A 3-minute read on the part of a new job’s health plan that resets before the signing bonus even clears, and what that reset can actually cost.
A signing bonus arrives as a single round number, wired in with the first paycheck at a new job. What doesn’t come with it is a note explaining that most health insurance deductibles run on the plan’s calendar, not the employee’s start date, so a new job in the middle of the year usually means a new deductible in the middle of the year too.
Say someone spent the first half of the year working down a three thousand dollar deductible: a couple of doctor visits, a round of physical therapy, a refilled prescription. By June they’ve paid in twenty two hundred dollars toward it, close enough that insurance is finally covering most of what’s left. A new employer’s plan in July resets that number to zero. The twenty two hundred already paid in doesn’t transfer, it just stops counting.
Nothing in the offer letter mentions this, because the bonus and the deductible reset get decided by different people in different departments. HR quotes a number that looks like pure upside. The health plan quotes nothing at all, since deductibles live in a summary plan document nobody opens until a claim comes in.
The fix isn’t turning down the job or the bonus, it’s checking one number before the offer gets signed: how much of this year’s deductible and out-of-pocket maximum is already paid, and whether continuing the old coverage through COBRA for a few months costs less than restarting from zero. Sometimes the answer is nothing. Sometimes it’s real money showing up as a smaller net raise than the offer letter implied.
P.S. Tomorrow: why automatic escalation works for a retirement contribution and a training plan, and where both quietly fail.
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