Colorado insurance companies filed for a weighted average 13.4 percent premium increase on individual health plans for 2027, with one carrier asking for as much as 23.9 percent. None of those numbers are prices yet. As of today, the Colorado Division of Insurance has not approved a single one of next year’s requested individual-market rate increases, and the state’s own review process is still working through the filings insurers submitted in July. That gap between what’s been asked for and what’s been approved is the entire story right now, and it’s worth understanding before anyone budgets around this July’s numbers.
What “Requested” Actually Means in Colorado’s Review Process
Every year, health insurers file their proposed rates for the coming plan year with the Colorado Division of Insurance through SERFF, the national System for Electronic Rate and Form Filing run by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The division opened a public comment period on the 2027 filings that closed August 12.
Colorado’s division posted the preliminary 2027 numbers on July 22, and from there, the division’s own actuaries examine each company’s assumptions, medical-trend estimates and justification for the increase before deciding what rate, if any, gets approved for the plans that actually go on sale during Open Enrollment. A filed number reflects only what an insurer’s actuaries think they need; it isn’t reviewed, negotiated or finalized until the division signs off.
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Where the Review Stands Right Now
The division’s own Insurance Plan Filings & Approved Plans page still lists 2026 as the most recent plan year with approved rates and plan counts published; there is no 2027 approved-rate data posted there as of this writing. The division’s July 22 release said only that it would spend “the next month” conducting in-depth analysis of every company’s filing, without committing to a specific approval date, and it repeated the caution that runs through the entire release: “these rates are based only on what the insurance companies have requested, not what has been approved.” That single-month estimate has already come and gone; today is more than six weeks past the point the division said its analysis would wrap, a sign of how closely regulators are scrutinizing a filing round shaped by the loss of enhanced federal subsidies.
Colorado Has Trimmed Filed Requests Before
This isn’t the first time Colorado’s requested and approved numbers have diverged. For the 2024 plan year, the division’s own announcement, titled “Gov. Polis and DOI Announce 80% of Health Insurers to Decrease Premium Requests for 2024,” reported that its review process resulted in the large majority of insurers filing decreases rather than increases once reinsurance savings were factored in, alongside $411 million in reinsurance savings for consumers that year. That history from a different plan year doesn’t predict what happens to the 2027 filings, but it does show that Colorado’s actuarial review isn’t a formality, and that a July filing and a final rate can be genuinely different numbers here, not just a rounding difference. Coloradans who remember the 2024 cycle may recall headlines about rate decreases rather than hikes, a reminder that a July filing is a starting point for scrutiny, not a finished bill.
New York Just Showed How Much a Filed Number Can Move
Colorado isn’t the only state working through this cycle, and another state’s outcome this month is a useful gauge of how far a filed number can move by the time regulators finish. New York’s Department of Financial Services announced on September 4 that it had cut insurers’ requested 2027 individual-market rate increase from 20.6 percent down to an approved 6.0 percent, a reduction of about 71 percent from what companies asked for, saving individual-market consumers there an estimated $324 million. New York’s small-group market saw a similar cut, from a requested 23.7 percent down to an approved 8.0 percent, across roughly 860,000 New Yorkers enrolled in individual and small-group plans combined. Colorado’s own review is following the same request-then-scrutinize arc, just on its own timeline, and there’s no guarantee it will cut as deeply as New York did, or as little.
What This Means for Colorado Shoppers Before Open Enrollment
Open Enrollment for 2027 coverage through Connect for Health Colorado begins November 1, which means Colorado’s regulators have roughly two months left to finish reviewing filings and finalize what actually appears on the marketplace. A household budgeting for next year’s premium based on today’s 13.4 percent weighted filing, or the 23.9 percent high end, is budgeting off a number regulators haven’t signed off on. The more reliable move is to wait for the division’s approved rates, expected sometime before shopping opens, and to compare plans directly once they post rather than assume this July’s filings are the final word. For now, the only accurate answer to what a plan will cost in 2027 is that nobody outside the division’s actuarial staff knows yet, including the insurance companies that filed the original requests.
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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