Spend on Wellbeing as % of Revenue — BRSR Core Attribute

What this attribute is

Spend on Wellbeing as a Percentage of Revenue is one of the nine BRSR Core attributes that SEBI requires every Top-1,000 listed entity to subject to independent reasonable assurance. It is one of three Core attributes that fall under NGRBC Principle 3 — Wellbeing of Employees, alongside Female Wages Share and POSH Complaints.

The attribute measures the proportion of revenue the entity reinvests into the wellbeing of its workforce — health and accident insurance, maternity and paternity benefits, day-care facilities, and other wellbeing programmes the entity discloses — over and above statutory retirement benefits. It is the most operational of the three P3 Core attributes: straightforward when GL tagging and bucket mapping are well controlled, no multi-component sub-disclosure, no payroll-basis nuance.

The work is in the chart-of-accounts setup — once wellbeing-related GL accounts are tagged distinctly from salary, CSR, and retirement-benefit spend, the disclosure runs cleanly off the GL year-on-year.

Formula and units

Wellbeing Spend (%) = (Cost incurred on well-being measures, employees + workers)
                    ÷ (Total revenue from operations from audited P&L,
                       excluding other income) × 100

The numerator wording follows the BRSR Core phrasing: cost incurred on well-being measures for employees and workers, comprising buckets such as health insurance, accident insurance, maternity benefits, paternity benefits, and day-care facilities (entity-disclosed composition).

The output is a percentage — unitless. The denominator is raw revenue from operations as disclosed in the audited Statement of Profit and Loss, not revenue adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity. The verified BRSR Core material specifies “Total Revenue from Operations – From Audited P&L Statement” and indicates other income should not be included; the PPP normalisation that applies to the P6 intensity attributes (which are physical-quantity-over-revenue) is not applied here, because the percentage output is already dimensionless.

The numerator: Wellbeing spend

The BRSR format identifies specific benefit buckets that comprise the wellbeing-spend disclosure under Principle 3 Essential indicators. The same buckets feed the BRSR Core numerator:

Benefit bucket	What’s typically included
Health insurance	Group medical insurance premiums for employees and workers, including dependant cover where the entity pays the premium
Accident insurance	Personal accident cover and group personal accident premiums
Maternity benefits	Statutory maternity benefit payments + entity-funded enhancements (extended leave, childcare allowance)
Paternity benefits	Entity-funded paternity-leave benefits
Day-care facility	Operating cost of on-site or off-site day-care (where applicable to the entity)
Other wellbeing programmes	Employee Assistance Programmes, mental-health services, ergonomics interventions, wellness initiatives — entity discloses the composition

The entity should disclose the composition of the “other” bucket — if a material portion of the numerator sits in “other”, disaggregation in the BRSR notes builds credibility with the assurance partner and with downstream ESG-rating agencies that consume the data.

The numerator should reconcile to the relevant General Ledger lines in the entity’s chart of accounts. In practice, this means tagging wellbeing-related GL accounts distinctly (often a sub-ledger within “Employee Benefits Expense”) so the BRSR numerator can be extracted without manual classification each year.

Employees + workers — both cohorts in the numerator

The BRSR format scope includes both employees and workers in the wellbeing-spend disclosure. A common first-year omission: workers’ benefits sit in a different ledger (often classified under “contractor cost” or “operations payroll”) and get missed when the entity pulls the numerator from the “Employee Benefits” GL category alone.

Where workers are engaged on the entity’s direct payroll, their wellbeing spend is captured the same way as employees.

For contractor-engaged workers, the treatment is a disclosed entity policy choice rather than a single universal rule:

• If the company directly incurs the wellbeing spend (e.g., centrally arranged health cover for contractor workers because cohort-pricing is more efficient), the spend belongs in the wellbeing-spend numerator
• If the wellbeing spend is embedded in the contractor’s commercial rate (the entity pays a fully-loaded daily/monthly rate that includes the contractor’s own benefit provision), the entity-level numerator typically excludes the implicit benefit component to avoid double-counting

Whichever treatment the entity adopts should be documented, disclosed alongside the figure, and applied consistently year-on-year. The assurance partner reviews for both consistency and absence of double-counting.

