Your assumptions, made arithmetic
Most corporate wellness ROI calculators hand you a flattering number built on a borrowed effect size. This one supplies none. Put in your headcount, realistic participation, your own absence figures and the effect you actually believe in — including zero — and see what the model says.
Your model, over 3 years
Programme cost
$48,799
Modelled saving
$70,560
On your assumptions this nets $21,761 over 3 years, paying back the build in about 7 months.
- Active participants
- 175
- Absence days avoided per year
- 84
- MVP build
- $12,000
- Maintenance, 3 years
- $36,000
- Cost per participant per year
- $93
Every figure above is your assumption made arithmetic. We deliberately supply no default effect size: corporate wellness ROI claims are genuinely contested in the peer-reviewed literature, and the widely-repeated return multiples do not survive contact with study design. Model it low before you present it high.
What decides the outcome
Participation, not the feature list
Participation is the whole ballgame
Every projected saving multiplies through participation. A programme with 12% sustained engagement and a great effect size beats nothing; one with a great platform and 3% engagement is a line item with no return attached.
Sign-ups are not participation
Enrolment numbers at launch are the vanity metric of this category. What matters is sustained monthly active use six months in, which is usually a fraction of the launch figure and should be what you model.
Employees are wary of health data at work
The fastest way to kill participation is to make people feel their employer is watching their health. Aggregate-only reporting is not just a compliance posture, it is a participation strategy.
You need the reporting to defend the budget
Whoever signs this off will be asked to justify it next year. Aggregate participation and outcome reporting from $799 is what turns a renewal conversation from a debate into a chart.
Methodology
Why there are no benchmarks in here
The arithmetic is simple and entirely yours: headcount times participation gives active participants; participants times your absence days times the reduction you selected gives days avoided; days avoided times your fully-loaded day cost gives the annual saving. Cost is the published build floor plus any add-on plus maintenance at $1,000/mo across the window.
What is deliberately absent is any default for the effect size, and any per-employee saving benchmark. The return multiples that circulate in this category trace back to studies whose methodology has been widely challenged, and more rigorous later work has generally found much smaller effects. Supplying a default would quietly become the number everyone reported, which is precisely the failure this page exists to avoid.
The tool also models only absence, not healthcare claims cost, retention or presenteeism. Those are real, harder to attribute, and adding them would make the output look more authoritative while being less defensible — the opposite of useful in the meeting where someone has to sign this off.
The unprofitable advice: run this at a participation rate you would bet your own money on, not the one in the vendor deck, and at a zero effect size as a floor. If it only works at 60% participation and a double-digit reduction, the honest read is that it does not work — and it is far cheaper to learn that from a slider than from a year of a deployed platform.
Programme questions
What HR and benefits leaders ask
What is the ROI of a corporate wellness programme?
Honestly: contested. The widely-quoted return multiples in this category come from studies whose design has been repeatedly challenged, and later randomised work has found much smaller effects than the early literature suggested. That is exactly why this calculator supplies no default effect size and asks you for yours instead. A model built on your own participation and absence figures, run at a pessimistic assumption as well as an optimistic one, is worth more in a budget meeting than any borrowed multiple.
Why doesn't the calculator include a benchmark saving per employee?
Because publishing one would make the tool useless and dishonest at the same time. Effect sizes vary enormously by programme type, population, baseline health and how participation is measured, and a single default would quietly become the answer everyone reports. Setting the reduction slider to zero — which the tool explicitly invites — shows the pure cost of the programme, which is the number most business cases never state.
What does a corporate wellness app cost to build?
Using published prices: an MVP build from $12,000, a full custom platform from $25,000 for multi-employer reporting, SSO and benefits integrations, dashboards from $799, and maintenance from $1,000/mo. A five-day planning sprint at $1,500 comes first and is credited toward the build.
What actually drives participation?
Participation, not features, is what decides whether any of this works — a programme nobody opens has an effect size of zero regardless of what the literature says. The things that move it are unglamorous: enrolment that takes under a minute, manager-level visibility, something that happens in the first week rather than a portal that waits to be visited, and not requiring employees to hand over health data they are uncomfortable sharing with an employer.
Does employee health data in a wellness app create compliance obligations?
It can, and the answer depends on how the programme is structured and who holds the data. An employer-sponsored programme that touches health information sits close to several regimes at once, and the boundary is a question for counsel rather than a developer. What we do is map which regime applies during planning, and design so that the employer sees aggregate reporting rather than identifiable individual health data by default.
Next steps
From model to programme
Let’s create together
Send us the model and we'll pressure-test it
Paste in your participation assumption and what this returned. If the programme only works at numbers we don't believe you'll hit, we'll say so before you build anything.