Age and medical inflation do most of it, your own claims add to it, and Bupa is not obliged to match what it charges a new customer.

What actually happens

Four things move a Bupa renewal, and only one is about you personally. You are a year older, and private medical insurance is priced by age, so the underlying rate rises every year and jumps harder as you cross an age band. On top of that sits medical inflation: the cost of private consultations, scans and surgery climbs faster than general prices, and the whole book is repriced to keep pace.

The third driver is claims. Insurers pool risk, so a year of heavy claims across your group lifts everyone's premium, and if you claimed yourself, some plans move you down a no-claims scale as well. The fourth is quieter: an introductory discount from when you joined may simply have ended, so nothing about the risk changed but the headline price still rose.

What surprises people most is that the loyalty protection they have heard about does not apply here. The FCA rules that stopped insurers charging existing customers more than new ones cover home and motor insurance, not private medical insurance. Bupa, like every PMI insurer, can quote a renewing customer more than it would quote a new one for the same cover, which is exactly why the renewal figure is worth challenging rather than paying on autopilot.

Before you accept it, ask Bupa for a breakdown and a like-for-like alternative, and get the same cover priced elsewhere. Switching insurer is possible without re-declaring your history if you move on a continued-exclusions basis, so a high renewal is a prompt to compare, not a reason to give up cover.

Questions to put to the insurer or broker

  • How much of this rise is age and medical inflation, and how much is my own claims?
  • Is there a version of this plan with the same core cover at a lower price?
  • If I moved to another insurer on continued personal medical exclusions, what would the same cover cost?

Related questions

Sources

  • Source: Bupa policy guide — Bupa By You health insurance (BINS 14718) (2024), read 4 September 2026.

What a switch cannot change

Switching insurer or adjusting cover changes the price, not your medical history. A condition you already have stays excluded when you move — carried across as it stands on continued personal medical exclusions, re-declared under full medical underwriting, or parked under a fresh moratorium. Chronic conditions are excluded by every insurer whose wording we hold, and renewal terms change each year, so read the document you are actually offered before you commit.

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