We Updated Our Dependent Stipend For The First Time In 8 Years, Here’s What Changed

If you’ve followed Buffer for a while, then you know we have a few uncommon approaches to teammate benefits and compensation. The example I’ll dig into today is our “Dependent Grant,” which we launched in 2016. 

Our Dependent Grant is separate benefit, outside of salary, that we grant teammates who are taking care of and supporting family members. It’s an extra $3,000 USD per year per child, up to four dependents total. This has been one of our most unusual (and at times controversial) benefits. 

Until recently, this was granted for extended family members, like siblings, parents, and grandparents. After eight years, we’ve updated this benefit. As always, we’re here to share the full story.  

Our new Dependent Stipend in 2025

Starting this year, we’ve decided to apply our stipend to dependent children, and no longer include partners or extended family members. It’s still a priority to support our teammates with young kiddos, especially during those rare weeks of work-related travel, such as Retreat week. 

The dependent stipend will continue to be a pillar in our network of benefits designed to help our team thrive in our remote work experience. For example, teammates often apply this stipend to childcare such as daycare or a nanny, which allows them to work during the day. To quote from a teammate in the original discussion: “supporting dependent children has a unique and direct impact on how Buffer teammates can engage with their work.” The goal was to strike this exact balance: generosity and support for teammates as it relates to work and our business. 

Beyond that, we feel it’s a family choice how a teammate’s family approaches work, childcare, and extended familial support. If we had unlimited profits, we’d love to support every teammate in a variety of different financial situations, and in fact this was the original dream of this stipend back almost 10 years ago! However, as a small business, we have to continually find the right balance of generosity and pragmatism when we examine our budget, our priorities, and our choices. 

This is how we will now define a Dependent:

• Under 18 years of age
• Residing in the Buffer teammate’s home at least some of the time
• The Buffer teammate is one of their primary caregivers
• All other situations on a case-by-case basis

This adjustment ensures that the stipend is focused on supporting childcare-related needs, bolstering our commitment to helping teammates thrive in a remote work environment. Whether it’s offsetting childcare costs during work hours or easing the burden during work travel (like retreat weeks), this stipend is now focused on offering practical support to teammates with young families. 

Under the new structure, we have 59 dependents across 31 teammates who are receiving support, with a projected budget of $117,000 for the year — a number that will likely grow as we welcome new Buffer babies or hire teammates with dependents throughout 2025.

When we reevaluated the benefit in 2024, Buffer was supporting 99 dependents, including:

• 59 children
• 22 spouses/partners
• 15 parents
• 2 siblings
• 1 grandparent

At $3,000 per dependent, this amounted to a total of $297,000 per year.

To be clear, while we know this topic has financial implications, our deep dive into the dependent stipend was driven more by the commitment to transparency and fairness. For example, transparency is lacking on this topic; this stipend is not included in our public salaries, and the concept of a dependent was being applied differently across the team. 

Why we changed our Dependent Stipend 

Late in 2024, we held a “Leadership Collaboration Week“, focused on taking a step back from the day-to-day business and asking bigger questions on our strategy, culture, or execution. 

I brought up our Dependent Stipend, and many teammates chimed in to unpack the cultural and financial implications of offering this benefit. (As with all topics that relate to money, not everyone has the same perspective, but I loved that we were able to have a really open discussion about the topic.) 

Here’s a summary of some elements of the stipend that work well for the Buffer team: 

• We love the idea of supporting working parents. In general, modern capitalism forces parents to make tough tradeoffs between work and family, and we want to help make those tradeoffs a little bit easier. (This is one motivation behind our four-day workweek as well.)
• Because we’re fully remote, we periodically ask teammates to travel to a central location for coworking and bonding. When parents travel for work, it requires a lot of preparation and support, some of which incurs additional costs, especially related to childcare. 
• We try to be generous with teammates, and we loved getting to support teammates who were helping out a family member going through a tough time and not able to work. 
• We are a US-based company, but we have teammates all over the world. This level of generosity supported a variety of global cultures, some of which have more family-sharing than others. 

On the other hand, here are the elements that felt a bit off about the stipend: 

• We are meticulous about fairness and transparency when it comes to our salary formula. This fund is separate from salary, and because we took a “no-questions-asked” approach, we ended up with some big disparities in how this was applied across the team, which felt out of line with our approach to overall compensation and benefits. 
• It felt a bit off to give extra money to teammates whose spouses and partners chose not to work in contrast to those partners who did. I often found myself twisted into logic puzzles on this one. For example, a family with an at-home parent often did not pay for external childcare, but these were the teammates whose spouses were eligible for the grant. (Of course, the grant is much less than childcare costs in a year in most places, but still.) 

We reflected on these elements and how we felt about them in light of Buffer’s Values and our compensation philosophy (which is to strive to be transparent, fair, generous, and simple), and ended up with a new version of this grant for the future. 

Over to you! 

When this benefit was first introduced in 2018, each Buffer teammate claimed an average of 1.04 dependents. By 2020, that number had increased to 1.2 dependents per teammate. In 2024, it had risen further to 1.35 dependents per teammate — a reflection of how our team’s lives and responsibilities have evolved over time.

One of Buffer’s core Operating Principles is to prioritize long-term thinking — building a company that thrives for decades, embracing patient growth, and planning ahead for our industry and the world. This principle extends to our team as well: 54% of our current teammates have been with Buffer for five years or longer. As they’ve grown with us, so have the caregiving responsibilities for many who have welcomed children while at Buffer. Our dependent stipend has been a reflection of this commitment, evolving alongside our team to provide meaningful support at different stages of life.

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Please share in the comments below, or reach out on our social pages!