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Project 2025Chapter 22 › Proposal

Cap the untaxed employee benefits an employer can deduct

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, chapter 22, p. 697. Written by William L. Walton, Stephen Moore, David R. Burton.

Cap the untaxed employee benefits an employer can deduct

The document says “shouldWho acts: Congress, TreasuryHow: legislationp. 697 in the PDF
What the document says

“the next Administration should set a meaningful cap (no higher than $12,000 per year per full-time equivalent employee—and preferably lower) on untaxed benefits”

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 697

The chapter frames this as reducing the tax bias against wages relative to benefits. It says benefit expenses other than tax-deferred retirement contributions should count toward the limit, including shared benefits such as employee gym facilities, that the cap should not be indexed to inflation, and that employers should be denied deductions for health insurance and other benefits provided to dependents aged 23 or older.

What the document actually says

“the next Administration should set a meaningful cap (no higher than $12,000 per year per full-time equivalent employee—and preferably lower) on untaxed benefits”

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 697
That sentence, in plain words

Set a limit on tax-free job perks. No more than $12,000 a year per worker.

What this is about

Some job perks are not taxed, like health cover. The book says that favors perks over pay. It wants a cap on how much can go untaxed.

No action is recorded against this proposal. That is not evidence that none has been taken. See what the tracker does not yet cover.

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The quotation is the document's own words, exactly as printed, and we check the page number against the book itself before publishing. The paragraph underneath is our summary, not the document's words. So is the plain English version, which is why it sits beside the quotation rather than replacing it.

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