Employer figures now use KFF’s 2026 survey: the example family’s whole bill rises from $32,171 to $33,481 a year.
The calculator’s employer premiums moved from KFF’s 2025 averages to its 2026 ones: family $28,303 (worker $7,471, employer $20,832) and single $9,804 (worker $1,672, employer $8,132). For the household the page opens with (a family of four in Dallas on $95,000 with employer coverage), the share on the paystub rises from $8,228 to $8,849, the share that never appears on it from $23,943 to $24,632, and the difference from the Sanders financing model from $22,534 to $23,844 a year. The one model that would cost this household more than today at a high enough income now crosses over at about $248,000, up from $238,000. Marketplace and universal figures do not use the survey and are unchanged. A reader who types their own premium into the drawer is unaffected.
Explained under Employer coverage.
The representatives snapshot is refreshed as of 28 October: 117 House members and 19 senators now marked as sponsor or cosponsor.
Rebuilt after the weekly watcher found H.R. 3069’s cosponsor list had moved, so the rep card now shows Rep. Jason Crow as a cosponsor. Membership is unchanged: Florida’s 20th and Texas’s 23rd are still vacant. S. 1506 is unchanged. Every cosponsor claim on the card carries the new as-of date.
Explained under Members and cosponsors.
KFF’s 2026 Employer Health Benefits Survey, published 22 October, puts the average family premium at $28,303, with workers paying $7,471 of it.
The average family premium rose 5 percent from last year’s $26,993, to $28,303: workers pay $7,471 and employers $20,832. The worker’s share rose faster than the total, 9 percent or $621. Single coverage averaged $9,804 (worker $1,672, employer $8,132), up from $9,325 (worker $1,440).
Source: KFF, 2026 Employer Health Benefits Survey. Explained under Employer coverage.
New type: headlines now in a newspaper serif, figures in a plainer sans, and a cleaner read on phones.
No number, source or method changed. Headlines move from condensed capitals to Newsreader, the face the page already used for reading, with their emphasis in its italic; figures, labels and buttons move to Hanken Grotesk, whose figures still line up in columns. The header and footer links are lowercase. On phones, the ZIP button no longer breaks onto two lines, five digits fit the ZIP field even on the narrowest screens, the methodology tables stack instead of squeezing their text into a sliver, and labels no longer end on a single stranded word.
Explained under How every figure is computed.
The site has a new look: bolder headlines, two live stat bands, and figures that move when your numbers do.
No number, source or method changed; every figure is computed exactly as before, and the letter is untouched. Headlines are set in a condensed face, the type is down from three families to two and from about 300 KB of fonts to about 140 KB, and two bands now carry the figures that matter most for your household: what never reaches your paystub, and what universal coverage would leave you. Bars and figures animate as you change your inputs, and stay still if your device asks for reduced motion. It also fixes the financing-model buttons, which had been showing in your browser’s default font.
Explained under How every figure is computed.
Fixed: the plan-number fields now accept a zero, and a household with no tax credit is told the real reason.
An outside code review found four defects, all now fixed. A zero typed as your deductible or premium deduction was ignored and the survey average used instead, and a minus sign in two fields was dropped, so a negative number became a positive one. A total premium below the survey average deduction was outvoted by that deduction without a word; the drawer now says so. And on the marketplace route, every household without a credit was told it was past the 400% cliff, including households under the poverty line, in Medicaid’s range, or whose credit simply works out to $0. Each now gets its own reason, matching the eligibility box.
Explained under Who gets no credit, and why.
The representatives snapshot is refreshed as of 28 September: 116 House members and 19 senators now marked as sponsor or cosponsor.
Rebuilt after the weekly watcher found both bills’ cosponsor lists had moved, so the rep card now shows Rep. Aisha Wahab and Sen. Ron Wyden as cosponsors. Membership is unchanged: Florida’s 20th and Texas’s 23rd are still vacant. Every cosponsor claim on the card carries the new as-of date.
Explained under Members and cosponsors.
