What does employer health coverage cost in Texas?

27 rating areas, built from 254 counties.

• Your employee's individual market premium is set by the rating area their ZIP falls in, not by your company address.
• Lowest-cost Silver at age 21 runs from $422 to $720 per month across the state. That's a 71% spread.
• Two employees doing the same job in different parts of Texas price very differently.
• A single company-wide contribution can clear the affordability test in one area and fail in another.

+24.3%, the median approved change for the Texas individual market in 2026.

• From final rate filings submitted to CMS.
• Read it as context, not as your number. It describes the individual market, not your group plan.
• Where it's useful: if your group renewal is anchored well above that, the gap is worth asking about.
• Some plans moved far more than the median, some far less.

Texas uses the federal marketplace, which works in your favor here.

• Texas carriers file their rates with CMS rather than a state-run exchange.
• Those filings are public, so every Texas county returns a real filed premium, not an estimate.
• 21 other jurisdictions run their own exchanges and file elsewhere, so their premiums sit outside this data.
• If your people are in Texas, you can check the exact number before a single conversation.

Between 5 and 14 carriers, depending on where you are. The median Texas rating area has 6.

• Travis County has the most competition in the state at 14 carriers filing Silver.
• Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar and Collin all sit at 12.
• Rural West Texas areas run at 5 or 6.
• Why it matters: more carriers means more plan designs, more network options and more price pressure on the person shopping.

Your census age, then your claims history, then your geography.

• Small group in Texas is age-rated inside the federal 3:1 band. A 64-year-old can be priced at 3 times a 21-year-old for the identical plan.
• Average age under 35? Age-rated usually wins.
• Average age over 45? A shelf-rated plan, one flat published rate per tier with no age rating and no medical questions, often wins.
• Spread across the state? A CHOICE Arrangement lets each person buy in their own rating area instead of forcing one network on everyone.

Often, and Texas is one of the better states for it.

• A CHOICE Arrangement (formerly ICHRA) is a plan design where you set a fixed monthly budget per employee, tax-free, and your people buy their own individual coverage with it.
• Texas is large and spread out. One group network almost never fits a workforce in Houston, Lubbock and the Valley at the same time.
• Every Texas county has filed premiums, so you can model it exactly before you commit.
• It doesn't always win. A young, concentrated census with a clean claims year usually does better on a group plan.

CMS 2026 Qualified Health Plan public use files, final filed rates.

• Premiums are the lowest-cost Silver plan in each Texas rating area for plan year 2026.
• Carrier counts and the approved rate change come from the CMS Unified Rate Review file posted March 2026.
• Age factors use the federal default age curve, confirmed against 2.2 million filed rate records.
• These are individual market rates. Your group plan prices differently, which is exactly why the comparison is worth running.