What does the benchmark plan cost in your county?

9.96% for plan years beginning in 2026.

• Set by the IRS in Revenue Procedure 2025-25, published July 18, 2025.
• Up from 9.02% in 2025, and the highest it has ever been.
• Higher works in your favor. Employees can be asked to pay a larger share of income before the offer is unaffordable, so a smaller contribution can still pass.
• Timing trap: it attaches to the plan year, not the calendar year. A plan year that started in late 2025 keeps 9.02% until it ends.

Subtract your contribution, then compare what's left to 9.96% of income.

• The premium above is what the employee pays with no help from you.
• Under 9.96% for a 2026 plan year, the offer is affordable.
• Tested per employee, per location. One company can pass for headquarters staff and fail for a remote hire two states away, on the identical contribution.

Two things happen, and only one of them is a penalty.

• For the employee. They can decline an unaffordable offer and claim a premium tax credit instead, if otherwise eligible. An affordable offer removes that option, enrolled or not.
• For the employer. At 50 or more full-time equivalents, an unaffordable offer creates exposure under employer shared responsibility when an employee gets a credit on the exchange.
• Under 50? No mandate, no penalty.
• Model it first. For a lower-wage workforce in a market with rich subsidies, a poorly sized contribution can leave employees worse off than no offer at all.

No. The IRS doesn't expect you to know what your employees' households earn.

Use one of three safe harbors instead, applied consistently to a reasonable category of employees.

• W-2. Measured against Box 1 wages for the year.
• Rate of pay. Hourly rate times 130 hours per month, or monthly salary. Most common, because you can calculate it before the year starts.
• Federal poverty level. Measured against the poverty line for a single person. Simplest and most conservative, because it produces the lowest threshold.

A safe harbor doesn't change the premium side. The lowest-cost Silver plan in their rating area is still where you start.

No, and this catches people out.

• Subsidies run on the second-lowest-cost Silver plan. That's what most public datasets publish, because tax forms need it.
• Affordability runs on the lowest-cost Silver plan.
• Different plan, different number, usually lower.
• If someone hands you a benchmark premium for an affordability test, check which one it is.

It doesn't change the test at all. This is the most misunderstood part of the rule.

• Affordability is always measured on the self-only lowest-cost Silver plan. An employee with a spouse and 4 children is tested against the same number as a single colleague of the same age in the same rating area.
• You can't fail the test by hiring people with large families.
• You also can't assume an offer that passes is enough for a family to live on.

What family size does change is what the household pays.

• Individual coverage isn't sold in flat tiers. Each person is priced separately and added together.
• Only the 3 oldest children under 21 are charged. A household with 5 young children pays for 3.

The tool shows both. Green is what the regulation tests. Gold is what your employee lives with.

The employee's age on the first day of the plan year.

• Set it once. It holds all year, even if they have a birthday in March.
• A 64-year-old can be charged up to 3 times a 21-year-old for the same plan.
• Two employees in the same county can get completely different answers.
• Run your oldest and your youngest in the tool above to see the spread you're contributing against.

It tells you how much competition your employees have where they live.

• 12 carriers filing Silver behaves very differently from 2.
• More carriers means more plan designs, more networks and more price pressure.
• One of the better predictors of whether this feels like an upgrade or a downgrade to the person shopping.
• Counts come from final 2026 rate filings, current for every state.

Rating areas don't always follow county lines.

• A handful of counties sit across two or more rating areas, usually split by 3-digit ZIP.
• Two employees in the same county can face different rates.
• Run the affordability test for each of them separately.

It's the median approved rate change for individual market plans in your state for 2026.

• From final rate filings submitted to CMS.
• Read it as context, not as your number. It describes the market, not a specific plan.
• Some plans moved far more than the median, some far less.
• Useful for one thing: if your renewal is anchored well above your state's approved change, that gap is worth asking about.

Yes. All 50 states and DC return a filed premium now, including the 21 jurisdictions that run their own exchanges.

• California, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and 17 others file with their own exchange rather than the federal marketplace. Those filings are now loaded here alongside the federal ones.
• Age works differently in some of them. New York and Vermont don't rate by age at all, so a 64-year-old sees the same premium as a 21-year-old. Massachusetts, Utah and DC file their own age curves rather than the federal 3:1 band.
• We hold three filed anchors per county, at ages 27, 40 and 50. Those three are exact in every state. Ages in between follow that state's own curve.
• Filed rates are published in whole dollars, so an interpolated age can sit up to $2 either side. Confirm the exact figure on your state's exchange before you file anything.

Yes. Same benefit, new federal name since September 3, 2026.

• CMS and the Small Business Administration adopted CHOICE Arrangement, short for Custom Health Option and Individual Care Expense Arrangement.
• Agency terminology, not an act of Congress. The regulations are unchanged and existing plan documents stay valid.
• The affordability math on this page is the same math it always was.
• Expect both names for a while. Carrier forms, IRS guidance and plan documents still say ICHRA.

Full guide to how a CHOICE Arrangement works

Annually, when CMS publishes the plan year files.

• Again whenever a state posts corrected data during open enrollment.
• Premiums here are plan year 2026 final filed rates.
• Carrier counts and rate changes come from the Unified Rate Review file posted March 2026.
• The last reviewed date is at the bottom. If it's stale, treat the numbers as stale.