How much does private health insurance cost? — company schemes

You are not buying this for yourself. Whoever types "company health insurance cost uk" is usually a director, an office manager, or whoever in a growing firm was handed the benefits question — and that changes nearly every part of the answer. The cost comes per head, and depends on how many heads. The employees covered will not read a line of the wording before you sign it. The settings that move the price — the level of cover, the size of the excess, whether partners and children are included — are yours to choose and theirs to live with. What you are deciding is what level of cover to buy for how many people, and a broker can price that against your real staff list.

The number first, with the caveat that matters. As a rough indicative guide only, UK group schemes are talked about in the region of £500 to £1,200 per employee per year: a band wide enough to be honest, not a quote, and nothing in it says your firm would sit at the bottom of it. Your own company medical insurance cost is a quoted premium, built from your employees' ages and locations and from the choices below. The form on this page is short, and the FCA-authorised broker it reaches can approach several insurers in a single conversation, free. No premium data for any named insurer sits behind this site, which is why there is a band here and no company's name beside a price.

Why company medical insurance arrives as a figure per head

Employers come looking for a price list and find that the thing being priced is their own staff list. A group quote is built from the people who will be covered: their ages, where they work, the cover you ask for, and what an insurer expects a workforce of that shape to claim. Change the list and the figure changes, which is why no page — this one included — can hand you a company health insurance premium without seeing who is on it.

On the same general-knowledge basis as the band above, the per-head figure tends to ease as a group grows, because the running cost spreads further. We hold no data saying by how much or at what headcount, so treat it as a reason to have the scheme priced on your real numbers rather than as a rule to plan around.

You also cannot pick the healthy ones. Schemes are commonly written for a defined group — all employees, or everyone above a certain grade — so the firm's age profile is built into the price in a way an individual buyer never experiences. What follows are the choices that sit on top of that list, in the order a quote asks about them.

The settings are yours to choose; the excess is your employees' to pay

Everything this site has verified about excesses comes from retail documents sold to individuals: Aviva's Healthier Solutions terms and conditions (April 2025 issue), the Bupa By You policy guide (BINS 14718, 2024), Freedom Health Insurance's Freedom Elite policyholder guide (April 2025) and WPA's Complete Health Insurance Product Information Document (November 2025). None is a group scheme wording, so none of it is your scheme's terms. What they show is the shape of the lever you are about to pull, in the insurers' own published language.

On the Aviva wording the excess row lists six amounts, the lowest £100 and the highest £5,000, called options rather than tiers and applied to each member for every policy year (page 11). For an employer that row is the main dial between a cheaper quote and a benefit people will actually use, and the person turning it is not the person who pays. Aviva's worked example on page 12 shows where it ends: treatment costing £1,000 against an excess of £1,000 leaves the member meeting the full cost. A scheme can be affordable to the company and close to worthless to an employee on a modest salary by that setting alone.

The wordings also differ in how often staff would feel it. Bupa's guide works through a physiotherapy claim to show that on that policy the excess is charged once a policy year instead of once for every claim, so an employee with a long course of treatment meets it a single time (page 10). WPA's document offers a different structure: instead of an excess, Shared Responsibility, where the member pays 25% of eligible claims up to a ceiling of their choosing (page 2) — a share of everything rather than a sum paid once. The mechanics are set out with the wording on what a private health insurance excess is, and the choice between levels on how much excess to choose.

The useful move is to ask for the same scheme priced at two excess levels, so you can see what the cheaper quote is really buying and decide whether you want staff carrying that gap. Both figures come from one set of details, so ask a broker for both when you send the form on this page.

The out-patient limit is where a cheaper quote gets noticed first

Out-patient cover pays for what happens before anyone is admitted: the consultation, the scan, the physiotherapy. It is also where a lower premium usually comes from, which makes it the part of a company scheme employees meet first — at the referral, not in a hospital.

The Aviva terms we hold put a group of out-patient benefits under one combined limit for each member — either £500 or £1,000 in a policy year (page 7); the extract we verified does not list which benefits those are. The same document offers a reduced option with a £0 limit, under which out-patient treatment is not covered at all, including consultations and diagnostic tests (page 24). Three very different benefits, and all three arrive labelled "health insurance".

