What's Behind Pets Best's 2026 Premium Hikes

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title: "What's Behind Pets Best's 2026 Premium Hikes" description: "Investigation into Pets Best's recent rate increases on aging pets and what policyholders can do about it." date: "2026-04-07" slug: "pets-best-premium-increase-2026" author: "Pet Insurance Watch" keywords: ["pets best", "pet insurance premium increase", "SERFF rate filing", "pet insurance complaint"]

Over the past year, the inbox at Pet Insurance Watch has filled with a strikingly consistent story. A pet owner signs up for coverage when their dog or cat is young. Premiums creep up modestly for a few years. Then, somewhere between the pet's fifth and eighth birthday, the renewal letter lands with an increase that bears no resemblance to anything they'd seen before — 60%, 80%, sometimes more than 100% in a single cycle. No new claims. No change in coverage. Just a much bigger bill.

This pattern is not unique to any single carrier, but Pets Best has surfaced in our reports often enough — and with large enough jumps — to deserve a closer look.

The problem

The clearest example we've seen so far comes from a healthy seven-year-old dog in Wisconsin, insured by Pets Best with no claims on file. Year-over-year, the policy went from $384.40 to $687.75 — a 78.9% increase in a single renewal. Same pet. Same plan. One year older.

That case is not an outlier in our dataset. We've heard from owners in at least a dozen states describing renewal increases in the 60–100% range, almost always clustered around the same age window: roughly five to eight years old, right when pets begin aging into higher-risk underwriting brackets but long before any meaningful health decline. Many of these policyholders had been loyal customers for years and had filed few or no claims.

The common thread is that none of them were given a substantive explanation. Rate increase notices tend to point at "general trends in veterinary care costs" or "actuarial review" without ever showing the math.

What the rate filings show

In the United States, pet insurance is regulated at the state level. Most state insurance departments require carriers to file proposed rate changes through the System for Electronic Rate and Form Filing — SERFF — where they're reviewed before taking effect. Filings typically include the proposed percentage change, the affected policy forms, and supporting actuarial memoranda.

Anyone can search SERFF, and what's publicly visible there tells a different story than the carrier marketing. Pet insurance carriers, including Pets Best, have filed multiple double-digit rate increases over the past 24 months across a range of states. These filings are not always easy to find — they're indexed by company and form rather than by consumer-facing brand — and the actuarial memoranda are frequently marked confidential. But the headline rate changes are there, in writing, on the public record.

We're working on building a more navigable index of those filings. In the meantime, the takeaway is simple: when a carrier tells you the increase is routine and individualized, the rate filings often show that the same increase is being applied across a much broader book of business than your single renewal letter suggests.

Why it happens

The underlying business model is not a mystery. Pet insurance is sold to healthy young animals at a price point designed to win the customer. Once you're in, two things happen that make leaving difficult. First, your pet ages, and any condition diagnosed during your time on the plan becomes a pre-existing condition that no other carrier will cover. Second, new carriers grow increasingly reluctant to write policies on older pets at all.

The result is a classic lock-in: the customers who would most benefit from shopping around are precisely the customers who can't. Carriers know this. Once a policyholder is captive, raising rates is the path of least resistance, and the rate increases tend to be steepest in exactly the age window where switching becomes effectively impossible.

This is not a hypothesis about bad actors. It's a predictable feature of how the product is designed and sold.

What you can do

If you've been hit with a large renewal increase from Pets Best — or any other pet insurance carrier — there are three concrete things worth doing, in roughly this order.

1. Document your rate change publicly. Submit it at petinsurancewatch.com/report. It takes about a minute, it's anonymous, and every report makes the underlying pattern harder to dismiss as anecdote. The dataset we're building is the first of its kind, and its value scales with how many people contribute to it.

2. Send a demand letter to your carrier. Ask them, in writing, to provide the actuarial basis for the specific rate increase applied to your policy. You can generate a one-page letter here. Carriers are not always required to answer, but a written record of the request matters if you escalate.

3. File a complaint with your state insurance commissioner. This is the single most effective lever a consumer has. It's free, it goes on the carrier's regulatory record, and complaint volume is one of the inputs regulators use when deciding whether to scrutinize future rate filings. Our resources page has a directory of every state insurance department plus a checklist of what to gather before you file.

Closing

One renewal letter is a complaint. A thousand renewal letters with the same shape are a pattern, and patterns are what regulators, journalists, and attorneys general respond to. The more reports we collect — Pets Best and otherwise — the clearer that pattern becomes, and the harder it is for carriers to keep treating these increases as routine.

If your premium jumped this year, please take a minute to tell us about it. We read every submission.