Premiums rise each year for four stacked reasons: you are a year older, medical treatment costs are inflating faster than general prices, your own claims can affect your rate, and 12% Insurance Premium Tax compounds on top. Double digit renewal increases have been common across the UK market in recent years, but a sharp rise is a prompt to review the policy, not automatically to leave it.
The renewal letter is where private medical insurance loses most of its goodwill. The increase usually looks arbitrary. It is not; it is the sum of four separate effects, and knowing which ones are driving your figure tells you what, if anything, to do about it.
The four drivers
1. Age. PMI is priced on risk, and risk rises with age. Most insurers price in bands or yearly steps, so part of every renewal increase is simply the actuarial cost of being a year older. As our cost guide shows, the average premium for core cover roughly doubles between 40 and 60.
2. Medical inflation. The cost of private treatment rises faster than general inflation: consultant and hospital fees, new drugs and diagnostics that did not exist last year, and more people claiming, more often. NHS waiting lists, reported at around 7.3 million treatment pathways in England in 2026, have pushed private usage up across the market, and insurers recoup higher claims costs through premiums. Willis Towers Watson's Global Medical Trends survey put UK medical cost inflation at 10.6% for 2025, projecting 10% for 2026, and Health & Protection's annual individual PMI research has insurers reporting renewal increases running from around 10% to as much as 40% for some individuals.
3. Your claims, and your discount. Many individual policies carry a no claims discount or similar rating. Claim, and some of that discount unwinds at the next renewal, on top of the market wide effects. Insurers differ in how sharply this bites and how quickly it recovers, which is itself a reason the cheapest insurer on day one is not always the cheapest to hold.
4. Insurance Premium Tax. IPT is charged at 12% on medical insurance, so every pound of the increases above carries another twelve pence of tax.
What a normal increase looks like
There is no official benchmark, but as a working rule: a renewal a few percent above the combined effect of your age step and general medical inflation is ordinary; an increase of a third or more deserves an explanation, and usually has one, most often a claim affecting a discount, an age band boundary, or an insurer repricing a closed product. The right response starts with knowing which it is, and your insurer or adviser should be able to tell you.
What you can actually do at renewal
- Ask the current insurer first. There is often more flexibility in an existing policy than people assume: a higher excess, a guided hospital list, a capped outpatient limit, or removing an extra that was never used. Reshaping the policy keeps your underwriting position untouched.
- Review the market on switch terms. If the price is still wrong, other insurers can usually take you on while preserving your existing underwriting through continued moratorium or continued personal medical exclusions. Done properly this is the main competitive discipline on renewal pricing. Done badly it can cost you cover, which is why our guide to switching without losing cover exists.
- Do not simply cancel. Lapsing cover and rejoining later means fresh underwriting, so everything in the intervening years becomes a pre-existing condition. People who leave the market in their fifties because of price often find the way back barred by their own medical history.
- Review every year, move occasionally. Churning insurer annually for small savings accumulates paperwork risk for little gain. An annual review with an occasional, well executed move is the pattern that works.
A worked example
An illustration, with round numbers rather than a quote: a 52 year old paying £95 a month whose renewal arrives at £118, an increase of around 24%. Broken down, that might be roughly one part age step, two parts medical inflation across the insurer's book, and a chunk of no claims discount unwinding after a physiotherapy claim, with IPT riding on all of it. Seen whole, 24% looks outrageous. Seen in parts, each element is explicable, and two of them are negotiable: a £250 excess and a guided hospital list could, in this illustration, bring the renewal back towards its previous level with the underwriting untouched, while a like for like switch quote establishes whether the insurer is still competitive at all. That is a renewal review, and it is twenty minutes well spent every year.
How we handle renewals
A renewal review is the core of what a specialist broker does: establish what is driving your increase, test the current insurer's flexibility, then price the market on the correct switch basis if it is still worth it. We do this each year for every client, at no additional cost to you: we receive commission from the insurer. This guide is general information rather than advice; what is right at your renewal depends on your policy, your history and your renewal terms.