Any nonwage payment or benefit granted to employees by employers. Examples include pension plans, profit-sharing programs, vacation pay, and company-paid life, health, and unemployment insurance. Employers' payments for fringe benefits are included in employee-compensation costs and therefore are not usually taxed. If the cost of fringe benefits were paid directly as wages, the worker would pay taxes on this amount and therefore have less to spend when purchasing equivalent benefits independently.

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In governmental planning and budgeting, the attempt to measure the social benefits of a proposed project in monetary terms and compare them with its costs. The procedure was first proposed in 1844 by Arsène-Jules-Étienne-Juvénal Dupuit (1804–66). It was not seriously applied until the 1936 U.S. Flood Control Act, which required that the benefits of flood-control projects exceed their costs. A cost-benefit ratio is determined by dividing the projected benefits of a program by the projected costs. A wide range of variables, including nonquantitative ones such as quality of life, are often considered because the value of the benefits may be indirect or projected far into the future.

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• Economic benefit, the positive contribution to gross national product (or other measure of value) from an economic activity or project: see Cost-benefit analysis.
• Employee benefit, non-monetary employment compensation
• Benefit concert, or any activity performed for a charitable purpose
• Benefit (album), an album by Jethro Tull
• The Benefits, a musical duo from Denmark
• Benefit (sports), a match or season of activities granted by a sporting body to a loyal sportsman to boost their income before retirement
• Money, goods, or services provided by a social welfare program, including:
• Federal benefits, as provided by the United States federal government to its citizens.
• The Benefit Company, a financial company linking Bahrain's local banks together, as well as neighboring countries.