IFEBP Annual Employee Benefits Conference 2026

How it compares

For a company whose buyers sit on Taft-Hartley boards, this conference gathers more of them in one place than any other event of the year. Those trustees work for different unions and employers and rarely share an office, and the funds they oversee cover around 24 million participants and their families.

NCPERS Annual Conference & Exhibition (ACE) is the better trip for firms that sell only to state and local retirement systems. With more than 800 participants it is far smaller, but nearly everyone in the room works in public pensions, while in New Orleans the public sector is a minority of the audience.

The Foundation's own Health Benefits Conference & Expo (HBCE) each February draws mostly private corporate employers. Health and wellness vendors selling to single-employer plans get more from it. Investment managers, actuaries, fund administration software firms and the law firms that represent pension boards belong at the October conference.

Corporate HR buyers are easier to find at Society for Human Resource Management - SHRM, where benefits is one subject among many. The Annual Employee Benefits Conference covers plan governance and trust fund decisions only, which is why trustees treat it as their main event of the year.

The one trip of the year for anyone who sells to, advises or sits on the board of a union multiemployer or public sector benefit fund.

Who exhibits

The floor follows the way trust funds spend. Health carriers and pharmacy benefit managers such as Kaiser Permanente, UnitedHealthcare, CVS Caremark and Optum Rx take several booths each, next to point solutions like Hinge Health, Progyny and Virta Health. A second large group is investment managers and pension consultants, from Nuveen and GCM Grosvenor to Segal and Milliman. Fund administration software vendors, labor-owned banks and the securities litigation firms that work for pension boards, such as Robbins Geller and Labaton Keller Sucharow, complete the hall.

This year's list is on its way. A HallBrief brief picks the exhibitors worth meeting for your goals and the people to talk to at each. Get a brief

IFEBP Annual Employee Benefits Conference 2026

The 72nd conference takes place at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. New this year are Solutions Spotlights: seven half-hour company presentations in a designated area of the exhibit hall, from firms including Noom Health, Progyny, Included Health and Optum Rx. A new reception for public sector trustees and staff joins the program, and attendees can build kits for a New Orleans youth charity between sessions. Keynote speakers include Hidden Brain host Shankar Vedantam and Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar.

• Sessions are kept free of sales pitches, so the Solutions Spotlights in the exhibit hall are the only place companies present products. Time spent there sits outside the 11 sessions trustees need for their certificate, so plan it around the breakouts.
• Trustees spend most of the day in breakouts to earn their certificate, so the Monday and Tuesday lunches served in the exhibit hall are the most reliable time to find them at the booths.
• Spouses and guests can enter the exhibit hall only on Sunday, which makes the Sunday welcome reception on the floor the busiest social hour of the week.
• Book through the Foundation's hotel blocks: shuttle buses serve only the listed hotels, and the program marks the Hilton New Orleans Riverside, Loews and Caesars as union hotels, which matters to many labor trustees.

Exhibiting

Only members attend, so an exhibiting company must also hold an organizational membership in the International Foundation, and each booth includes one full conference registration. The exhibitor contract asks firms to disclose any disputes with labor unions in advance, because many attendees are union trustees. Exhibiting suits firms that sell to multiemployer and public plans, where trustees decide on fund assets and service providers directly.