2027 Annual Rate Change Project

Every year around this time I start my annual individual & small group market rate filing analysis project. This involves spending months painstakingly tracking every insurance carrier rate filing for the upcoming year to determine just how much average insurance policy premiums on the individual market are projected to change.

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.

The actual data I need to compile my estimates are actually fairly simple, however. I really only need three pieces of information for each carrier:

• How many effectuated enrollees they have in ACA-compliant policies this year;
• The average projected rate change for those policies;
• Ideally, a breakout of the reasons behind the changes.

Usually the reasons given are fairly vague things like "increased morbidity" (ie, a sicker risk pool) or the like. Sometimes, however, there's a very specific reason given for some or all of the premium changes. Major examples of this include:

• 2017: 2 of the 3 "training wheel" programs included in the original ACA legislation expired (federal reinsurance and risk corridors)

• 2018: Trump 1.0 cut off Cost Sharing Reduction CSR) reimbursement payments to carriers

• 2019: Repeal of the federal Individual Mandate penalty

• 2021: Accounting for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health insurance claims

And of course, for 2026...

• The expiration of the upgraded premium subsidies introduced by the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021, which were extended by the Inflation Reduction Act through the end of 2025.

This upgrade finally brought the ACA's premium tax credits up to the levels they should have been in the first place while also removing the hated "subsidy cliff" which caused households which earn even $1 more than 400% of the Federal Poverty Level to lose eligibility to any federal subsidies at all.

Unfortunately, both of these improvements expired at the end of 2025, resulting in gross ACA premiums shooting up nearly 20% and net ACA premiums jumping an astonishing 58% on average this year.

It has also resulted in at least 3 million ACA enrollees already losing healthcare coverage as of April (and likely far more than that before the end of this year).

Well, it's May now, which means that it's time to dust off my spreadsheet and start digging through SERFF (System for Electronic Rates & Form Filing) databases and state insurance dept. websites again to see what the actuaries crunching numbers at hundreds of health insurance carriers around the country have come up with for the 2027 Open Enrollment Period.

USE THE DROP-DOWN MENU NEAR THE TOP OF THIS PAGE TO PICK A STATE.