Sticker price against real cost
The most expensive counties in Colorado are the cheapest to insure
Figures on this page checked . Medicare and marketplace numbers reset every year — if you are reading this long after that date, call and we will tell you what moved.
Two numbers, running in opposite directions
These are last plan year’s averages, from Connect for Health Colorado's Open Enrollment Report for 2026. The left column is what the plans cost. The right is what households receiving financial help paid each month, after the federal premium tax credit and Colorado Premium Assistance came off.
Jackson
Hinsdale
Garfield
Eagle
Summit
Pueblo
El Paso
Larimer
Weld
Denver
Averages for plan year 2026, for customers receiving federal financial assistance. The two columns are drawn to separate scales, because the premiums are an order of magnitude larger than the bills — so read the figures beside each bar rather than measuring one column against the other.
Read the top row and the bottom row together. Jackson County has the highest premium in Colorado and the smallest bill. Denver’s plans cost 44% less and its households paid nearly three times more.
Why it works that way
Nothing is being discounted. It falls straight out of how the federal credit is calculated, which pays to understand once because it explains most of what looks strange about these prices.
Your credit is the cost of a benchmark plan in your county, minus what the government has decided a household at your income can afford to contribute. The benchmark is local. Your contribution is not — it depends on your income and nothing else.
In plain terms
So when the local benchmark rises, your expected contribution stays put and the credit grows to cover the whole difference. An expensive county produces a bigger credit, not a bigger bill.
Which produces the rule we would rather you heard from us than from a neighbor: never assume coverage is expensive where you live until somebody has run the subsidy. For a household receiving help it is close to the opposite of true.
And it reverses completely above the cliff
Everything above depends on a credit absorbing the local price. Over 400% of the Federal Poverty Level there is no credit, so the household pays what the county costs.
Same geography, same person, opposite outcome. Averaged across last plan year, customers with no financial help paid $555.07 a month in Denver and $1,161.80 in Hinsdale. More than double, forty-odd miles apart as the crow flies.
If you are above the line
Geography becomes one of the few things that moves your price and that you can change. It also makes the comparison between an on-exchange and an off-exchange plan a live question, which is almost never true below the line and is often true above it.
There is one thing working for you either way, and it is invisible on every quote you will see. Colorado runs a reinsurance program that pays down carriers’ highest-cost claims so that every premium in the state is filed lower than it otherwise would be. You do not apply for it and there is no line item. It is already inside the number you are looking at, and it is a large part of why Colorado’s increases run below the national middle.
Larimer and Weld, since that is where we are
Both sit in the middle of that table and neither is unusual on price. What is unusual here is the network question. The large health systems in Northern Colorado do not participate evenly across carriers, it changes by plan year, and two plans that look identical on paper can differ entirely on whether your doctor is inside them.
That is a ninety-second check for us and an afternoon for you, and it is the single most common way somebody in Fort Collins or Greeley ends up on a plan that looked perfect and drops their doctor in January.
One statewide figure to carry before you assume anything about your own: 58% of customers receiving financial help had at least one plan available to them last year with an estimated net premium under $10 a month. That is the marketplace’s own reporting, not ours.
Grove Benefit Advisors, LLC is a certified broker with Connect for Health Colorado and is not a government agency or the marketplace itself. Plan availability, networks, and pricing vary by county. Any savings figure shown here is illustrative; final eligibility for a premium tax credit is determined by Connect for Health Colorado on your application.
Questions about what it costs
Will these numbers hold for next year?
No, and we would not want you to plan around them as forecasts. They are averages for a plan year that has closed, which is exactly what makes them reliable — nothing about them is going to be revised.
For next year, carriers have asked to raise individual premiums by an average of about 11% and the Division of Insurance was still reviewing that request when we last checked. What the table above shows you is how the arithmetic behaves, not what your bill will be.
These are averages. What about my household?
Averages hide everything that matters here — your age, your household size, your income and which plan you pick all move the number, and the age band alone can double a premium between a 25-year-old and a 60-year-old.
So treat the table as an argument about direction rather than a quote. The only number that describes you is the one run against your own details, and it takes about ten minutes to produce.
Should I move counties to get cheaper insurance?
Almost certainly not, and it is a bigger question than we are qualified to answer. If you receive financial help, moving somewhere cheaper on paper will likely raise what you pay rather than lower it, because your credit shrinks with the local benchmark.
If you are above 400% of the Federal Poverty Level and already considering a move for other reasons, then the price difference is real and worth putting in the column with everything else. It should not be the reason.
Why do premiums vary so much between counties at all?
Colorado prices by rating area rather than by county, and those areas differ in what care costs locally and how many providers compete. A mountain county with one hospital and a short season prices differently from the Front Range, and that flows into every plan sold there.
It is not something a carrier chooses arbitrarily, and it is not something you can negotiate. It is why the subsidy is calculated locally in the first place.