The representatives snapshot is refreshed as of 21 September: 115 House members now marked as sponsor or cosponsor of H.R. 3069, up from 113.
The weekly watcher noticed the bill’s status had moved after the 1 September snapshot, so the lookup was rebuilt from the same public sources. Two seats have new members since then (Georgia’s 13th and California’s 14th), Texas’s 23rd is vacant alongside Florida’s 20th, and one sitting member added her name to the bill. Senate cosponsors are unchanged. Every cosponsor claim on the card carries this new as-of date.
Explained under Members and cosponsors.
The site now introduces itself to search engines and assistants: titles that say what it is, structured data, a plain-text methodology.
Nothing a reader sees changed. Each page’s title now carries the words people search for (healthcare cost, Medicare for All, the premium tax credit), the objections section is marked up as questions and answers, the methodology is also served as markdown at /methodology.md, an llms.txt describes the site for assistants, and robots.txt names the search and AI crawlers it welcomes, which is all of them. A cite-this line joined the Sources.
Explained under Sources.
Early retirees: the letter can speak as one, the cliff explains age rating, and the chart follows a household past 550% of the poverty line.
A reader who retired before Medicare found the generated letter speaking as a sole proprietor. There is now a fourth persona for the letter (retired before Medicare, buying on the exchange), with the retirement figures cited to EBRI. Under the cliff, a household with an adult of 55 to 64 sees how far up the state’s age curve it sits, read from the same curve the benchmark uses, and is told that retirement income counts toward the line. And the cliff chart, which stopped at 550% of the poverty line and so dropped a couple at $131,000 off its right edge, now widens to keep the household on it. The letter’s emphasis list is two lists now, who is writing (one choice) and what else to mention, so no story has to grey another out.
Explained under The benchmark premium.
The Census Bureau counted 26.7 million people, 7.9% of the country, uninsured for all of 2025, not statistically different from 2024.
The Bureau’s Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement, released 15 September 2026, put the national uninsured rate at 7.9% for calendar year 2025, unchanged from 2024 within the survey’s margin of error. Employment-based coverage remained the most common source, covering 53.5% of the population, ahead of Medicare at 20.1% and Medicaid at 17.1%. The survey window ends before plan year 2026, so it does not yet capture the enhanced credits’ expiry or this year’s marketplace enrollment drop; those will show up in next September’s edition.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2025 (P60-291). Explained under What a bad year costs without coverage.
Households on TRICARE, Medicare or VA care are now told the calculator does not price them, with the numbers behind that.
A note under the coverage control, a fifth objection (the three programs are the existence proof that government-run coverage already works here, for tens of millions of people) and a methodology row with the Military Health System’s headcount, budget and fee schedule, each sourced. A full TRICARE route is under consideration. The honest result would be that many military families pay more under every financing model, and that needs its own copy before it ships.
Explained under Households the calculator does not price.
Every source now links to its primary document, and key terms link to the methodology section that explains them.
Reader feedback after launch. Seventeen phrases on the calculator carry a dotted link into the methodology, chosen because a reader needs them to trust the number in front of them. Every row of the Sources table links to the document itself, not a summary of it; the links were retrieved on 4 September 2026.
Explained under Sources.
Correction: the credit’s income floor and the repayment rule under Public Law 119-21.
Before this the methodology described the pre-2026 exception that let lawfully present immigrants below the poverty line claim the credit, and did not say that the cap on repaying excess advance credit is gone. Both are now stated where the credit is explained. No calculated figure changed; the copy did.
Explained under The credit’s floor.
The site is public.
Until now it sat behind a login while reviewers checked it. Every number had been through six review passes and every finding is closed. The site keeps no analytics script and sets no cookies; traffic is read as edge request counts.
Explained under Three kinds of number.
Benchmark premiums are now the real second-lowest-cost silver plan for every county, from CMS’s plan-year 2026 files.
