How much does pet insurance cost? The 2025 averages, and the factors that move your dog away from them

Five years of average premiums, by plan type

NAPHIA, the North American Pet Health Insurance Association, publishes the average annual premium per insured dog and per insured cat in the United States for three kinds of product: accident only, accident and illness, and insurance with embedded wellness. The chart sets the 2021 figure beside the 2025 figure for each. Read the length of each line as the five-year move; read the right-hand number as what the average insured pet of that species, on that plan type, cost for a year in 2025.

Three readings matter for a buyer. First, the accident-and-illness dog average rose $211 in four years, from $625 in 2021 to $836 in 2025, an increase of 33.8 percent, and the last two years did most of it (NAPHIA prints +11.0 percent for 2024 and +11.5 percent for 2025). Second, accident-only moved the other way: the dog average peaked at $204 in 2023 and was $190 in 2025, 6.9 percent lower; the cat average went from $122 in 2022 to $112 in 2025. Third, the gap between scopes is wide. In 2025 the dog accident-and-illness average was 4.4 times the dog accident-only average ($836 against $190), and the cat ratio was 3.9 ($435 against $112). That gap is the price of illness cover: cancer, infections, digestive problems, and the hereditary and chronic conditions that appear on many breed watch lists.

The reasons behind the rising lines, clinic prices among them, are taken apart in the guide on why vet bills are so expensive now, and the guide on why a premium goes up at renewal splits one owner's increase into age, trend and plan. This page stays with the buying question: where your dog is likely to sit against these averages, and why.

What a national average measures, and what it blends

NAPHIA's report is compiled for the association by Willis Towers Watson, and the association estimates that its data represents approximately 99 percent of the written pet health insurance premium in the United States and Canada. The premium pages carry a footnote saying the figures combine member-contributed data with publicly available sources such as corporate filings and insurance filings, aggregated, with actuarial inferences applied in some instances to estimate allocations. That makes the averages a sound picture of the market. It does not make them a price list.

An average annual premium per dog is total premium divided across insured dogs. Every insured dog sits inside it: a ten-week-old mixed breed on a high deductible, a nine-year-old giant breed on an unlimited plan, a dog in a city where clinic fees are high and one where they are not. NAPHIA also defines what each product covers, and the definitions explain the spread on the chart. Accident only covers events such as foreign body ingestion, lacerations, motor vehicle accidents, ligament tears and poisoning. Accident and illness adds illnesses such as cancer, infections and digestive problems. Insurance with embedded wellness bundles in routine items such as vaccinations, early screening diagnostics, nutrition consultations and dental care.

Mix also moves an average. NAPHIA reports that insured cats rose to 25.1 percent of US insured pets in 2025, from 18.3 percent in 2021, and that premium volume has grown faster than the number of insured pets each year because the average premium kept rising. When the population changes, the average can move even if no individual rate did. Treat each line on the chart as the market's center of gravity, then use the rest of this page to find which direction your dog pulls from it.

The averages as monthly figures

Quotes arrive monthly, so here are the 2025 averages divided by twelve. The division is the only arithmetic done to NAPHIA's figures; the monthly column is a convenience for comparing a quote with the market, not a figure NAPHIA publishes.

Annual figures from NAPHIA State of the Industry Report 2026, page 22, checked October 28, 2026. Monthly figures are the annual average divided by 12 and rounded to the cent for this guide. Not quotes.

Two comparisons fall out of the table. A cat accident-and-illness policy averaged 52.0 percent of the dog figure in 2025 ($435 against $836), which tracks the species line in the NAIC's list of cost variables. And the embedded-wellness dog average was $578 a year above the accident-and-illness dog average ($1,414 against $836). That difference is not the cost of illness cover; it is the cost of routine care bundled into the policy, alongside whatever differences in the pets and plans that choose it. Whether bundling routine care makes sense is a separate question, set out in the wellness plan versus insurance guide.

If a live quote for your dog lands far from the dog average, that is not by itself a sign of a bad quote. A large breed with a documented orthopedic watch list, an older enrollment age, a low deductible or an unlimited annual limit will each push a quote above it; a young small breed on a high deductible can sit well below it. The factors table below is how to tell which.

