(MONEY Magazine) – Stock-option fever continues to sizzle, but this year it's not only the dotcoms that are making headlines. Dramatically more Old Economy companies are sharing the wealth with employees up and down the corporate ranks. The National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO), a nonprofit research firm in Oakland, estimates that between 7 million and 10 million employees received options in 1999, up 20% from 1998. This year, almost half of the public companies on our list offered options to all staff levels; in 1999 only one-third did so.

That's not all the good news in MONEY's seventh survey of America's best company benefits. Big corporations are using the Internet to help workers better understand and manage their benefits, from exercising stock options via the Web to managing 401(k) investments. Even the drudgery of filling out health-care forms has been reduced as more employees file claims online.

To get a reading on the trends and challenges in the world of employee benefits, MONEY polled the largest companies in the nation (the Fortune 100) about benefits for their nonunion staffers. Our survey partners for this project were benefits consultants Gene Kalwarski, Jeffrey Lane and John Muehl of Milliman & Robertson's Vienna, Va. office. We focused on four key areas: retirement plans (including profit sharing), health care, stock options and insurance. Since retirement concerns loom so large with MONEY readers, we heavily weighted the generosity of each company's retirement benefits--the pension payout after 20 years of employment, the 401(k) match on employee contributions and the profit-sharing formulas. The second major factor in the scoring was an employee's monthly premium for health insurance for a family of four. Fifty companies completed our survey and are ranked in our list (see below); they represent almost 4 million U.S. employees and their families and span 19 industries.

The winner? For the second year in a row, Philip Morris, the $78.6 billion maker of cigarettes and packaged foods, came out on top, thanks to a wide array of exceptional benefits offered to employees of its tobacco company. (Benefits in other parts of the corporation vary.) In addition to its hefty traditional pension and low health-care costs, Philip Morris cinched the No. 1 spot with a profit-sharing program that gives workers between 13% to 15% of pay.

Here are other significant trends:

--Pensions. To stabilize costs and please workers demanding portable pensions, employers are continuing to switch from traditional pensions (where the bulk of benefits accrue later in your career) to cash-balance pension plans (where benefits accrue more evenly throughout an employee's career). Thirty-six percent of the companies on our list now offer cash-balance plans, up from 25% last year. Our survey showed that right now payouts for traditional pensions for long-term employees are higher than for cash-balance plans. But the Employee Benefit Research Institute notes that companies making the switch tend to boost 401(k) matches and profit-sharing contributions.

--401(k) plans. Companies are providing more flexibility and investment choices in their 401(k) plans. With few exceptions, employees at the MONEY 50 firms can easily access balances, make daily changes in their investment selections and learn more about retirement planning via the Web.

--Health care. Now for the bad news: According to a recent Watson Wyatt poll, companies are forecasting a 12.2% rise in health-care premiums for active employees and a 13.3% increase for Medicare retirees in 2001. To control costs, employers are either dropping higher-priced fee-for-service plans or making them prohibitively expensive. Workers at American Express (No. 44), for instance, pay an average of $384 for family health coverage under a traditional fee-for-service plan vs. $140 for the HMO plan. On the other hand, TIAA-CREF (No. 23) offers staffers a $76 refund if they choose an HMO over the higher-priced point-of-service (POS) plan. Also bucking the trend of passing on higher costs to employees: AT&T (No. 26) and Boeing (No. 11), which both pick up 100% of the cost for whatever plan within their network the employee chooses.