Small Businesses in Virginia Support State-Facilitated Retirement Savings Program

A recent survey from The Pew Charitable Trusts shows that a vast majority of small-business leaders in Virginia—about 91%—support RetirePath, a state-facilitated retirement savings program that helps private sector workers who don’t have access to retirement plans through their jobs save for the future. Providing an affordable and accessible retirement savings option for employees can reduce financial stress on businesses, promote workforce stability, and limit retirees’ reliance on state assistance programs.

Prior research has shown that small-business owners want to help their workers prepare for retirement to ensure a secure future for their team members and foster loyalty and commitment. By offering employees a way to save, small employers demonstrate their commitment to the long-term well-being of their staff. But many say they cannot afford to offer their own retirement savings plans.

As of late 2025, 17 states have created automated retirement savings programs—often known as auto-IRAs—to help small businesses and their employees. In these states, private sector workers without access to a workplace retirement plan are enrolled in the state program. Businesses are required only to provide employee data and facilitate payroll contributions; they can decide to offer their own retirement savings plan at any time. Virginia is one of those 17 states, with an automated savings program known as RetirePath Virginia. However, RetirePath only covers employers with 25 or more eligible employees.

To understand small employer views of RetirePath, and of retirement savings plans in general, Pew conducted a survey of 300 Virginia small-business owners and decision-makers whose companies had fewer than 25 employees and did not offer a retirement plan in 2025.

Sixty-one percent of respondents said they don’t provide retirement benefits because such plans are too costly to set up, and 62% said they were concerned about their ability to operate a retirement savings program. Asked if they planned to offer a retirement savings plan in the future, 73% said they would never do so.

Auto-IRAs provide small-business owners a no-fee, easy-to-manage solution. As noted above, 91% of respondents in Pew’s survey said they would support a savings initiative that automatically enrolls workers in a payroll deduction program; roughly 1 in 4 respondents, or 28%, said they strongly support it.

In previous Pew research, employers also voiced concerns about the broader fiscal costs of insufficient savings. Beyond the workplace, inadequate retirement savings can hurt taxpayers as well as individuals. If employees are unable to save adequately, they may be forced to rely on state-funded social assistance programs after they retire—which can lead to increased state spending and, ultimately, higher taxes for all businesses and residents. In a recent Pew analysis of the public costs of inadequate retirement savings, researchers projected that Virginia can expect to spend an additional $5.9 billion from 2021 to 2040 on expenses such as Medicaid because of insufficient retirement savings.

Retirement programs also help level the playing field for small businesses. In today’s job market, potential employees often consider a company’s benefits, including retirement saving options, when evaluating job offers. Small-business leaders know that retirement savings plans help them attract top talent and compete with larger businesses. In this way, those owners know that auto-IRAs like RetirePath are not only an investment in their employees’ future but also an investment in the future success and sustainability of their enterprises.

This new survey shows that employers believe a retirement savings program like Virginia’s RetirePath would help level the playing field among different types of employers. In fact, 43% of small-business owners said the main reason they support RetirePath is that it would either help attract and retain quality employees or it would make their business more competitive.

Virginia’s RetirePath is an automated savings program that small-business owners support. It boosts savings for workers who are not routinely setting aside money for retirement while helping employers compete with bigger rivals. Meanwhile, Virginia taxpayers benefit from a population that is better prepared financially for retirement and less likely to rely on government help.

How Pew did this research

The Pew Charitable Trusts conducted a survey to understand small-business owners’ awareness of and interest in state-sponsored retirement plans in Virginia. For this study, SSRS, an independent research firm, surveyed business owners or decision-makers at Virginia companies with two to 24 employees about employee benefits. The sample was drawn from the Dun & Bradstreet database and included an oversample of rural businesses.

Interviews were conducted by telephone with a live interviewer from Sept. 11 to Nov. 24, 2025. In total, 300 respondents completed the survey, including 103 from rural businesses.

The survey data was weighted to be representative of Virginia small businesses by employee size, rurality, industry, and revenue, with calibration to benchmark distributions and trimming of extreme weights. The margin of error for the total sample is plus or minus 9.2 percentage points.

For more details, see the survey questions, the topline, and methodology.

John Scott directs The Pew Charitable Trusts’ retirement savings project.