The denominator: Total revenue from operations

The denominator is revenue from operations as disclosed in the audited Statement of Profit and Loss prepared under Indian Accounting Standards. The same line that powers the P6 intensity attributes — but, as noted above, without the PPP adjustment that the P6 intensities apply.

Three rules:

1. Exact match to financial statements. Use the audited revenue-from-operations figure. Do not use turnover net of discounts, do not use gross of taxes — the as-disclosed line in the audited P&L is the figure.
2. Boundary alignment with numerator. If the wellbeing-spend numerator covers only the standalone listed entity, revenue must also be standalone. Consolidated environmental data with standalone revenue is the kind of mismatch the assurance partner catches in the first reconciliation pass.
3. No restatement for non-recurring items. Even in a year with a one-off divestment that inflates revenue, the percentage uses the as-reported revenue. Year-on-year comparisons can be discussed in the supporting BRSR text but the numbers themselves are unadjusted.

Worked example

Illustrative only — not representative of a typical company. Wellbeing spend as a percentage of revenue varies materially by sector, workforce composition, and benefit-programme generosity (an IT services company can run materially higher than a heavy-manufacturing entity, or vice versa, depending on policy). The numbers below are constructed to make the calculation structure clear; an actual filing must use the entity’s GL extracts and documented bucket composition with full audit-trail.

Same diversified mid-cap manufacturer used in the GHG intensity and water-withdrawal worked examples — declared operational-control boundary, standalone listed entity, FY 2024-25:

Step 1 — Numerator: wellbeing spend by bucket

Bucket	Spend (₹ Cr)
Health insurance — employees	6.5
Health insurance — workers (direct + entity-procured for contractor cohort)	2.4
Accident insurance — employees + workers	1.8
Maternity benefits paid	1.2
Paternity benefits paid	0.3
Day-care facility	0.4
Other wellbeing programmes (EAP, mental-health, ergonomics)	0.4
Total wellbeing spend	13.0

(PF, gratuity, and ESI contributions are NOT included — those are reported separately under the Principle 3 retirement-benefits Essential indicator.)

Step 2 — Denominator

Revenue from operations (audited, standalone) = ₹1,847 Cr

(No PPP adjustment for this attribute — the percentage output is already dimensionless.)

Step 3 — Wellbeing %

Wellbeing Spend % = 13.0 ÷ 1,847 × 100 = 0.70%

This 0.70% figure is illustrative for this constructed example. There is no SEBI benchmark that makes any specific percentage inherently typical or atypical — actual wellbeing-spend ratios vary materially by sector, workforce composition, and benefit-programme generosity. A figure higher than this would be common for IT-services entities with rich benefit programmes; a figure lower could be common for entities that fund minimal wellbeing beyond statutory retirement benefits. The disclosed bucket composition is what makes the assured percentage interpretable.

The BRSR XBRL filing carries this percentage in the relevant taxonomy element (verify the current MCA-published BRSR taxonomy for the exact element name), with both current-year and previous-year values populated and the bucket-level composition filed alongside under the Principle 3 Essential indicator on wellbeing measures.

What’s NOT in wellbeing spend

Three categories of cost are commonly mis-included in the wellbeing-spend numerator and need to be disentangled:

• Retirement benefits — PF, gratuity, ESI, superannuation, NPS contributions. These are statutory or quasi-statutory retirement-benefit costs reported separately under the Principle 3 Essential indicator on retirement-benefits coverage. Including them in the wellbeing-spend numerator double-counts and misstates the attribute.
• CSR spend on employee welfare. Companies Act §135 CSR spend has its own disclosure regime (Principle 8 and the CSR section of the annual report). Even where a CSR programme benefits employees indirectly (e.g., funding a community health initiative that employees access), the spend stays in the CSR disclosure — not the P3 wellbeing-spend BRSR Core attribute.
• Salary and wages. The “employee benefit expense” line in the audited P&L includes salaries and wages — these are not part of wellbeing spend. Wellbeing is the cost of measures supporting employees and workers beyond their core compensation.

