ICHRA in Wilmington, Ohio 2026: Clinton County 61%
Clinton County's 2026 benchmark runs an estimated 61% below small group, about $10,388 a year per employee. Sourced Wilmington, Ohio data for employers.
The short version
- Clinton County's 2026 individual-market benchmark runs an estimated 61.0% below the small-group benchmark, about $10,388 per employee per year — well above Ohio's statewide average of 54.9%, ranking 13th of 88 counties by percentage.
- Clinton's benchmark is shared, to the cent, with Brown County and Highland County — a three-county rating area of roughly 129,077 residents in our dataset.
- Wilmington, the county seat, lost its largest single employer when DHL closed its national air-cargo hub here in 2009. The local economy has rebuilt around smaller employers: Air Transport Services Group, AZEK Company, R+L Carriers, CMH Regional Health System, and Wilmington College.
- Ohio isn't a borderline state the way some others are — all 88 Ohio counties clear our $100-a-month qualifying floor for 2026, and Clinton sits well above the statewide average on both measures.
- Qualifying is not the same as guaranteed savings for your business. The honest limits are covered later, including where this comparison breaks down for a specific workforce.
Does ICHRA beat small group in Wilmington, Ohio?
Yes, and it's one of the stronger county gaps we've published for Ohio. An ICHRA (Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement, now also referred to by HealthCare.gov as a CHOICE 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 Clinton County, the Ohio county that contains the city of Wilmington, the 2026 individual-market benchmark premium runs an estimated 61.0% 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 61.0% ranks 13 out of Ohio's 88 counties on percentage spread, well above the statewide average of 54.9%. In dollars it's $10,388 a year per employee, ranking 30th of 88 counties statewide — identical to Brown and Highland counties, because all three sit inside the same federal rating area. Of the 1,309 counties nationwide in our dataset, every one of Ohio's 88 counties clears the $100-a-month gap we use as the floor for including a county at all, and Clinton sits comfortably above the state's own average on both measures.
61.0%
Estimated Clinton County savings vs. small group
13/88
Rank by percentage savings among Ohio counties
42K
Clinton County residents in our dataset
$10,388
Est. Clinton County savings per employee, per year
The employer problem this is actually solving
Wilmington, Ohio isn't a town that's never seen a big employer. It's a town that had one, lost it almost overnight, and has spent more than fifteen years rebuilding around smaller businesses that now have to compete for workers without a Fortune 500 benefits budget behind them. Airborne Express opened a national air-cargo sorting hub at the former Clinton County Air Force Base site in the late 1970s, investing more than $250 million there over roughly two decades, per Wikipedia's summary of the city. DHL bought Airborne in 2003 and consolidated its U.S. hub operations in Wilmington in 2005 — then closed the hub in 2009 and shifted sorting to Cincinnati–Northern Kentucky International Airport, eliminating thousands of local jobs in a single decision.
That's the backdrop a small Wilmington-area employer is operating against today. A six-person accounting firm, a twelve-person machine shop, or an eighteen-person home-health agency isn't competing against other small startups for workers; it's competing against whatever's left of a company town that once had one dominant employer and now has several mid-sized ones. Air Transport Services Group, parent of ABX Air, is still headquartered in Wilmington, with its aircraft-maintenance business employing several hundred people. AZEK Company runs its main manufacturing plant in the city and opened a polyethylene recycling facility at the airpark in 2018. R+L Carriers, a trucking company, is headquartered there too. CMH Regional Health System operates out of Clinton Memorial Hospital. None of them employs anywhere near what DHL once did at a single site, but together they set a real local benefits bar — and a small employer with no benefit at all is competing against all of them for the same shrinking labor pool.
Going without any benefit at all isn't a neutral choice in a labor market like this one; it's a standing disadvantage against the employers that can still offer group medical and a retirement match. An ICHRA, funded at even a modest level, is a way to show up in that competition without pricing out a group plan the business was never going to qualify for at six, twelve, or eighteen employees anyway.
Why 2026 and 2027 renewals keep landing high
For the Clinton County employers who already carry a small-group plan, the renewal letter has been getting heavier for two straight years, and that isn't a local 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 brief published August 6, 2026 — up from an 11% median across 318 insurers for the 2026 plan year, per the same tracker's brief published September 24, 2025. Fifty-nine percent of insurers proposed 2027 increases between 10% and 20%.
