2026 Rate Change Project

Every year, I spend months painstakingly tracking every insurance carrier rate filing (nealry 400 for 2025!) for the following year to determine just how much average insurance policy premiums on the individual market are projected to increase or decrease.

Carriers tendency to jump in and out of the market, repeatedly revise their requests, and the confusing blizzard of actual filing forms sometimes make it next to impossible to find the specific data I need.

I really only need three pieces of information for each carrier:

• How many effectuated enrollees they had enrolled in ACA-compliant individual market policies as of early this year;
• What their average projected premium rate change is for those enrollees (assuming 100% of them renew their existing policies, of course); and...
• Ideally, a breakout of the reasons behind those rate changes, since there's usually more than one.

This year, the third bullet above has even more importance due to the almost certain expiration of the enhanced IRA subsidies. Most (possibly all?) insurance carriers have either been instructed to or are choosing to break out the portion of their requested rate changes which are specifically because of IRA subsidies expiring at the end of this year, which they in turn expect to cause a significant chunk of their healthier exchange enrollees to drop coverage, which in turn would make the remaining risk pool sicker/more expensive to treat.

Unfortunately, there are some states where, due to the carriers and/or the state insurance departments heavily redacting the rate filing documentation, I'm unable to fill in the actual number of people enrolled by some or all of the insurance carriers within that state's individual market. In those states the average premium rate changes listed (shown in grey) are unweighted averages, not weighted.

This can make a big difference.

• Let's say you have 2 carriers in a state, one raising rates by 10% and the other raising them by 1%. The unweighted average increase would be 5.5%.
• However, what if it turns out that the first carrier has 90% of the market share while the second only has 10%? That would mean a weighted average increase 9.1%.
• The unweighted average is the best I can do for these states without knowing the market share breakout, however.

In some of these states I've been able to acquire the actual effectuated enrollment for some carriers on the individual market but not all of them. In those cases I've been able to run partially-weighted averages:

• Let's suppose there are 4 carriers offering individual market policies in a state, but I only have the actual enrollment for the first two (30,000 and 120,000 respectively).
• Let's say the average rate changes for each carrier are +12%, +4%, +1% and -3%
• An unweighted average would be +3.5%, completely ignoring the enrollment numbers.

• Let's further say that according to the official CMS report, that state had 170,000 people enrolled in on-exchange policies as of February.
• If I assume 85% of their enrollees did so on exchange, that would put the total market at 200,000 people. It would also mean the other 2 carriers with unknown enrollment numbers had 50,000 between them. I'd then assume 25,000 apiece in order to run a semi-weighted average.
• This would give a semi-weighted average of +3.95%, rounded up to +4.0%.

This requires two big assumptions, however: First, that on-exchange enrollees make up 85% of the total; second, that the "missing" enrollees are evenly spread across the other two carriers. This isn't ideal, but it's still more accurate than just running a completely unweighted average.

With all of that in mind, use the DROP-DOWN MENU above to pick a state (as of this writing Vermont is the only state available).