For Employers
The plan for the
worst week at work.
Your bereavement policy says how many days people get. MORTL gives HR, managers, and employees the plan for what happens next: the first call, the first 48 hours, the paperwork months, and the return to work. And before any of that, every employee gets MORTL Premium to plan ahead all year.
Founding Employer Program: $2,500 for the first year, for up to 250 employees. Renewal is $2 per employee per month at renewal, billed annually, with a $2,500 annual minimum.
The short answer
Death reaches every workforce, and most companies improvise when it does. MORTL for Employers is a loss-response system: a scored readiness audit, manager scripts and training, a first-48-hours workflow, a return-to-work plan builder, and MORTL Premium for every employee all year. Pricing is printed on this page, with nothing hidden behind a sales call.
Reviewed August 2026
The first 48 hours after an employee loss →The manager conversation script →
Free downloads
The guides HR keeps
on the desk.
Sourced, dated, and written to be used on paper. Each one opens with your work email.
Bereavement Leave Law for Employers, 2026The five state bereavement mandates, the sick-leave states, ADA and PWFA exposure, and a 51-jurisdiction table, each read at the statute in September 2026.Get the PDF →
What a Death Costs a CompanyHow often a death reaches a company of 100, 500, or 2,000 people, what it costs, and a per-100-employee worksheet built from sourced inputs.Get the PDF →
The First CallA 45-minute drill for HR and one manager: the first call after an employee loss, named responsibilities, a 20-item gap finder, and a 30-day fix plan.Get the PDF →
The Manager's YearA month-by-month guide for managers: the return, performance talks while grieving, prolonged grief disorder, ADA and FMLA, 988, EAPs, and anniversaries.Get the PDF →24%
of surveyed U.S. adults reported having a will in 2025
Caring.com 2025 Wills & Estate Planning Survey100 business days
average duration of reported workplace impact after a loss
Empathy 2025 Grief Tax reportNo federal requirement
for employers to provide paid funeral leave under the FLSA
U.S. Department of Labor: Funeral LeaveWhat happens without a plan
Someone dies. The manager finds out first and freezes, because nobody ever told them what to say. HR starts improvising: leave, payroll, the announcement, what the team can be told, who calls the family. The policy answers one question, days off, and none of the others.
Then the employee comes back, still carrying a second job nobody sees: accounts, certificates, probate deadlines, benefit claims. That work runs for months. Your EAP offers counseling, which matters, and which doesn’t file anything.
Every case gets handled by hand, differently each time. That inconsistency is the real cost: HR hours, manager guesswork, and people who remember exactly how their company treated them the week it mattered.
Every moment, covered
One system carries your company from readiness through response, recovery, and renewal. This is what it does at each moment.
Before a loss
A policy that works and managers who know their part
The readiness audit, a customized response plan, manager scripts, and training
The first call
Clear actions, one owner, and privacy rules
The first-call workflow for HR and the manager
The first 48 hours
Payroll, benefits, communication, IT, and family contact, in order
The printable first-48-hours checklist
While they grieve
Practical help beyond counseling sessions
A private, state-specific plan that puts the paperwork in order, plus every Premium tool
The return to work
A workload plan and check-ins that happen
A 30-, 60-, and 90-day return plan, built for that person
All year
A benefit people use before there’s a crisis
MORTL Premium for every employee: will template, advance directive, the Folder, family sharing
At renewal
Proof it worked
Quarterly aggregate reporting and an annual policy and readiness review
Free to every HR team, no signup, no sales call
Start with the working tools.
Score your readiness, print the response guides, and build a return-to-work plan today. If they’re useful, the founding program makes them your company’s system.
Start here
Bereavement Readiness Audit
Twelve questions, a scored readiness report, and the gaps to fix. Five minutes.
Get your score →For everyone who works here
Send This to Your People
Three ready-to-send emails and an intranet post that give your people MORTL's free will, living will and powers of attorney, under your name, with tracked links filled in.
Open the email kit →For the handbook
The Bereavement Policy Template
Day-one eligibility, real day counts, reproductive loss covered, no proof demands. Adopt it in an afternoon, free, as Word or PDF.
Open the template →For HR
An Employee Died: The First 48 Hours
Confirming with the family, telling the team like people, final pay and benefits, and the two weeks after. One page, in order.
Open and print →For every manager
Someone on Your Team Lost Someone
What to say word for word, the sentences to retire forever, and the return-to-work conversation. Scripts, not platitudes.
