuinely useful — they tell a Tennessee employer roughly where the published measurement of the employee side sits. Used as a stand-in for a quote, they mislead.
How to get the figure that applies to your own group
The number you actually need is produced by your own census, your plan selection, and your contribution decision, run through a specific issuer’s rates. It appears on a proposal, not in a survey table. Your current renewal paperwork already carries the equivalent figure for the plan year you are in, broken out by tier, and that document is a far better answer to “how much of the premium do we pay” than any state average could be.
For questions about the regulator’s side of the market rather than the arithmetic of one quote, the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance, Insurance Division is the office that oversees health insurance filings in this state. For the figure itself, work from the proposal.
The bottom line
The federal survey that measures Tennessee employer coverage publishes the employee side of a small-group premium and nothing about the other side. An employer’s contribution is set by that employer’s own plan decision and by the issuer’s contribution requirement, and the figure that matters to your business comes off your own quote.
Frequently asked questions
Does MEPS-IC publish what Tennessee employers pay toward a small-group premium?
No. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality publishes, for Tennessee private-sector establishments at firms with fewer than 50 employees, the average total employee contribution per enrolled employee for single coverage and the percent of total premiums contributed by employees enrolled in single coverage. Those are both measurements of the employee side. There is no matching employer row in the table, so there is no employer figure to quote, and this site will not derive one from the rows that are published.
Why not just work the employer share out from the published employee percent?
Because the result would be a number the survey has not published and does not stand behind. Every published estimate in that table carries its own row label, its own population, and its own standard error. A figure produced by operating on two published estimates inherits none of that, and it would be presented to a Tennessee employer as though AHRQ had measured it. It has not.
What actually decides how much a Tennessee employer contributes?
Two things, neither of them a statewide average. The first is the employer’s own decision about how much of the premium to fund, which is a plan design choice made at quote and at renewal. The second is the issuer’s minimum employer contribution requirement, which exists alongside minimum participation and is recognized in federal regulation at 45 CFR 147.104(b) as a condition allowed under applicable state law. Those requirements are set at state and issuer level rather than nationally, so they are a question for the specific quote in front of you.
Do the published Tennessee figures apply to family coverage?
No. Both figures used on this page name single coverage in their own row labels. Family coverage is measured on separate rows of the same table with separate estimates, and nothing about the single-coverage employee share carries across to a family tier. Treating one as a proxy for the other would be a claim the survey does not make.
Does a Section 125 plan change the employer’s share of the premium?
No, and that distinction is worth keeping straight. A cafeteria plan under Section 125 changes whether an employee’s payroll contribution is taken before or after tax. It does not move any part of the premium from the employee to the employer. IRS Publication 15-B describes a cafeteria plan as a written plan, which is the practical point for a small Tennessee employer: without the plan document in place, contributions come out after tax.
About the author
Nate Jones, CPCU, is the founder of Wexford Insurance and Wexford Health Insurance, an independent agency placing small-business group benefits in 9 states. He reads the MEPS-IC Tennessee table one row label at a time before quoting a figure from it, and declines to publish the numbers that table does not contain. Start with the Wexford Health Insurance quote form.