The factors that set the price, in one table

Read the table as the quote form sees your dog. The first rows are facts about the pet and the place that you cannot change; the last rows are the levers you can. Insurers must disclose several of these effects: under Section 4A of the Model Act, the disclosures state whether coverage or premiums change based on claim history, the age of the pet, or a change in where you live. If a quote seems to move for no stated reason, one of these rows is usually the reason.

What five policy forms say can change the premium after you buy

A quote is the first premium, not the lifetime premium. The Model Act makes insurers disclose whether claim history, age or a move will change the price, and the policy form then says it in its own words. These are the five sample forms read for this guide, quoted from the renewal and premium provisions. Four of the five name at least one of the pet's age, veterinary cost inflation or an address change as a reason the price can move; the Spot form says only that rates are subject to change at reissuance. The older Trupanion form is the one that rules age out as a reason.

Sample and posted forms show wording, not the terms of your policy. The form issued for your state and your dog governs.

The practical lesson is to read a price as a path. A form that names age as a renewal factor can cost more each year the dog gets older, on top of whatever veterinary inflation does to everyone. A form that fixes the age-related part at enrollment shifts more of the price into the first quote. Neither design is better in general; they spread the same risk across different years. Ask for the insurer's disclosure on age, claim history and location in writing, and set it beside the quote.

Why breed sits near the top of the list

Pet insurance is priced on expected claims, and expected claims are not evenly spread across dogs. The conditions that generate the largest bills, orthopedic surgery, disc disease, hereditary and congenital disorders, cluster in particular breeds, which is why the same plan type on the same street can price very differently for two dogs. The Model Act treats hereditary disorders, congenital anomalies, and chronic conditions as defined terms precisely because they drive so much of the cost and so many of the exclusions.

This is also why averages mislead when read as prices. The national dog average blends a young mixed-breed dog on an accident-only plan with a senior giant breed on an unlimited accident-and-illness plan. Neither owner is buying the average. Your breed page on this site carries the conditions your breed is prone to and a labelled research-sample premium anchor; start there, then price the levers below against live quotes.

The three levers, and what each one really trades

The deductible, the reimbursement percentage, and the limit are one trade stated three ways: money every month, against money on the worst day. A higher deductible and a lower reimbursement percentage shrink the premium because they shrink the insurer's share of every claim. Nothing about the trade is hidden, but it is easy to misjudge, because the premium is certain and monthly while the claim share is uncertain and arrives all at once.

Judge the levers against a bill, not against the premium. On a $4,000 eligible bill: a $250 deductible at 80 percent pays $3,000 and leaves you $1,000; a $500 deductible at 90 percent pays $3,150 and leaves you $850; a $1,000 deductible at 70 percent pays $2,100 and leaves you $1,900. The third setting should quote the lowest premium of the three, and it leaves you with 1.9 times the worst-day cost of the first. None of the three is the right answer in general. The right answer is the one whose worst-day figure you can pay without borrowing, priced against the premium difference the quotes actually show. The deductible, reimbursement and limit decoder runs the same order of operations through a limit that cuts the claim.

Age: the factor most forms let move your price

Two age effects can stack. First, enrolling an older pet starts at a higher price than enrolling the same breed young, and some insurers will not accept a pet past a certain age at all, a limit the NAIC flags in its consumer guidance; the age limits guide records the cut-offs. Second, premiums commonly increase as the covered pet ages, and under the Model Act the insurer must disclose whether it raises premiums based on the pet's age or claim history. Two of the five forms quoted above, Figo and AKC, name the pet's age as a renewal factor, two more (MetLife and Spot) allow rates to change at renewal without naming age, and the older Trupanion form is the counterexample that fixes the age element at enrollment. Ask for the disclosure in writing before you buy, because a plan that looks cheap at age two and reprices steeply at age nine is a different product than its first quote suggests.