Open and print →For the return
Return-to-Work Plan Builder
Answer a few questions about the person and their workload, get a 30-, 60-, and 90-day support plan as a document.
Build a plan →For launch
Employer Launch Kit
Employee announcement copy, intranet copy, manager note, activation steps, and privacy language.
Open the launch kit →For IT and legal
Security and Data Boundaries
What MORTL stores, what it never sees, and the answers your security review will ask for. Written to be forwarded.
Read the security FAQ →What it costs
One program, one price, everything included. Every employee gets MORTL Premium. HR gets the response system, the training, and the reporting.
Where the price breaks even
At 100 employees, the founding year is 15% of what the bereavement days alone cost that year, $16,880. $2,500 is about 53 hours of staff time at $46.89 an hour, wages plus benefits, and each year after, $2,500, is about 53 hours.
If the system saves HR and managers that many hours across a year's cases, it has paid for itself. MORTL doesn't claim to reduce bereavement days; the law and your policy set those. What it cuts is the improvising: the first call, the announcement, final pay, and the return plan, run from a written sequence instead of from memory.
The hours use the headcount and the hourly cost set in the slider; $46.89 is the U.S. private-industry average, wages plus benefits, per hour worked. The prices are the two tiers below, at that headcount. Sources, retrieved September 14, 2026: CDC, FastStats: Deaths and Mortality (2024 deaths); Verdery et al., PNAS 2020, the bereavement multiplier; BLS, Employment Situation, Table A-1 (adult population); BLS, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026.
Founding Employer Program
$2,500 first year, up to 250 employees
- The bereavement-readiness audit, scored, with a written gap report
- A customized HR response plan for your policies and your states
- A live manager training session, plus scripts and the first-48-hours workflow
- MORTL Premium for every employee. They activate with a work email: no rosters, no spreadsheets, no SSO project
- Private employee planning and post-loss guidance, state-specific
- Quarterly aggregate reporting and an annual policy and readiness review
- Launch within one week of signing
- If agreed activation goals are missed, we run a second launch campaign at no charge
Renewal
$2 /employee/month at renewal, billed annually, $2,500 minimum
- Everything in the founding year, every year
- New employees get access as they join; new managers get trained
- The annual readiness review keeps your response plan current as laws and policies change
- Renewal decisions made from real usage: what employees used, what managers completed, what happened in actual cases
- Above 500 employees, pricing is custom
At 250 employees: $2,500 the first year, which is $10 a person. Each year after: $6,000, which is $24 a person.
Benefits decisions for January plan years happen in late summer and fall; start below and you’ll be live before open enrollment.
Proof
The founding five
Nobody has bought this yet. There are no customer names on this page, no quotes, and no activation numbers. The first five companies get it from the person who built it.
What the first five get
- The price above, unchanged: $2,500 for the first year, for up to 250 employees
- The readiness audit and the manager training, run by Stephanie Werner, MORTL's founder, herself
- A direct line to her for the whole year
- A say in what gets built next
What MORTL asks in return
- Your company's name and logo on this page
- A quote from you after 90 days
- Permission to publish the program's activation numbers as aggregates. Never anyone's individual activity.
The first activation numbers will be published on this page as soon as there are any.
Request a founding callHow the founding year runs
1. One call
Thirty minutes with your HR or benefits lead. We score your current readiness, scope headcount and states, and set the launch date.
2. Launch week
You get the response plan, the manager training session, and the launch kit. Employees activate by signing in with an approved work email. Live within one week of signing.
3. Quarterly reporting
A 90-day utilization summary prepared by MORTL: aggregate activations, checklist progress, saved-tool adoption, and planning actions. No individual activity or plan content.
4. The annual review
Before renewal, we re-score your readiness, review what employees used and what managers completed, and update the response plan for the year ahead. Renew on the evidence, or walk away clean.
Sending this to a colleague? Download the one-page overview (PDF)
For IT and legal, in plain terms
The five answers a security review asks for first, and where the templates stand with counsel.
- The employer sees aggregates only. Activation rate, checklist progress, which tools get used. The reporting has no path to an individual’s plan, documents, answers, or activity.
- The employee owns the account and the data. They create it with their work email, and what they put in it is theirs. You pay for access and never acquire the contents. MORTL doesn’t sell personal information.
- Uploaded documents are stored encrypted at rest by the storage provider, and every connection uses HTTPS. The product also tells people to keep Social Security numbers, passwords, and seed phrases out of it.