Until this the benchmark premium was modeled from a handful of metros and labelled as such. It is now built per county from the CMS public use files (3,288 county entries, per-state age curves, family tiers in New York and Vermont) and validated to the cent against the published landscape file and against New York’s and California’s own figures on every rebuild. Its basis tag moved from modeled to statutory.
Explained under The benchmark premium.
Six financing models replace one.
The universal figure is shown under six published models spanning the spectrum: the bill’s own financing list, the Lancet 2020 study, RAND, CBO, the Mercatus (Blahous) alternative and Urban’s most expensive scenario. Where a study published no household figure, the allocation is shown and labelled modeled. The mixed vintages are disclosed.
Explained under Universal coverage, six models.
Insurers propose a median 15% premium increase for 2027, the second double-digit year in a row.
KFF’s read of preliminary rate filings across all 50 states and DC: a median proposed increase of 15% for 2027, after 2026 finalized at 20%. Insurers cite rising prices for care, inflation and labor shortages, and two things specific to this market: the enhanced credits’ expiry and the sicker risk pool it left behind. Final 2027 rates arrive in the fall, when the benchmark table on this site is rebuilt from CMS’s files.
Source: KFF, How much and why ACA Marketplace premiums are going up in 2027. Explained under The benchmark premium.
The IRS set the 2027 credit schedule: the expected contribution rises in every band, and the top band goes from 9.96% to 10.22%.
Rev. Proc. 2026-26 gives the applicable percentage table for taxable years beginning in 2027: 2.15% of income below 133% of the poverty line, rising through the bands to 10.22% from 300% to 400%, against 2.10% to 9.96% in 2026. The required contribution percentage, which decides whether an employer offer counts as affordable, is also 10.22%. The calculator uses the 2026 table until open enrollment for 2027 begins on 1 November; the 2027 table is on this site’s list.
Source: IRS Rev. Proc. 2026-26, applicable percentage table for 2027 (Internal Revenue Bulletin 2026-31). Explained under The premium tax credit.
KFF measured the first plan year without the enhanced credits: net premiums up 58%, a record $3,786 average deductible, and roughly five million fewer enrollees.
The average premium a marketplace enrollee pays after the credit rose 58%, from $113 to $178 a month. The average deductible reached $3,786. KFF projects average monthly enrollment falling from 22.3 million in 2025 to about 17.5 million in 2026; early CMS effectuated-enrollment data already count nearly three million gone.
Source: KFF, What we know so far about 2026 ACA Marketplace enrollment, premiums and deductibles. Explained under The premium tax credit.
HHS published the 2026 poverty guidelines: $33,000 for a family of four in the 48 contiguous states, up from $32,150.
The guidelines took effect on 13 January 2026 and reflect a 2.63% price increase. The credit for a plan year uses the guidelines in force when its open enrollment began, so plan year 2026 still runs on the 2025 figures the calculator uses today; these are the figures the 2027 credit will use.
Source: Federal Register, Annual Update of the HHS Poverty Guidelines, 15 January 2026. Explained under Poverty guidelines.
The enhanced premium tax credits expired. The 400% subsidy cliff is back for plan year 2026.
The 2021 enhancements (no income ceiling, a lower expected contribution at every income) ran through 2025 and were not renewed. From 1 January 2026 the schedule in IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-25 applies, and a household above 400% of the poverty line gets no credit at all. Every figure on this site uses the 2026 schedule.
Source: IRS Rev. Proc. 2025-25, the applicable percentage table for 2026. Explained under The premium tax credit.
Public Law 119-21 tightened the credit from 2026: no cap on repayment, and lawfully present immigrants below the poverty line lose it.
The July 2025 reconciliation law removed the exception that let lawfully present immigrants below 100% of the poverty line claim the credit, for plan years from 2026; from 2027 refugees, asylees and people with temporary protected status are excluded too. It also ended the cap on repaying excess advance credit from tax year 2026, so a household that earns more than it projected repays the whole difference at filing. The calculator reflects both.
Source: H.R. 1, 119th Congress, enacted as Public Law 119-21. Explained under The credit’s floor.