Ohio's individual market tells a similarly pointed story. healthinsurance.org's Ohio marketplace guide, updated August 23, 2026, reports that 11 insurers offered ACA marketplace plans in Ohio for 2026, with an average unsubsidized rate increase of 19.8%, calculated before any premium tax credit. Separately, KFF's own tracking of national ACA marketplace competition found that the average number of insurers participating per state fell from 9.6 in 2025 to 9.0 in 2026, and that the number of counties served by only a single ACA issuer nationwide jumped from 93 to 165 — a shift KFF ties largely to Aetna CVS's exit from 17 states and other insurer departures following the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits at the end of 2025.
None of that changes the underlying mechanic that makes ICHRA work in a county like Clinton: 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. Clinton's gap has held for the entire 2026 plan year regardless of which direction each market moved on its own.
How an ICHRA (now also called CHOICE) actually works
Before the Clinton County numbers mean anything, it helps to be precise about what's being compared, since most of the confusion around ICHRA comes from skipping this step.
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, effective August 19, 2019, and applicable to plan years beginning on or after January 1, 2020. HealthCare.gov now also refers to the same structure as a CHOICE Arrangement; the mechanics and the federal rules haven't changed, only the public-facing name. 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 (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.
The comparison behind every number in this article rests on two specific prices for a given county and rating area — the geographic zone insurance regulators use to set premiums, usually a cluster of neighboring counties. The individual-market benchmark premium is the second-lowest-cost silver-level plan available in that rating area to a representative 50-year-old enrollee. "Silver" refers to 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 type of 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 employer can trigger a penalty tied to the employer mandate, the ACA requirement that applies to ALEs (applicable large employers, generally 50 or more full-time-equivalent employees). Smaller, non-ALE employers aren't subject to that mandate at all, which covers most of the small practices and shops described above.
One structural piece is often misunderstood: an employer can define different employee classes — for example, full-time versus part-time, or by geographic rating area — and offer different benefits to each class, subject to federal minimum-size rules for some class types. What an employer cannot do is offer the same class of employees a choice between ICHRA and a traditional group plan; it's one or the other, per class, not both at once for the same people. Within a class, reimbursements can still vary by age, up to a 3-to-1 ratio, and by number of dependents, per HealthCare.gov's current CHOICE Arrangement guidance.
Clinton County's rate spread, in dollars
Here is the actual 2026 benchmark comparison for Clinton County, home to the city of Wilmington. The individual-market benchmark premium is $552.58 a month. The small-group benchmark premium, built from comparable small-group plan filings for the same rating area, is $1418.28 a month. That's a gap of $865.70 a month, or $10,388 a year, per employee, an estimated 61.0% in favor of the individual market.
A top-fifteen number in our Ohio dataset
Clinton County's 61.0% ranks 13th of Ohio's 88 counties by percentage savings, well above the statewide 54.9% average. Its dollar figure, $10,388 a year per employee, is identical to Brown and Highland counties, because all three share one rating area. It isn't the single widest gap we've found anywhere in Ohio, and this article says so plainly later on, but it's a strong, sourced number for a county whose economy had to rebuild itself around smaller employers.
See the full Ohio savings breakdown for every county, or the national savings map to look up a specific county by name.
Why Clinton prices identically to Brown and Highland counties
This is the detail that makes Clinton County worth its own page. Its benchmark comparison doesn't just resemble its rural southwest-Ohio neighbors — it's identical, to the cent, because all three sit in the same federal rating area.
| County | Population (dataset) | Individual benchmark | Small-group benchmark | Savings vs. small group |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clinton (Wilmington) | 42K | $552.58 | $1418.28 | 61.0% |
| Brown | 44K | $552.58 | $1418.28 | 61.0% |
| Highland | 43K | $552.58 | $1418.28 | 61.0% |
Clinton, Brown, and Highland counties share the identical 2026 benchmark comparison because all three sit in the same marketplace rating area.
