How does Service 1st Benefits support my business during open enrollment?

We personally manage the entire open enrollment process — from educating employees to handling enrollment forms and answering plan questions. Our goal is to make open enrollment smooth and stress-free for everyone.

Can employees contact you directly for help?

Yes. Employees can reach out to us anytime for questions about claims, coverage, ID cards, or plan details. We act as your team’s benefits partner, not just your broker.

What size businesses do you work with?

We specialize in serving small and medium-sized businesses, typically ranging from 1–200 employees. If you’re growing or planning to expand, we help scale your benefits as your team grows.

Do you handle communication with insurance carriers for us?

Absolutely. We take care of claims issues, employee changes, renewals, and any carrier communication so you don’t have to spend hours on hold.

Do you offer voluntary or supplemental benefits?

Yes. We can provide optional add-ons like disability, accident, or critical illness insurance to enhance your benefits package at little or no cost to the employer.

What types of group benefits do you offer?

We provide comprehensive group health, dental, vision, and life insurance options for small and medium-sized businesses. We help you compare plans, handle enrollment, and manage carrier communication.

What information do you need to provide a quote?

We typically need: Number of employees Basic employee census (age, gender, ZIP code) Current plan (if applicable) Desired benefits or coverage goals We keep the process as simple as possible.

Do you charge fees for your services?

No. Our services — including plan comparison, open enrollment, and year-round support — are provided at no additional cost to your business.

COBRA Notice Timing: What Employers Actually Need to Send and When

Charlie Hopgood

3 days ago

4 min read

When an employee on your group health plan loses coverage — through termination, a cut in hours, divorce, or a dependent aging off the plan — COBRA administration doesn't start with a single notice. It's a chain of at least three separate deadlines, each running on its own clock, and missing any one of them is a compliance failure with a real dollar cost attached. For a small business without a full-time HR compliance team, that chain is exactly where things quietly go wrong.

Here's the actual timeline, notice by notice, plus what it costs to get it wrong.

The Three Notices Every Plan Has to Send

1. The General Notice — within 90 days of coverage starting

The first COBRA notice has nothing to do with a qualifying event. It's the plan's standing disclosure of COBRA rights, and it has to go out to every covered employee and spouse within 90 days of the date their group health coverage begins. Most small businesses handle this by folding it into new-hire enrollment paperwork — which works fine, as long as it's actually happening for every hire, not just the first few before the process went stale.

2. Employer notifies the plan — 30 days

When the qualifying event is something the employer already knows about — termination, a reduction in hours, the employee's death, Medicare entitlement, or the employer's bankruptcy — the employer has 30 days from the date of the event to notify the plan. If you're the plan administrator for your own group health plan, this step and the next one both land on you.

3. The Election Notice — 14 days after that

Once the plan has been notified of the qualifying event, it has 14 days to send the formal election notice to every qualified beneficiary — the former employee, plus any covered spouse or dependents. Stack that against the 30-day employer notice, and a small business that's also its own plan administrator has, in the slowest legal case, up to 44 days between a termination and the point the election notice actually goes out. That's within the rules — but it's also exactly the gap that lets a termination slip through the cracks.

A Worked Example

Say an employee is terminated on March 1. In the slowest legal case: the employer has until March 31 to notify the plan (30 days). The plan then has until April 14 to send the election notice (14 more days). The former employee has until roughly mid-June to elect COBRA (60 days from whichever is later — receiving the notice or losing coverage). And once they elect, they get 45 more days to make the first payment — which can push final resolution of that one termination into August, five months after the employee actually left. Multiply that by however many separations happen in a year, and a simple three-column tracker (event date, notice sent, notice due) earns its keep fast.

When the Clock Runs the Other Way

Not every qualifying event is one the employer finds out about on its own. A divorce, or a dependent child aging off the plan, is something only the employee or family member knows happened — so COBRA shifts the notice obligation to them. Plans can set a deadline of at least 60 days for the qualified beneficiary to notify the plan of one of these events, counted from the latest of: the date of the event, the date coverage would be lost because of it, or the date the plan told them about this requirement in the first place.

What Happens After the Election Notice Goes Out

Once a qualified beneficiary has the election notice in hand, two more deadlines kick in:

60 days to elect coverage — counted from the later of the date the election notice was provided or the date they'd otherwise lose coverage.
45 days to pay the first premium — once they elect, they have at least 45 days to make the initial payment, which has to cover the full period back to when coverage would otherwise have lapsed.
A 30-day grace period on every payment after that — monthly premiums due later in the coverage period get a minimum 30-day grace window before the plan can terminate coverage for nonpayment.

The Real Cost of Missing a Deadline

This isn't a “best practices” issue — it's a federal excise tax. Under Section 4980B of the tax code, a plan that fails to comply with COBRA's notice or coverage requirements can be taxed $100 per day, per affected qualified beneficiary (doubling to $200 a day if more than one family member is affected by the same failure). For an unintentional failure caught before an IRS exam, there's an annual cap — generally the lesser of 10% of what the employer spent on its group health plan that year, or $500,000 — but if the failure is caught on audit instead, minimum penalties of $2,500 (or $15,000 for more than an isolated, minor failure) apply regardless of how small the underlying mistake was.

One important caveat: federal COBRA only applies to employers with at least 20 employees, counting part-time staff proportionally based on the prior calendar year. Employers below that threshold may still owe continuation coverage under Oklahoma's own state rules, which run on a different notice timeline than what's described here.

Keeping the Chain Intact

None of these deadlines are complicated on their own — the problem is that they're spread across HR, payroll, and whoever handled the termination paperwork that week, with no single person watching all three clocks at once. The businesses that stay clean on COBRA timing usually do one simple thing: they treat every termination, hours reduction, or dependent status change as an automatic trigger for a dated checklist, rather than relying on someone remembering to start the clock.

If you're not confident your current process would catch a missed 14-day or 30-day window before it became a problem, that's exactly the kind of gap a compliance review turns up — for Norman and OKC employers, or anyone we work with remotely.