Eye tests, glasses and contact lenses can be claimed on Vitality health insurance through one add-on, the Optical, Dental and Hearing Cover option, and how much comes back depends on where you go: up to £500 a plan year through Vitality's network optician, or 80% of the cost up to £300 a plan year at an optician of your choosing, never more than £500 in all. Without that option, routine sight tests and spectacles fall outside the plan. Weighing up whether eyecare is worth adding to a quote? Ask an FCA-authorised broker to take that up with Vitality: use the form on this page, mention glasses or lenses, and they will ring you back free.

The terms set out here come from Vitality's Membership Guide (Your Personal Healthcare plan terms and conditions), print code VHTCR0002 08/2024, so the August 2024 issue. We read it as a PDF hosted by the broker site mytribeinsurance.co.uk on 10 October 2026, and page numbers refer to that copy. The issue is more than two years old and Vitality may have revised it since, so check the optical limits against the terms that arrive with your own quote.

Vitality opticians: the network partner or one you choose

The optical benefit has two routes, and which one you take sets how much comes back. In the guide's "Optical care" section (page 15), the two sentences that decide it read: "If you use our network partner for your sight tests, and glasses or contact lenses (where required), you can claim up to £500 per plan year and we will reimburse you in full. If you use a different provider, we will pay 80% of the costs up to £300 per plan year." The benefit table on page 12 shows the same pair of rows, one for supply by the network provider and one for supply by any other optician.

The two routes share a ceiling. The paragraph closes: "You cannot claim any more than £500 in total in any single plan year." So using both routes in the same year still leaves £500 as the most you can claim.

Vitality describes its partner only as a leading optician network and points members to the Care Hub in Member Zone, or the Vitality Member app, for the name and for how to claim. If you want to know whether a branch near you counts, ask which optician network applies before you buy; a broker can check that with Vitality free of charge.

Eye tests are paid at whatever frequency your optometrist recommends, and a sight test a consultant recommends is eligible too. The test has to take place in the UK, and new glasses or lenses must be bought in the UK. Two concessions apply to this benefit: "Your acceptance terms do not apply to this benefit, and you will not have to pay your plan excess." The next sentence adds a condition, covered under claiming below: a prescription issued before your cover started, or before the option was added if that came later, does not qualify.

The excess section (page 25) gives the other side of the network choice. Although no plan excess is taken from an optical claim, you pay "20% of your optical costs if you choose not to use our network partner".

Vitality health insurance glasses: what one prescription buys

A new pair of glasses is claimable after a sight test that produces a new prescription. Vitality lists what it will reimburse rather than giving a price per item:

  • one pair of frames;
  • lenses, including bifocals or varifocals where necessary;
  • lens coating, tinting or thinning;
  • prescription sunglasses, though not as well as regular glasses on the same prescription;
  • one repair to existing prescription glasses each plan year.

Breakages are where people get caught out. In the guide's words, "No benefit is available for replacement glasses on the same prescription, even if this is to replace glasses that have been damaged", and cases, cloths and similar accessories are not reimbursed unless they come with the frames at no extra charge. Between eye tests, the yearly repair is the only help with a broken pair.

Contact lens wearers get a year's supply instead of glasses, after a sight test and a new prescription. The rule on choosing is plain: "It is not permitted to claim for both a new pair of glasses and contact lenses on the same prescription." A supply bought through an optician's eye care plan can count, but only for lenses you have actually received by the time you claim. The prescription has to come from a standard eye exam rather than an annual contact lens check, and "No benefit is available for contact lens check-ups or contact lens solutions."

For a frequent lens wearer, those check-ups and solutions stay as your own spending each year. If you are working out whether £500 at the network optician, or 80% up to £300 elsewhere, would cover your usual glasses or lenses, that is a good question to raise on a free call-back while the option is being priced.

Reclaiming the money: receipts, six months and a new prescription

Optical claims skip a step that hospital claims need: the claims section (page 32) says no pre-authorisation is required under the Optical, Dental and Hearing Cover option. The usual pattern is to pay the optician first, then claim with an itemised, receipted invoice; Vitality refunds what is eligible once the test or purchase has happened.