Unlike Mason and Cincinnati's shared rating area, this one doesn't include a major metro county. Brown County's population grew an estimated 1.6% between the Census Bureau's 2020 base and its July 1, 2025 estimate — from 43,681 residents to 44,397 — while Highland County grew 1.2% over the same window, and Clinton County grew 0.7%, per the Bureau's Vintage 2025 county population estimates. All three are modest, steady-growth rural counties rather than fast-expanding suburbs, which is part of why this rating area's benchmark numbers look different from the Cincinnati-area counties covered in our Mason, Ohio guide.
How Clinton compares to Ohio's biggest counties
Three of Ohio's eight largest counties — Cuyahoga (Cleveland), Summit (Akron), and Stark (Canton) — show a meaningfully smaller per-employee dollar figure than Clinton County. That's not a knock on those counties; it reflects how each rating area's carriers happened to price small-group versus individual coverage for 2026, which has little to do with a county's size or economic weight. It's a clear illustration of why a statewide or metro-level average can mislead: check your own county, not a regional headline number, before you model a rollout.
| County (city) | Population | Savings vs. small group | Est. annual savings / employee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Franklin (Columbus) | 1,318,149 | 59.6% | $10,624 |
| Cuyahoga (Cleveland) | 1,256,620 | 48.6% | $7,414 |
| Hamilton (Cincinnati) | 827,671 | 62.3% | $10,675 |
| Summit (Akron) | 539,361 | 38.8% | $4,433 |
| Montgomery (Dayton) | 536,121 | 58.3% | $10,014 |
| Lucas (Toledo) | 430,014 | 57.0% | $9,514 |
| Butler (Hamilton, Ohio) | 388,327 | 62.3% | $10,675 |
| Stark (Canton) | 374,199 | 41.1% | $4,692 |
| Clinton (Wilmington) | 42K | 61.0% | $10,388 |
How Ohio's 88 counties break down by savings tier
Number of counties in each savings band, 2026 plan year. Source: src/data/qualified_counties.json (Ideon rate data, cross-verified against CMS public-use files).
Clinton sits in the "60%+" band, alongside a minority of Ohio's counties. Illustrative and rounded; not an offer of insurance or a guarantee of savings.
What Wilmington looks like after the DHL years
The scale of the local labor market today, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, shows a county that's smaller and more fragmented than it was at the height of the DHL hub. Clinton County (area code 39027) reported 962 establishments and an average employment of 19,013 across 2025, at an average weekly wage of $1,274 and an average annual pay of $66,234. Most of those establishments are small, and that's the point: the county's benefits landscape isn't built around one dominant corporate HR department anymore. It's built around hundreds of smaller employers, each deciding independently whether to offer anything at all.
Wilmington's population was 12,664 at the 2020 census, per Wikipedia's summary of the city citing U.S. Census Bureau figures, with Clinton County as a whole at 42,026 residents in 2020, growing to an estimated 42,301 by mid-2025. A county this size, recovering from the loss of its largest single employer, is exactly the kind of place where a fixed, affordable ICHRA budget competes well against "nothing" — which, for a lot of small Clinton County businesses, is the real baseline they're competing against, not a rival group plan.
Thousands of jobs lost in 2009
When DHL closed its national air-cargo hub in Wilmington and moved sorting operations to Northern Kentucky.
962 establishments today
BLS QCEW count for Clinton County, 2025 annual average — most of them small employers, not one dominant one.
Same price as two rural neighbors
Clinton County's benchmark comparison is identical to Brown and Highland counties, to the cent.
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 defines a "group participation rule" as "a requirement relating to the minimum number of employees or dependents" that must be enrolled relative to a specified percentage or number of eligible individuals or employees. 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 statewide.
In practice, that means a Wilmington-area employer shopping small-group coverage may see a different minimum-participation requirement from one carrier to the next, confirmed plan by plan rather than published in one place. A ten-person shop with a part-timer, a new hire still inside a waiting period, or an employee already covered through a spouse's job at one of the county's larger employers can end up short of whatever bar a given carrier sets, 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 eligible employee who isn't a self-employed business owner or the owner's spouse. There are also no annual minimum or maximum contribution requirements. 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 workforce for 100 to 200 employees, and 20 employees for more than 200. Those class-size rules don't apply at all to an employer offering only a CHOICE Arrangement, which describes most Clinton County small businesses.
