If you buy health insurance through your state marketplace or Healthcare.gov, your premium will probably go up next year.

That’s the amount you pay every month just to have insurance.

Prices for 2026 haven’t been finalized yet, but according to a new analysis from the health policy nonprofit KFF, insurers selling Affordable Care Act — or Obamacare — plans are expected to raise rates by about 15%.

That would be the biggest premium increase since 2018.

On top of that, the enhanced subsidies that the federal government has been offering since 2021 will probably be going away, too. 

When health insurance companies want to raise premiums, they must submit paperwork to state regulators justifying why.

“Usually, these filings are just filled with a lot of math and numbers,” said Cynthia Cox, a vice president at KFF.

Cox said that sometimes insurers also include a narrative explanation for why they want to raise rates.

This year, some of that narrative is familiar: The cost of health care is rising, and insurers want to pass more of it on to consumers.

“But what's different for 2026 is that we're also seeing insurers talk a lot about federal policy,” Cox said. 

Tariffs are one example, and how they might push the cost of prescription drugs and medical devices even higher.

But the main reason insurers plan to raise rates is that they expect Congress to let the enhanced subsidies — that have made ACA insurance much more affordable — expire.

“Many enrollees are going to pay a lot more for their coverage,” said Matthew Fiedler at the Brookings Institution. “Some of those people are going to decide to drop their coverage as a result.”

Fiedler said insurers are assuming that the people most likely to drop coverage are relatively healthy, while those who are sicker are more likely to keep it.

“So, insurers are raising premiums to account for the fact that the typical enrollee in 2026 will now be someone who needs more care than the typical enrollee in 2025,” Fiedler said.

Congress first approved the enhanced subsidies during the height of the pandemic, in 2021. Since then, ACA enrollment has doubled from 12 million to 24 million.  

Cox said that with the planned rate increases and without the more generous subsidies, the average person will pay about 75% more to buy insurance in 2026.

“Let’s say that we have a family of three making $110,000 a year,” she said. “So right now they get a subsidy to help them with their monthly premium costs. They're still paying almost $800 a month.”

Next year, without the subsidy, Cox said that same plan would cost them about $1,600 a month — if they can afford to keep it.