One knock-on deserves more weight than it gets when a company compares quotes. On that wording, picking the reduced out-patient limit of £500 or £1,000 also removes cover — as an in-patient, day-patient or out-patient alike — for surgical procedures on the teeth performed in a hospital, and for the complications of pregnancy and childbirth (page 8). Choosing the cheaper limit for a workforce that includes people who may start families is a decision with a face on it, taken by whoever signs the paperwork. How limits and excesses interact is set out on private health insurance benefit limits explained.

So get each quote's out-patient assumption in writing before you compare them: schemes that look alike on price can be as far apart as full out-patient cover and none at all.

Who else goes on the scheme, and who pays for them

The next question a quote asks is one an individual buyer never faces: who counts as covered. Employees only, partners too, or children as well — and if dependants are in, whether the company pays for them or the employee does out of salary. Each answer moves the per-head figure and the total, and we hold nothing on how any insurer prices a dependant on a group scheme, so get that line costed rather than estimated.

It also changes which settings matter. The £50 excess the Aviva wording puts on routine dental treatment and on optical benefit (page 11) reads as small change for one adult and differently across a family; a reduced out-patient limit that strips cover for complications of pregnancy and childbirth lands harder once partners are on the scheme. What family cover involves is covered on what private health insurance costs for a family, and the employee's side of a company scheme on private health insurance for employees and what it costs.

Underwriting: the question this page cannot answer for you

Here is what most employers actually want to know, and what we are least able to tell you: whether an employee's existing health problem will be covered, and whether every member of staff has to complete a medical form before the scheme starts. It matters more than the premium to the people on the scheme.

No document behind this page says how any insurer underwrites a group, and we have established nothing about the headcount at which an insurer's approach to medical history changes. Both are real features of the group market, discussed freely in sales conversations, and we cannot confirm a word of it. Treat any page that tells you how underwriting works at a named insurer, or at a given group size, without showing you the wording as something to check rather than rely on — and put the question to a broker, who can ask each insurer directly and come back in writing.

Three questions get you most of the way. On what basis would existing conditions be treated for the people on my list? Does each employee complete a medical declaration, or is the scheme written some other way? And what changes if someone joins partway through or leaves? Those answers decide whether the scheme is worth having to the people it is for.

What the scheme costs your employees, and what reaches their P11D

As we understand the general position, a premium the company pays for an employee's cover is normally treated as a benefit in kind for that employee, so the thing you are giving them carries a cost to them even though no invoice reaches their desk. That is our understanding rather than tax advice, and it is close to the whole of what this page will say: we hold no tax evidence of our own, so there are no rates here, no thresholds, and no account of how the amount is worked out. How your company treats the premium in its own accounts is a separate question again, and one for your accountant rather than for a website like this one.

Raising it is not a technicality — it is part of the comparison you are running. A benefit that shows up in someone's tax affairs needs explaining when you offer it, especially if staff are asked to contribute. Some firms pay the entire premium and some do not, and the arrangements price differently. The benefit-in-kind side is handled on private health insurance, P11D and benefit in kind and on company health insurance and UK tax, with the arithmetic on the P11D health insurance calculator.

One caution before any of the figures above goes in front of staff or a board. The Aviva clauses here are the April 2025 issue, captured in September 2026, and a later issue has since been published that none of them has been re-read against — so work from the paperwork that comes with your own scheme.

What to ask before you sign, and what no page can tell you

A company scheme is priced on things only you know, so the fastest route to a real figure is handing all of them over at once: headcount, your employees' ages, the postcodes they work from, whether dependants are in or out, the excess you think you want, and what you need out-patient cover to do. Then the questions that separate two quotes that look identical:

• What is the figure per employee per year, and what does it become if the headcount moves either way?
• What excess has been assumed, and is a co-payment structure available instead?
• What is the out-patient limit, and what does choosing a lower one take away besides out-patient treatment?
• Which hospitals are on the list, near each site we work from?
• How are existing conditions handled, and what does each employee have to fill in?
• What is renewal likely to do, and what happens to the price if we claim?