Age also interacts with the clause machinery. Every year uninsured is a year in which a symptom can enter the veterinary record and become a pre-existing condition on any policy you buy later. That is a cost of waiting that never appears in a premium comparison, and it is why the enrollment-timing question belongs on this page rather than only in the puppy guide.

What a quote leaves out

A quote is a price for a described risk, and the description has edges. The premium does not include the deductible you will pay before reimbursement starts, the share of each bill your reimbursement percentage leaves with you, any exam fee or other charge the policy excludes, or the cost of care that falls outside the scope entirely, such as routine and preventive care on a plan with no wellness component. The Model Act's disclosure list exists for this reason: the insurer must disclose its exclusions for pre-existing, hereditary, congenital, and chronic conditions, its waiting periods, deductible, coinsurance, and limits, and whether claim history, age, or a move can change your price or coverage (Section 4A), and must post a summary of those provisions on its website, where you can read it before you buy (Sections 4H and 4I).

Budget with the full stack: twelve months of premium, plus the deductible, plus your share of a plausible bad-year bill from your breed page's watch list. That total, not the monthly figure, is the honest annual cost of the policy, and it is the number the worksheet below builds. To put two quotes on the same footing, use the line-by-line quote comparison method, and to see which bills a policy will never pay, read what pet insurance does not cover.

The worksheet: price your dog in four steps

Step one: open your breed page and write down the two or three conditions in its coverage watch list. These are the bills the policy has to survive. Step two: get live quotes for the same dog at three lever settings, a low-deductible high-reimbursement setting, a middle setting, and a high-deductible low-reimbursement setting, holding the plan type constant. Step three: for each setting, run one watch-list bill through the claim payout simulator on this site and record what you would pay on that bill. Step four: add twelve months of premium to that worst-day figure. The setting with the lowest total is not automatically the winner; the winner is the lowest total whose worst-day figure you can actually pay. A setting you cannot fund on the worst day is not cheaper, it is just deferred.

Then place the quotes against the market. If your accident-and-illness quote for a dog is near $70 a month, it sits close to the 2025 national average; if it is far above, find the row in the factors table that explains it (breed, age, location, a low deductible, a high limit) before deciding the quote is out of line. Generic premium arithmetic, such as the total of a monthly figure over several years, is on CalculatorVillage rather than here.

Before you accept a quote

• Open your breed page and list the two or three watch-list conditions a policy for your dog has to survive.
• Get live quotes at three lever settings (low, middle, and high deductible) with the plan type held constant.
• For each setting, run one watch-list bill through the claim payout simulator and write down what you would pay.
• Add twelve months of premium to each worst-day figure; compare the totals, not the monthly prices.
• Set each accident-and-illness quote beside the 2025 average ($836 a year for a dog, $435 for a cat) and name the factor that explains the gap.
• Read the insurer's disclosure summary before you buy: exclusions, waiting periods, deductible, coinsurance, limits, and whether age, claim history, or a move can raise your price.
• Check the enrollment age limit and the orthopedic waiting period for your breed before paying anything.

Why the average is a starting line, not your price

Because the average is doing arithmetic on dogs that are not yours. This page publishes NAPHIA's averages so you can tell whether a quote is in the market's range, and the breed pages publish research-sample anchors, clearly labelled with their source and the words not-a-quote, to show that breed moves price. Neither is a price you can buy at. Reading an average as a price invites exactly the error the factors table warns against: comparing your dog to a blend. If a figure on any page of this site ever looks like a price for your dog, it is labelled wrong; the price for your dog is a live quote, and the worksheet above is how to judge it when it arrives.

Where that leaves your number

Start from the market: in 2025 the average insured dog's accident-and-illness policy cost $836 a year and the average cat's $435, with accident-only far cheaper and embedded-wellness plans far dearer. Then move from the market to your dog. Species, breed, sex, age and location set where your dog starts, and you cannot negotiate them. Scope, deductible, reimbursement and limit set what the premium buys, and you can price them at three settings before you buy. Judge each setting by its full annual stack (premiums plus deductible plus your share of a bad-year bill), read how the form says the price will change at renewal, and read the disclosure items, exclusions and waiting periods before the monthly figure is allowed to decide anything.