If a group quote already fell through on participation
If you've already tried to set up small-group coverage in the Wilmington area and a carrier's participation requirement blocked the quote, that's a specific, common signal that an ICHRA is worth pricing out next, since the mechanic that blocked you doesn't apply to it when it's the only benefit you offer.
A worked example for a Clinton County employer
Here's what the Clinton County numbers look like applied to a real headcount. Assume a 10-employee Wilmington-area company currently renewing a small-group plan priced at this year's Clinton County benchmark.
Here's the math
The 2026 small-group benchmark in Clinton County is $1418.28 a month per employee, or $17019.36 a year. The 2026 individual-market benchmark is $552.58 a month, or $6630.96 a year. The difference is $10,388 a year per employee. For a 10-person company, funding ICHRA contributions at the benchmark level instead of renewing small group works out to an estimated $103,884 a year in aggregate savings.
This is illustrative math built from real 2026 county rate data and a hypothetical headcount. It is not a quote, and it assumes the employer sets the ICHRA contribution at the benchmark level, which is a design choice, not a requirement. Your actual number depends on your employees' ages, exact home counties, and the plans they choose once they're shopping with their own budget.
The same arithmetic scales down to a smaller shop: a 5-person machine shop or dental practice near downtown Wilmington that has never offered benefits at all. That company could fund an ICHRA at the $552.58 individual benchmark and offer a real, tax-free benefit for about $2763 a month in total contributions, or roughly $33,155 a year for the whole company — a genuine first benefit offered to every eligible employee, with no enrollment percentage to clear.
At the other end of the size range, a 55-employee Clinton County company crosses into ALE territory under the employer mandate, which changes the calculus without changing the underlying county math. The same Clinton County 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 an employer-mandate 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.
How ICHRA adoption is actually growing
Clinton County's numbers sit inside a national adoption trend that keeps compounding. The HRA Council's fifth annual report, Growth Trends for ICHRA & QSEHRA, Vol. 5 (released August 12, 2026, data current through January 31, 2026), found that ICHRA-covered lives surpassed 500,000 nationally at the start of 2026, spread across more than 20,000 U.S. businesses now offering ICHRA or QSEHRA. Adoption among applicable large employers (ALEs) more than doubled year over year, the fastest-growing segment in the report.
The number that matters most for the small Wilmington-area business this article opened on: over two-thirds of small businesses offering ICHRA had previously offered no health coverage options at all. For most small Clinton County businesses, the realistic comparison usually isn't "ICHRA versus our current group plan." It's "ICHRA versus offering nothing while we compete for workers against the handful of mid-sized employers left after DHL," which is a much easier case to make than it sounds.
Setting up an ICHRA in Clinton County
Ohio does not layer state-specific ICHRA rules on top of the federal framework. The same IRS, Department of Labor, and HHS final rule that governs ICHRA everywhere applies here. What determines whether a Clinton County rollout goes smoothly:
- Pull your census by county, not by office address. A company headquartered in Wilmington with staff living in Brown or Highland counties shares the same numbers — but a company with staff further out may not.
- Check every employee's actual county on the savings map. Even in a state where every county qualifies, the percentage and dollar figures vary meaningfully by rating area — this step is still worth ten seconds per employee.
- 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.
- Define employee classes carefully, if you use them. Class rules carry minimum-size requirements and cannot offer the same class a choice between ICHRA and group coverage.
- Send the required notice on time. Eligible employees need written notice at least 90 days before the plan year starts, with specific required content.
- Budget for onboarding support. Employees who have never shopped the individual market on their own need guidance, once, at enrollment — especially new hires coming from a bigger employer's group plan.
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. Before anything else, it's worth checking whether your county is one where this works at all: the national savings map takes about ten seconds to search.
If your employer just offered you an ICHRA
This guide is written for the employer side of the decision, but if you're a Clinton County employee who was just told your benefit is changing, the short version is: you'll get a fixed monthly amount and shop for your own plan on the individual market instead of picking from your employer's group menu. Our guide for employees walks through what to expect.
