Automatic Waivers for Missed Enrollment Deadlines

Keep enrollment moving forward, even when an employee misses the deadline. BambooHR now prepares waivers for eligible employees who do not complete open enrollment or new hire enrollment on time, giving benefits admins a clear outcome to review without having to resolve each missed submission manually.

What's new

When an eligible employee reaches the enrollment deadline without a completed submission, BambooHR creates a submission that waives every plan available to them, including employer-paid and required plans. Saved drafts that were never submitted are treated the same way. This applies to open enrollment and new hire enrollment windows, but not qualifying life event windows in BambooHR.

Employees also receive clearer expectations before the deadline. An existing enrollment email now explains that eligible plans will be waived when enrollment is not submitted on time.

After the deadline, system-created submissions appear as Never Submitted (Waived) on the Elections tab and remain awaiting approval. Benefits admins can review, edit, and approve them using the existing approval workflow. Until approval, the submission does not create active benefits, and BambooHR does not sign on the employee’s behalf.

This update does not automatically renew existing benefits. It also will not retroactively process waivers for enrollment windows that ended before rollout. If an existing window is reopened with a future end date, the waiver process will apply when that new deadline passes.

As always, we love your feedback! To provide product feedback on this feature and more, head over to our product feedback page and let us know how we’re doing.