Leave a receipt in a drawer too long and the money is lost. Page 32 sets a six-month window from the date of treatment for sending invoices, allows an exception where there is a good reason you could not, and then states plainly that invoices arriving after six months will not be reimbursed. The dental page quotes both sentences in full; for glasses and lenses, the practical rule is to claim soon after you collect them.

The prescription itself must be new under the policy. Glasses or lenses are not eligible for a prescription dated before your cover start date, or before the optical option first began, whichever is later, so a pair ordered on an older prescription in your first weeks of cover would not qualify.

Paying at the network optician may work differently from the receipt-and-reclaim route; how a purchase there is settled is something the broker can find out from Vitality for you.

Adding the optical option: what comes with it

Optical cover is not a stand-alone extra. It is one part of a single option that also carries dental and hearing rows, each with its own limit, and the hearing row on page 12 (hearing tests and new prescription hearing aids) is limited to 80% of the costs up to £300 per plan year. The dental side is set out on Vitality dental cover. Whether eyecare alone justifies the option depends on what all three parts are worth to your household.

The option's price is set within the overall premium, which turns on age and on the other settings chosen for the plan; what a Vitality plan costs explains how that figure is built, and Vitality underwriting: full medical or moratorium covers how existing conditions are handled.

The network optician is part of the insurance benefit and should not be confused with the partner rewards in the Vitality Programme, the discounts and tracking tools the guide describes on page 7. Rewards can come as a pound amount, a percentage off, cashback, or a benefit with no set retail value, and page 38 reserves Vitality's right to change its partners, and the incentives on offer, from time to time. If an eyecare reward is part of your reason to buy, get it in writing with its date. Rewards in general are discussed on Vitality health insurance: discounts and offers.

Other insurers set eyecare up differently. AXA Health's Personal Health membership handbook (October 2024, print code PB116343a/10.24, read in a copy hosted by the intermediary more-health.co.uk) lists this in its Dentist and Optician Cashback Option table on page 7:

Optician fees 80% of the cost of prescribed glasses and contact lenses, up to £200 a year. This benefit is not subject to the restrictions for pre-existing conditions described in section 3.4.

AXA adds that it pays this "so long as the glasses or lenses are used to correct your vision", and the same table gives a separate eye test benefit of up to £25 a year. Those are AXA Health's terms, not Vitality's; AXA Health dental and optical cover has the detail.

Eye operations sit outside the optical option

The option pays for routine eyecare, not for operations on the eye. Among the exclusions on page 28 is "routine, precautionary or preventive examinations, routine dental, hearing and sight tests (except for the cover available under the Optical, Dental and Hearing Cover option)", and page 29 likewise rules out spectacles and contact lenses except under the option.

Page 27 excludes treatment for short sight, long sight, astigmatism or any other refractive error, and treatment related to those conditions, again keeping sight tests and glasses or lenses under the option as the exception. Anyone hoping a plan would fund laser correction should treat that exclusion as the starting point.

Cataracts and other eye diseases are a different question: they are treated in hospital, not bought at an optician, so the £500 and £300 figures do not apply to them. For a specific eye procedure, the call-back is the place to have a broker ask Vitality how your plan would treat it.

Vitality glasses and optical cover: quick checks

Are children's glasses covered?

That turns on who is named on the policy and the option on its certificate; a broker can go through a child's eyecare with Vitality for you, free.

Can I claim for just an eye test, without buying glasses?

Yes, with the option: the benefit covers sight tests at the frequency your optometrist recommends, inside the same yearly limits. A new pair of glasses or lenses is a separate claim on the same allowance.

Can I claim for prescription sunglasses?

Yes, but in place of regular glasses on that prescription, not on top of them. Coating, tinting or thinning on an ordinary pair counts as a lens modification and is claimable in its own right.

If eyecare is part of why you are looking at Vitality, ask for the call-back and have the optical option priced alongside the core plan in the same quote.