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Employee benefits

Your renewal has gone up

The short answer

An increase at renewal is not by itself evidence that anything is wrong. Group health and protection pricing moves for reasons that have nothing to do with your scheme, and for reasons that have everything to do with it, and the letter usually does not tell you which.

What is worth doing is finding out which, before deciding whether to move. This page is the questions.

No saving or outcome claimed Last reviewed 15 August 2026

Why renewals move

Several of these can apply at once, which is why a single percentage tells you very little on its own.

  • Your own claims experience, on products where the scheme is experience-rated.
  • Your workforce changing. Age profile, headcount and salary roll all feed pricing, and a scheme that has grown or aged will price differently.
  • Medical and treatment cost inflation, which moves faster than general inflation and affects the whole market.
  • The insurer's own position on that product or that segment, which may have nothing to do with you.
  • A change in terms. An increase alongside a change in cover is a different thing from an increase on identical terms, and the two are easy to conflate.

What to ask before you decide

Ask your current broker or insurer first. What comes back tells you a good deal about the service as well as about the price.

  • Are the terms identical to last year, and if not, what changed?
  • How much of this increase is our own experience, and how much is the market?
  • What would the price be at a different excess, a different level of cover, or a narrower hospital list?
  • What was the claims experience on this scheme, and can I see it?
  • What alternatives did you look at before presenting this?
  • If we do nothing, what happens at the next renewal?

What changing actually involves

Less than people fear administratively, and more than people expect in one specific respect.

Appointing a different intermediary is usually a letter to the insurer and a standard employee data export. It does not by itself change your cover, your insurer or your terms.

The respect that catches people out is continuity. Moving insurer, rather than intermediary, raises questions about anyone currently receiving treatment, anyone mid-claim, and how pre-existing conditions are treated on the new underwriting basis. Those are the questions to settle before a move, not after, and they are covered per product in the benefit guides.

What this page cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether your increase is reasonable. That depends on your claims experience, your workforce, your terms and the product, and none of those is visible from here.

It also does not promise that a review finds a better answer. Sometimes the answer is that the increase is fair and the cover is right, and that is a useful thing to know with confidence rather than to assume.

Questions people ask

Why has our employee benefits renewal gone up?

Group health and protection pricing moves for several reasons at once: your own claims experience where the scheme is experience-rated, changes in your workforce such as age profile and headcount, medical cost inflation across the market, and the insurer's own position on that product. A renewal letter often does not separate these, and asking which applies is a reasonable request.

Should we change broker if the renewal goes up?

An increase on its own is not evidence that anything is wrong. The more useful test is what your current broker or insurer says when you ask how much of the increase is your own experience and how much is the market, what alternatives were considered, and what the price would be on different terms. The quality of that answer is more informative than the percentage.

What is involved in changing benefits broker?

Appointing a different intermediary is usually a letter to the insurer and a standard employee data export, and it does not by itself change your cover, your insurer or your terms. Changing insurer is a bigger question, because continuity of treatment for anyone mid-claim and the treatment of pre-existing conditions on a new underwriting basis both need settling first.

Sources and limitations

What this page is, and is not

This page is general information about how employee benefits are bought and renewed. It is not a recommendation, not advice about whether any arrangement suits your organisation, and not a statement about what your own policy costs or contains. How an insurer prices a product, and how any intermediary is paid on it, varies by insurer and by product. Advising on whether a particular contract of insurance suits you is a regulated activity and is a separate conversation. Alltoogether is an appointed representative of Sante Partners Ltd, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

Financial Conduct AuthorityThe Financial Services Register
Supports: that an intermediary's permissions and status can be checked independently, including ours
Published or updated: live register. Retrieved: 15 August 2026.
Limitation: the register records permissions and status. It says nothing about the quality of any firm's service.

Related guides

ZF

Zak Fenton · Founder, Alltoogether

Written by Zak Fenton, MSc Workplace Health and Wellbeing (Distinction), founder of Alltoogether, a UK employee-benefits broker and workplace-health platform. Alltoogether is an appointed representative of Sante Partners Ltd, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (914023).

Last reviewed 15 August 2026.

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