A reconciliation from the audited P&L employee-benefit-expense line to the BRSR Core wellbeing-spend numerator should be retained as part of the workpaper file. It typically looks like:

Audited P&L employee-benefit-expense
  – Salaries and wages
  – Retirement benefits (PF, gratuity, ESI, etc.)
  – Share-based payments / ESOP expense
  + Wellbeing spend on contractor-engaged workers (if entity-procured, not in P&L line)
  = BRSR Core wellbeing-spend numerator

Common audit findings

Common practice patterns observed in BRSR Core assurance engagements — not SEBI-recognised categories of finding:

1. Contractor-worker wellbeing spend missed. When workers are contractor-engaged but the entity directly pays for their health / accident cover (often arranged centrally for cohort-pricing reasons), that cost can sit in a non-payroll GL and get omitted. Reconciliation to the procurement-side records often surfaces this.
2. Retirement benefits double-counted. The single most common over-statement: PF / gratuity / ESI gets added into the wellbeing-spend numerator even though they’re separately disclosed elsewhere. Auditor reconciles to the P&L and the retirement-benefits Essential indicator.
3. CSR-employee-welfare overlap. Entity runs a CSR programme that benefits employees indirectly and counts the spend in both the CSR disclosure (Principle 8 / Section 135) and the P3 wellbeing-spend numerator. Auditor surfaces the overlap during cross-disclosure reconciliation.
4. “Other wellbeing programmes” bucket undisclosed. The bucket exists, often holds a meaningful share, but the BRSR draft just lists “Other: ₹X Cr” with no composition. Not technically wrong, but the assurance partner will request disaggregation.
5. Boundary alignment with denominator. Less of a boundary-heavy disclosure than the P6 intensity attributes — the principal risk on this attribute is in numerator classification (which buckets, which cohorts, what’s included from contractor-worker treatment) rather than boundary alignment with revenue. That said, if the wellbeing-spend numerator is captured at one boundary (e.g., consolidated) and revenue at another (e.g., standalone), the percentage is misstated; the BRSR cover note’s declared boundary applies to both sides.
6. Mid-year benefit-policy change — documentation and cutoff. When an entity introduces or revises a wellbeing programme mid-year, the assured numerator should reflect actual spend during the reporting period (not annualised hypothetical cost). This is a documentation and cutoff issue rather than a SEBI-recognised standard finding — the relevance depends on materiality of the change and how the entity captured the partial-year figures in the GL.

XBRL filing

This attribute is filed in the BRSR XBRL instance document under the relevant element from the MCA-published BRSR taxonomy module. Element names and unit references should be verified against the current MCA taxonomy version before generating the instance document. Both current-year and previous-year context references must be populated.

The bucket-level composition is filed alongside under the Principle 3 Essential indicator elements — disaggregating the numerator into the named buckets (health insurance, accident insurance, maternity, paternity, day-care, other) so the assured percentage can be traced back to its components in the XBRL.

See XBRL Taxonomy for BRSR for the structural overview.

How this attribute rolls up into the BRSR Core engagement

This is one of the three Core attributes under Principle 3, alongside Female Wages Share and POSH Complaints. The signed BRSR Core assurance report attests this percentage to reasonable assurance under SAE 3000 (Revised). Workpapers retained by the assurance partner cover the bucket composition, the GL reconciliation from audited employee-benefit-expense to the BRSR numerator, the contractor-worker treatment disclosure, and the boundary alignment between numerator and denominator.

For the engagement that produces the signed assurance opinion, see BRSR Core Assurance.

Related reading

• NGRBC Principle 3 — Wellbeing of Employees — parent pillar
• GHG Emission Intensity per Revenue — sibling Core attribute (P6, but uses PPP-adjusted revenue — different convention)
• Water Withdrawal Intensity — sibling P6 intensity attribute
• Document Evidence Requirements — full per-attribute evidence checklist
• XBRL Taxonomy for BRSR — XBRL filing structure
• BRSR Core Assurance — service