2025 ACA Open Enrollment running 16.6% ahead of last year across 38 states w/at least 3 weeks left to #GetCovered

Now that the two largest ACA marketplaces (HealthCare.Gov, which hosts 31 states, and Covered California) have joined a half-dozen other states in posting fairly recent 2025 Open Enrollment Period updates, I figured it would be a good time to take a look at where things stand ahead of the big holiday break.

Across 38 states, a total of around 19.5 million people have selected Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) via either the federal or state-based exchanges as of anywhere from 12/05 - 12/18. Collectively, this is roughly 16.6% higher than the same/nearly the same dates a year ago. It's important to remember that Georgia moved from the federal exchange to its own state-based marketplace this year, which is why ~1.2 million enrollees have been subtracted from the 2024 HC.gov total. Note that the HC.gov numbers are rounded off to the nearest 100K, per CMS's press releases both years.

In fact, these 38 states are already running around 9.2% higher than the final 2024 Open Enrollment Period (OEP) totals.

As for the 13 missing states, according to the last CMS snapshot report they were running 34% behind the same point last year...except that a) this only included the first 23 days of 2025 OEP, and b) this didn't include auto-renewals.

If you add the new enrollees & active re-enrollees thru 11/23 in these states to the national total, you get 19,883,145 this year vs. 17,325,979 last year so far...still up 14.8% even without the missing auto-renewals:

If you also include the missing auto-renewals to the grand totals, the year over year growth is even more impressive, since there have technically been 75% more auto-renewals in these 13 states this year compared to last year...

...HOWEVER, it's important to remember that Georgia is a special case and that the final 2025 auto-renewals will inevitably be smaller than the numbers shown above since many of those liste as being "auto-renewed" have since (or still will) gone into their accounts and either actively re-enrolled or have actively terminated their renewals.

In other words, while the numbers make it look like 22,851,609 total QHPs this OEP to date vs. 19,021,793 at the same point last year (up over 20%!), the actual growth is somewhat less than that...at least so far.

Stay tuned...