Depending on your employer’s program policy, benefit accounts can have different rules on whether balances expire if you don’t spend them by a certain date, or whether they roll over until they reach a maximum balance.
Benefits with expiring balances don’t allow roll over when you get the next deposit from your employer, so you’ll lose any money you didn’t spend.
For example, imagine that you have a benefit where you receive $30 on the first day of each month. If you’ve spent $20 so far this month, you have a $10 balance remaining. If the benefit has a monthly expiring balance, on the first day of the next month when you get your $30, you lose the $10 you didn’t use and your balance will be $30.
Benefits with maximum balances do allow unused balances to roll over when you get your next deposit, until you reach a maximum balance set by your employer.
For example, imagine that you have a benefit where you receive $50 on the first day of each month, with a maximum balance of $200. If you don’t spend the full amount by the end of the month, you’ll still get your next $50 deposit on the first day of the next month, and your balance will accumulate until it reaches $200. Then it's capped and you won’t get additional deposits until you spend down the balance.
You’ll still get a partial deposit if you haven’t reached the maximum balance — so if you have $180 remaining at the end of the month, you’ll get a $20 deposit to reach the maximum balance of $200.
You can tell which benefits have a maximum balance at the top of the benefits detail page:
You can check if any of your accounts have expiring or maximum balances in your employer’s program policy.