Colorado’s insurance regulator released preliminary 2027 premium filings from health insurers in late July, and buried in that filing data is a bigger number than the one the state highlighted in its own headline. Insurers filed for a weighted average request of 13.4 percent more across Colorado’s individual market for next year, with one carrier’s filing running as high as 23.9 percent. None of it is final; these are the numbers companies asked for, not what regulators have approved.
Two Different Numbers, Both Real
Colorado’s own insurance regulator told consumers to expect an 11 percent average increase in the individual market this cycle, a figure that already factors in the state’s premium assistance programs, which reduce what many households actually pay after subsidies.
The raw weighted average of what insurance companies actually filed, before that state assistance is applied, comes in higher: 13.4 percent, according to the Colorado Division of Insurance’s own July 22 announcement and an analysis of Colorado’s SERFF rate-filing database published by the health policy tracking site ACA Signups, which pulled the company-by-company filings directly because the division’s own filings webpage had not yet posted the underlying numbers in table form. SERFF, short for the System for Electronic Rate and Form Filing, is the same national database Colorado’s own division points consumers to for reviewing filings, run through the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Both figures describe the same batch of 2027 filings; they simply measure different things.
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The 23.9 Percent Outlier and Why the Range Is So Wide
Individual carrier requests for 2027 range from 10.2 percent on the low end to 23.9 percent on the high end, per the same filing data. A wide spread between carriers is typical in Colorado’s individual market, where a company’s requested increase depends on its own claims experience, the counties and rating areas it covers, and how many higher-cost members it’s carrying relative to the year before. A household’s actual bill depends on which carrier and plan it’s in, not on the statewide average, which is why the same batch of filings can honestly produce an 11 percent headline number and a 23.9 percent outlier at the same time. Two neighbors on the same street can see very different bills for that reason alone, even before factoring in age, household income, and whether either qualifies for Colorado’s premium assistance program.
Why the Increases Trace Back to an Expired Federal Tax Credit
Colorado officials are direct about where they place the blame. “Unfortunately, we continually warned that Congress’s failure to extend the enhanced premium tax credits would lead to instability in the market, and that’s a significant part of why we are continuing to see rate increases,” Colorado Insurance Commissioner Michael Conway said in the division’s release. Those enhanced federal tax credits, in place since 2021, expired at the end of last year, and their loss roughly doubled premium costs on average for hundreds of thousands of Coloradans already enrolled in the individual market for 2026. The state responded with its own money: Governor Polis signed HB25B-1006 during an August 2025 special session to direct more funding into Colorado’s Reinsurance and Colorado Premium Assistance programs, and signed SB26-178 this year to keep that relief in place, which the division credits with holding Colorado’s enrollment drop to about 5 percent so far this year versus a 13 percent drop nationally.
Where Colorado Ranks Against Other States
Colorado’s preliminary filings landed at a moment when roughly a third of states had already published their own proposed 2027 individual-market changes, with a median increase around 14 percent nationally, according to the division’s release. That puts Colorado’s 13.4 percent weighted filing close to the middle of the pack nationally, even as Cigna Health & Life Insurance Co. has announced it will exit the individual market nationwide for 2027, a move the division points to as adding further instability to a market already absorbing the loss of the enhanced federal tax credits.
What a Colorado Household Shopping for Coverage Should Know
Nothing here is locked in yet. The Division of Insurance says it spent the weeks after the July filing conducting its own in-depth review of every company’s numbers before deciding what’s actually justified, and the public comment period on the filings closed August 12. Anyone who wants to see a specific carrier’s requested change, rather than the statewide average, can search it through the federal government’s Rate Review tool, which lets consumers look up filed rate changes by state, carrier and market. Open Enrollment for 2027 coverage begins November 1, and the division is encouraging shoppers to work with a broker or compare plans through Connect for Health Colorado rather than assume this year’s carrier is still the cheapest option, especially with a new carrier, Colorado Access, entering the individual market for 2027. Checking a specific plan’s filed number now, before the division finishes its review, is a reasonable way to budget conservatively, but it isn’t the number that will show up at checkout in November.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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