There’s also the potential for free cash from your employer. Many match contributions into an HSA up to a certain limit. In its year-end HSA research report, Devenir (which provides investment services to HSA administrators) estimated that the average employer contribution to an HSA increased to $839 in 2018 from $604 in 2017.
Eric Remjeske, co-founder and president of Devenir, pointed to HSASearch, a website run by his company, where you can compare HSAs’ administrative expenses and investment choices. If you click “all HSA providers” on the top left, you can see that scores of providers have no administrative fees, but the majority also have no investment options available. This means you would be following a FSA-like “save and spend” model, possibly wasting some of the benefits of your HSA. The site has various other tools you can use to compare HSAs if you are looking for your own provider.
In its year-end industry report, Devenir estimated that only 19% of HSA balances were invested as of Dec. 31, with the rest sitting in cash. Devenir also estimated that the number of HSA accounts increased by 13% during 2018 to 25 million and that total assets in HSA accounts grew by 19% to $53.8 billion.