The honest limits of this data
A strong county number is not a guarantee for your business
- This isn't Ohio's single biggest gap. A handful of other Ohio counties show an even wider percentage spread. If you're looking for the widest spreads we've found in the state, check the full Ohio breakdown before assuming Clinton is the strongest case nearby.
- A benchmark comparison is not your actual renewal. The $1418.28 Clinton County figure is a small-group benchmark built from filed rates, not your specific carrier's quote for your specific group.
- A rebuilding local economy doesn't guarantee every sector feels the same pressure. A county that lost its biggest employer doesn't mean every new business faces the exact competitive dynamic described above; model your own hiring situation rather than assuming the county trend applies to you.
- An older or higher-risk workforce changes the real-world math. Benchmark premiums are built around a representative 50-year-old enrollee; a company with a younger average age could see a different real-world spread than the headline figure implies.
- Rates move every plan year. A carrier entering or leaving the rating area can shift the comparison for 2027; recheck before every renewal, not just once.
- Waiving the premium tax credit is part of the deal. An employee whose ICHRA offer is deemed affordable generally cannot also claim a marketplace subsidy for that month. Model both sides before assuming the reimbursement is pure upside for the employee.
Wilmington isn't a town that's never had a major employer. It's a town that had one, lost it almost overnight, and has spent fifteen years proving a local economy can rebuild around smaller businesses. Those businesses still have to compete for workers, and a fixed ICHRA budget is a real way to do it.
Mike MooreIf your renewal letter is already sitting on your desk and you're working against a deadline, it's worth a conversation before you sign: book time with our team. If you'd rather work through the mechanics on your own first, start with how ICHRA works and come back when you have questions.
How these numbers are calculated
Every county savings 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 50-year-old enrollee — 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.
Clinton County's population growth figures (42,026 in 2020, 42,301 estimated for 2025, a 0.7% increase) come from the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program, Vintage 2025 county totals file (co-est2025-alldata.csv), fetched directly from the Bureau's data server. The same file provides the Brown County (1.6% growth) and Highland County (1.2% growth) comparisons used above. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages reports 962 establishments, an average employment of 19,013, an average weekly wage of $1,274, and an average annual pay of $66,234 for Clinton County (area code 39027) across 2025 — broader labor-market context for the county, not a figure used in the savings calculation itself.
The national small-group figures (11% median for 2026 across 318 insurers; 14% median for 2027 across 295 insurers), the national insurer-participation figures (9.6 to 9.0 issuers per state; 93 to 165 single-issuer counties), Ohio's own marketplace figures (11 insurers, 19.8% average 2026 increase), the IRS affordability percentages, the HRA Council adoption figures, Wilmington's population and DHL hub history, Clinton County's current major employers, and the fact that Ohio has 88 counties (per Wikipedia's "List of counties in Ohio") each come from separately published, independent sources, not from our own county dataset, and describe national, statewide, or local context rather than the Clinton-specific benchmark comparison above. 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 show the same gap for 2027 if a carrier enters or exits that market.
Questions Clinton County employers actually ask
Does ICHRA beat small-group insurance in Wilmington, Ohio?
Yes, and by a wide margin. Wilmington is the county seat of Clinton County, and the county's 2026 individual-market benchmark premium runs an estimated 61.0% below the small-group benchmark, about $10,388 per employee per year. That ranks 13th of Ohio's 88 counties by percentage, well above the statewide average of 54.9%. It's the identical comparison Brown and Highland counties post for 2026, because all three share one federal rating area.
Why does Clinton County price identically to Brown and Highland counties?
Ohio prices health insurance by federal rating area, a geography covering a cluster of neighboring counties that all get filed the identical benchmark price for a given plan year. Clinton County's rating area also covers Brown County and Highland County — a combined population of roughly 129,077 residents in our dataset. An employer with a Wilmington office and staff living across the three counties doesn't need three different calculations; all three run on the identical $552.58 individual and $1418.28 small-group monthly benchmark for 2026.
How much can a Clinton County employer expect to save?
Using 2026 benchmark data, the estimated gap in Clinton County is $865.70 a month, or $10,388 a year, per employee. For a 10-person company, that is roughly $103,884 a year in aggregate estimated savings if the employer funds ICHRA contributions at the benchmark level instead of renewing small group. This is illustrative math from public rate data, not a projection of what any specific employer will actually pay.