- MORTL holds no SOC 2 or ISO certification. We say so up front, answer security questionnaires honestly, and review DPA requests. If a control you need is missing, you hear it before you sign.
- When the program ends, the data stays with the employee. Premium lapses to the free tier and the someone-just-died path stays free for everyone. Nothing is handed to you and nothing is deleted out from under them.
Where the templates stand with counsel
The bereavement policy template and the first-48-hours workflow are general information, not legal advice, and your counsel reviews the policy before it goes in the handbook. The will, living will, and power of attorney builders produce drafts; none becomes a legal instrument until it’s signed the way that person’s state currently requires. The living will and both power of attorney builders show that state’s witness and notary rules with the official source to check before anyone signs, and the will template tells the person to confirm their state’s current rules first.
Where MORTL sits
The three things an HR lead puts side by side, each described by what it does.
An EAP
Counseling sessions and referrals for the employee. It’s built for the person who needs someone to talk to. It doesn’t run HR’s first morning, train the manager, or file anything, and MORTL sits beside it.
Empathy
In its own words, as read on October 20, 2026: “One connected platform for major life transitions.” Its employers page names, among its offerings, Estate Planning, Leave Support, Bereavement Care, Caregiving Support, Care Team and Empathy Connect, for employers, life insurance carriers and financial services. It prints no price.
empathy.com/employersMORTL
The operational system for HR and managers for the week a death reaches the team: the first call, the first 48 hours, the manager scripts and training, the return plan. Plus the planning tools and Premium for every employee before anything happens. The price is printed on this page: $2,500 for the first year for up to 250 employees, then $2 per employee per month with a $2,500 annual minimum.
The 100 business days figure at the top of this page comes from the Empathy 2025 Grief Tax report, cited as a source like any other.
Questions HR teams ask
Is this a replacement for our EAP?
No. Your EAP handles counseling. MORTL handles the operational side: what HR does the first morning, what the manager says, the first-48-hours sequence, and the months of paperwork the employee carries. They sit side by side, and MORTL covers everything the EAP was never built for.
Why does renewal cost more than the first year?
The first year is priced to get the first companies in, and it includes the setup: the audit, the response plan, and the manager training. The per-employee rate is the real price. At 250 employees: $2,500 the first year, which is $10 a person. Each year after: $6,000, which is $24 a person. It's printed here so nobody is surprised at renewal.
What do employees get?
Full MORTL Premium: a planning dashboard personalized to their state, every document tool including the will template and advance directive hubs, a printable Folder handoff document, family sharing for 5 people, and the someone-just-died crisis path, which is free for everyone regardless.
What data do you report back?
Aggregate numbers only: activation rate, checklist progress, and which tools get used. Never individual plans, documents, or personal details. An employee's will isn’t your business, and we keep it that way.
How fast can we launch?
We target launch within one week after the agreement, annual billing arrangement, approved work-email domains, and launch date are confirmed. Timing can change if those inputs are incomplete.
What if nobody uses it?
Launch is a campaign, not one email. You get announcement and intranet copy, a manager note, and new-hire promotion language, and the manager training builds the habit of pointing people to it. If agreed activation goals are missed, we run a second launch campaign at no charge. And when a death does reach the team, the response system gets used no matter what last month's sign-ins looked like.
Do we need SSO or a roster upload?
No. Employees activate themselves by signing in with an approved work-email domain. No roster, no spreadsheet, no IT project.
Request a founding call
Thirty minutes. We score your current readiness and you leave with the gaps, whether or not you buy anything. All fields required.
Employer Questions
What HR asks us on the first call.
Why is death planning an employee benefit?
Empathy's 2025 Grief Tax report says people navigating loss experienced workplace impacts for an average of 100 business days. The Department of Labor also says federal law doesn't require employers to provide paid funeral leave. A clear plan and practical support give employees a place to start.
Can you see our employees' plans?
Their plans are theirs. An employee's documents, wishes, and family information are private to them, and we don't share the contents of anyone's planning with their employer. What you're buying is access and readiness, not surveillance.
How long does rollout take?
Days, not quarters. There's no HRIS integration required to start: employees get access, an intro session if you want one, and printable resources for the people who prefer paper. Open enrollment season is the natural moment, but a founding program can start any time.
What does it cost?
Pricing is $2,500 for the first year for up to 250 employees, then $2 per employee per month with a $2,500 annual minimum. The form below starts a conversation with MORTL.