BERN. The date is now fixed. On Tuesday 29 September, health minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider will announce the average premium for compulsory health insurance in 2027. The Federal Office of Public Health has spent the month declining to name the day. Le Temps reported on Wednesday that the appointment is set, in the usual staged form: a national figure, a ministerial verdict that the rise is unsatisfactory, and a country that already knows the letter in the kitchen will not match the average on the television.
What the forecasts still disagree about
One fact is not in dispute. Premiums will rise. They have risen every year since 2023: 6.6 per cent, then 8.7, then 6, then 4.4 per cent for 2026, which took the average adult premium to CHF 393.30 a month. Since 2022 that average has climbed from CHF 315, almost a quarter, while inflation has not. The argument left for Tuesday is whether the next step starts with a three or a four, or, for some households, something worse.
Comparis has held a 3.7 per cent projection since May. The health office warned insurers in late May that 4.5 to 5 per cent could be justified, and the comparison service bonus.ch reached the same range this month. The doctors’ association in French speaking Switzerland has argued that 2 to 2.5 per cent would match the cost data, a figure the insurers do not recognise. The gap is about the price of a modest dinner on an average premium, and it is politically useful to every side until the office publishes one number and retires the others.
The average will hide the bill that matters. Premiums differ by canton, insurer, age and model. bonus.ch expects some people to face rises approaching 20 per cent and others almost none. The federal figure is a weighted mean of thousands of tariffs. It is built for a press conference. The document that changes a household budget is the one with a name and a commune on it, and insurers must send those by 31 October.
The two months that are actually useful
Under the forecasts sits an accounting gap. The health office estimates the combined ratio for 2026 at almost 101 per cent, which means this year’s premiums do not quite cover this year’s costs. Part of the 2027 rise is a catch up, not only new spending on psychotherapy, weight loss drugs and home care. KOF expects costs per insured person to keep climbing into 2027, more slowly than in the worst recent years, and still upward. A smaller rise is not a cut. It is a fifth consecutive increase.
Parliament is already in the autumn session with the same levers it has debated for a decade: the franchise, outpatient tariffs, care moved out of hospitals, and a cap on insurer executive pay that the government itself says will not move next year’s premiums. None of those votes changes the 29 September figure. They shape the argument about 2028, which will start on Tuesday afternoon.
For anyone insured in Switzerland the calendar is short and concrete. Read the letter when it arrives, not the average. Cancellation of basic insurance must reach the current insurer by 30 November. The same mandatory cover can differ by more than CHF 100 a month between the dearest and the cheapest insurer in one commune, before a higher franchise or a family doctor model. Fewer than one insured person in ten switches. The system relies on that inertia.
Tuesday’s announcement will not tell you what you pay. It will tell the country what the politics of the winter will be about. A rise that lands near 4 per cent will be sold as relief after the steeper years. A rise near 5 per cent will be sold as proof the reforms have failed. Both sentences can be true of an average that describes almost nobody. The date is new. The direction of the number is not.