Insurance companies do not usually explain their price increases in public. This year they have, in writing, to state regulators — and in filing after filing for 2027, they point at the same cause for roughly four percentage points of the increase: the enhanced premium tax credits that expired at the end of 2025. That is the rare case of an industry naming the policy behind a number on your bill.
What Insurers Actually Wrote In Their Rate Filings
Every year, insurers that sell ACA marketplace plans file a public rate request with their state’s insurance department, along with an actuarial memo explaining why. For 2027, those filings are running high. Across 77 insurers in 16 states and Washington, D.C. that had filed by early July, the median requested increase is 14%, and 20 companies are asking for more than 20%, according to an analysis of the filings published by the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.
The filings name specific drivers. Antidote Health in Texas cited a 6.0% morbidity adjustment. Maine Community Health Options cited 4.7%. Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York raised its projected claims 7.7%, pointing to Congressional Budget Office projections about who stays enrolled. UnitedHealthcare of New York attributed 12.7 percentage points of its requested change to the credits’ expiration combined with a federal rule change, the Marketplace Integrity and Affordability Rule. These aren’t press-release talking points; they’re the sworn actuarial justifications insurers are required to submit for their rates to be approved.
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Why A Tax Credit That Expired In 2025 Is Still Driving 2027 Prices
The enhanced premium tax credits, first created during the pandemic and extended twice, expired at the end of 2025. That made 2026 the first plan year without them, and 2027 will be the second. If you’ve seen a claim that the credits expire at the end of this year, that’s wrong; the expiration already happened, and marketplace enrollees have been living with it since January.
When the enhanced credits disappeared, most subsidized enrollees kept some help but at a lower dollar amount. Enrollees earning at or above 400% of the federal poverty level — $62,600 for a single person in 2026 — lost their subsidy entirely and now pay the full sticker price. A KFF news release on the filings found that shift drove a 58% average jump in what marketplace enrollees actually paid out of pocket for premiums in 2026, plus roughly $1,000 more in average deductibles per person.
The Four-Point Math Behind Next Year’s Bill
Here’s the part that’s specific to your 2027 renewal notice. When subsidies shrank, healthier people were the ones most likely to decide coverage wasn’t worth the new price and drop out. That left insurers covering a smaller, sicker pool of enrollees on average — and sicker enrollees cost more to insure, which pushes rates up independent of medical inflation or drug prices.
Insurers estimate that this sicker-pool effect alone added roughly four percentage points to 2026 premiums. In their 2027 filings, they’re telling regulators to expect it again: another roughly four percentage points, on top of everything else, purely from the pool continuing to shrink and skew sicker. That’s the number in this headline — not the total increase, but the specific slice insurers themselves attribute, in writing, to the credits running out.
It’s worth separating this from the rest of the increase, because the two pieces respond to different fixes. Rising hospital, physician and drug costs — the underlying cost of medical care is up 10% for 2027, above the roughly 8% average of recent years — are a cost problem no single household can negotiate away. The four-point risk-pool effect is different: it exists specifically because Congress let the enhanced credits lapse and healthier people responded by leaving. If lawmakers restored the credits, insurers’ own filings suggest that piece of the increase would shrink as healthier enrollees came back, even though the underlying medical-cost trend would remain.
What Changes On Your Actual Premium Bill
If your household income sits below 400% of the federal poverty level, you likely still qualify for a subsidy, just a smaller one than in 2025, so part of the increase gets absorbed before it reaches your monthly payment. If you’re at or above that line, you’re now exposed to the full requested increase with no subsidy cushion at all — the median 14% national ask, or more in the 20 states where insurers filed above 20%. Either way, the number on your renewal notice reflects both rising medical costs and this risk-pool effect layered on top of each other, which is why increases have compounded two years running instead of leveling off.
There’s also a calendar change working against procrastination this year. The Marketplace Integrity and Affordability Rule, one of the federal changes insurers cited in their filings, shortens open enrollment on HealthCare.gov to November 1 through December 15 for 2027 coverage, down from the January 15 cutoff enrollees have had in recent years. Enroll by December 15 and coverage starts January 1; wait until after that and you’re pushed into a February 1 start date at the earliest, with a full extra month of gaps or old pricing to manage.
How To Read Your Own Renewal Notice This Fall
These are proposed rates, not final ones — state regulators can still adjust individual filings before they take effect, and the numbers above are preliminary as of the July filing deadline. Some states also publish a rate-review page where you can search your own insurer’s filed request and the actuarial memo behind it, rather than waiting for a mailed notice to explain the number after the fact. Checking your specific insurer’s filed rate against the 14% median gives you a real basis for deciding whether to shop around during open enrollment rather than letting your current plan auto-renew at whatever the new number turns out to be. If your income puts you near the 400% federal poverty line cutoff, it’s also worth re-running your own subsidy estimate before you assume last year’s number still applies — a small change in reported income can be the difference between a partial subsidy and none at all.
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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