What happened to Wilmington's economy when DHL left?
Wilmington built its modern economy around air cargo: Airborne Express opened a national sorting hub at the former Clinton County Air Force Base site in the late 1970s, investing more than $250 million over roughly two decades, per Wikipedia's summary of the city citing local historical accounts. DHL acquired Airborne in 2003 and consolidated its U.S. hub operations in Wilmington in 2005, then closed that hub in 2009 and moved sorting operations to Cincinnati–Northern Kentucky International Airport, eliminating thousands of local jobs in a single move. The airpark itself, now known as Airborne Airpark, still handles cargo traffic today.
What companies operate in Wilmington today?
Air Transport Services Group, parent of ABX Air, is headquartered in Wilmington and its aircraft-maintenance business still employs several hundred people, per Wikipedia's summary of the city. AZEK Company runs its main manufacturing plant there and opened a polyethylene recycling facility at the airpark in 2018. R+L Carriers, a trucking company, is headquartered in Wilmington. CMH Regional Health System operates out of Clinton Memorial Hospital, acquired by RegionalCare Hospital Partners in 2010. Wilmington College, founded in 1870, is also based in the city. None of these employers comes close to replacing the single-site scale DHL once had, which is the specific gap a lot of smaller local employers are now filling piece by piece.
Why did my 2026 or 2027 small-group renewal come in higher than expected?
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, per the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker's brief published August 6, 2026 — up from an 11% median across 318 insurers for the 2026 plan year, per the same tracker's brief published September 24, 2025. Fifty-nine percent of insurers proposed 2027 increases between 10% and 20%. On Ohio's individual-market side specifically, healthinsurance.org's Ohio marketplace guide (updated August 23, 2026) reports an average unsubsidized rate increase of 19.8% for 2026, across the 11 insurers offering ACA marketplace plans in the state.
What happens to my employees' premium tax credit if I switch to ICHRA?
An employee who is offered an affordable ICHRA generally becomes ineligible for a premium tax credit for any month that offer applies, whether or not they accept it. Affordability is measured against the IRS's Required Contribution Percentage, which is 9.96% of household income for plan years beginning in 2026 (Rev. Proc. 2025-25) and rises to 10.22% for plan years beginning in 2027 (Rev. Proc. 2026-26). Model that test before you set a contribution amount for any Clinton County employee currently receiving marketplace subsidies.
Sources
- Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, "How Much and Why Premiums Are Going Up for Small Businesses in 2027" (Aug. 6, 2026)
- Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, "How Much and Why Premiums Are Going Up for Small Businesses in 2026" (Sep. 24, 2025)
- KFF, "How Has Insurer Participation in the ACA Marketplaces Changed in 2026?"
- healthinsurance.org, "Ohio Health Insurance Marketplace" guide (updated Aug. 23, 2026)
- IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-25 — Required Contribution Percentage, plan years beginning in 2026 (9.96%)
- IRS Revenue Procedure 2026-26 — Required Contribution Percentage, plan years beginning in 2027 (10.22%)
- 84 Fed. Reg. 28888 — ICHRA final rule, Departments of the Treasury/IRS, Labor, and Health and Human Services (June 20, 2019)
- HealthCare.gov, "CHOICE Arrangements" — participation, class-size, and age-variance rules
- Ohio Legislative Service Commission, Ohio Revised Code § 3924.03(E)(1) — definition of "group participation rule" for small-employer health benefit plans
- HRA Council, "Growth Trends for ICHRA & QSEHRA, Vol. 5" (Aug. 12, 2026)
- U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates Program, Vintage 2025 county population totals
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages — Clinton County, Ohio (area code 39027), 2025 annual averages
- Wikipedia, "Wilmington, Ohio" — population, DHL/Airborne Express hub history, current major employers
- Wikipedia, "Clinton County, Ohio" — county seat, population
- Wikipedia, "List of counties in Ohio" — 88 counties
- County-level premium comparison:
src/data/qualified_counties.json, 2026 plan year (Ideon rate data, cross-verified against CMS public-use marketplace files)