What workers pay toward a $28,303 family health plan grew almost twice as fast as the plan itself, KFF finds

KFF said Thursday that the average employer-sponsored family health plan now costs $28,303 a year, up 5% or $1,310 from 2025, in its annual survey of more than 1,900 employers. That full price is called the premium, and most of it is paid by the employer. The part taken out of the worker’s paycheck, called the contribution, averages $7,471, up 9% or $621. Over the same period wages rose 3.7% and inflation 2.7%, KFF reports.

The burden is heaviest at small firms. Workers at firms with fewer than 200 employees contribute an average of $9,687 for family coverage, $2,847 more than workers at larger firms, and 32% of covered workers at small firms are in a plan where they pay more than half of the family premium, against 6% at large firms. Among large firms, 44% said they raised the share of the premium that workers pay in response to projected costs.

Workers pay about a quarter of the family premium on my arithmetic from KFF’s totals. Their $621 increase is 47% of this year’s $1,310 increase. Subtracting the contribution from the premium puts the employer’s side at roughly $20,832, against $20,143 in 2025, a rise of about 3.4%, under the 3.7% wage gain.

The gap has been building for two years. KFF’s 2025 survey found the family premium up 6% to $26,993 and the worker contribution up to $6,850 from $6,366, about 7.6% on my math, while wages rose 4%. Across the two surveys, the contribution has gone from $6,366 to $7,471, up about 17%. The premium went from $25,572 in KFF’s 2024 survey to $28,303, up about 11%, and compounding KFF’s two wage figures gives about 8%.

KFF’s five-year numbers look even by comparison: since 2021 the family premium is up 28%, worker contributions 26% and wages 27%. Working back from those figures, on my math contributions rose only about 7% over the three years from 2021 to 2024, so most of the five-year rise has come in the last two.

The premium is the number an employer budgets and the contribution is the number a worker reads on the pay stub. An employer that wants its own side of the plan to grow no faster than wages has several places to move the rest, and the paycheck deduction is the one large firms reported most.

KFF says early projections for 2027 point to further cost growth.

Sources

• KFF: Workers Now Pay $7,471 on Average Annually for Family Health Coverage, Up 9% or $621 from 2025
• KFF: 2026 Employer Health Benefits Survey
• KFF: 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey
• KFF: 2024 Employer Health Benefits Survey