That fourth question is where a lot of searches land sideways. People look up "spire health insurance cost" expecting a premium, or go hunting for a Kingston private health price list, but a hospital group is not an insurer: what matters to your premium is whether the scheme's hospital list reaches the hospitals near your offices. We hold no hospital price list, but a quote can be produced on more than one hospital list, and the gap between them is the real answer. Renewal is worth raising early too, because a scheme is a recurring budget line rather than a purchase; what tends to move a price at renewal is set out on what to expect from a health insurance renewal price.

If you want the figure rather than the range, the next step is a quote on your own staff list, which the form on this page will set in motion with an FCA-authorised broker at no cost to you.

The questions employers ask about the cost

How much is company health insurance per employee?

As an indicative range only, and not a quote anyone has offered you, group cover in the UK is discussed in the region of £500 to £1,200 per employee per year. Where your own scheme falls depends on your employees' ages and locations, the excess and out-patient limit you pick, and whether dependants are included — and those details are what turn a band into a figure you can budget against.

How much does a company pay towards health insurance, and how much do employees pay?

That is a decision rather than a market rate: some employers pay the whole premium, others ask employees to fund dependants or to contribute from salary. We hold no data on what proportion of firms do which, so have the arrangements you are weighing quoted side by side: the structure changes both the company's cost and the employee's.

Is company health insurance priced as a percentage of salary?

Not as far as anything we hold shows: quotes are built per head, from ages, locations and cover levels, rather than as a share of pay. You can divide a real quote by your payroll afterwards, which is a useful budgeting number but not how the insurer reaches the price, so treat any percentage-of-salary rule of thumb with suspicion.

How much is company health insurance worth to an employee?

Its worth is what the cover would cost them to buy themselves, plus what it actually pays out, and no single figure captures that honestly. The value sits in the settings above: the excess they must meet, the out-patient limit, and whether their existing conditions are covered — two schemes at the same price per head can be worth very different amounts to the people on them.

How much is private medical insurance in the UK if someone buys it themselves?

A different question with a different answer, because an individual premium turns mainly on one person's age rather than on a workforce profile; the indicative figures for individual cover are on what cover for one person costs on average. We have deliberately not set a group figure against an individual one here, because comparing two indicative bands would imply a precision neither has.

How much is private medical insurance in Scotland?

Where your employees are based is one of the inputs an insurer prices, so a scheme covering staff in Glasgow and staff in London is not one uniform figure. We hold nothing that quantifies the difference between nations or regions of the UK, so hand over the postcodes your people actually work from and the quote will reflect them.

How much does private surgery or a private appointment cost?

No self-pay price list sits in the evidence behind this page, so there is no figure for an operation here; what hospitals charge privately is dealt with on private hospital price lists. What the documents do show is that the cost to an employee turns on the scheme, not the clinic's price: an excess comes off first, WPA caps specialist out-patient consultations at £250 a policy year as standard (page 1), and Aviva's reduced £0 out-patient option excludes consultations and diagnostic tests altogether (page 24).

Is "Pru Life UK health insurance" a company scheme I can buy here?

Despite how the phrase reads, that name belongs to a business operating in a different market rather than to UK group private medical insurance. If you are pricing cover for staff employed in the UK it is not the product you are after, and we hold nothing on its pricing. UK group cover is what the rest of this page describes.

Does the company or the employee pay the excess when a claim is made?

Every document behind this page is a retail policy, and on those the member pays: Freedom's guide has the excess deducted from the invoices received, then settled by the member with the provider (page 31). Whether a company scheme can be arranged so the employer meets it instead is not something we have established, so ask whoever quotes you. Settle it before you pick a level, because a high excess paid by staff and one paid by the firm are different products.

How do I get company health insurance price quotes?

Send the details listed above and the quotes come back per head. The form on this page hands them to an FCA-authorised broker, and one set of details is enough to compare several insurers. If anything about your staff list is unusual — a very small group, a wide age spread, several sites — say so, because those are what change the answer.