OneAmerica pledges to raise base pay rate to $22 per hour

Indianapolis-based OneAmerica Financial Partners Inc.—the city’s largest privately held company—announced Wednesday that it will raise its minimum pay rate to the equivalent of $22 per hour for all full-time employees by March.

“We believe every OneAmerica Financial associate should have a path to achieve financial certainty through a career that enables their overall success,” CEO Scott Davison said in a written statement.

The $22-per-hour wage, which translates to $45,760 annually for a full-time employee, will come though a combination of an employee’s base pay plus his or her bonus plan.

The financial services company said 86 OneAmerica employees, including 79 Indiana-based employees, will see their pay increase because of the initiative. The company did not respond to a question about how many total employees it currently has.

As of fall 2024, OneAmerica had about 2,500 full-time employees. In a previously announced deal that closed Jan. 2, OneAmerica sold its full-service retirement plan business to New York City-based Voya Financial Inc.

In September, when the companies announced the transaction, a Voya spokesperson said “a vast majority” of OneAmerica’s full-service retirement plan employees would become Voya employees when the deal closed. OneAmerica declined to say how many people worked in that part of its company. Industry sources said at the time that the count numbered in the hundreds.

This is not the first time that OneAmerica has publicly pledged to raise its base pay. In December 2018, the company announced that it was raising its base pay to $18 per hour for employees who had been with the company for at least three years. That action came in response to a 2018 report from the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, “Advancing Opportunity in Central Indiana.”

That report, supported by the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership, said that only 35% of Central Indiana’s workers without a bachelor’s degree held a good job or a promising job. Brookings defined a good job as one that offered health insurance and at least $18 per hour, or $37,440 annually, in cash compensation. A promising job was defined as an entry-level position that would allow the job-holder to move into a good job within 10 years.

At the time it announced its $18-an-hour pay pledge in 2018, OneAmerica said it had determined that 104 of its employees held jobs that did not meet Brookings’ “good job” criteria.