HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) and FSAs (Flexible Spending Accounts) are both accounts designed to help employees put aside money to pay for extra medical expenses on a pre-tax basis, both have rules around maximum contributions and permissible distributions, and both have remarkably similar-sounding acronyms. However, the similarities, for the most part, stop there.
Employers may be confused as to how these two types of accounts impact each other. Most of this confusion may be a result of misunderstanding HSA eligibility rules or applying these rules to FSAs. In the below article, we will briefly discuss both HSAs and FSAs independently and discuss how they impact each other in terms of eligibility.