COBRA Cost Calculator
Premium & admin fee
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Fill in the fields on the left and this updates as you type.
Know what this estimate is based on
- Jurisdiction
- United States — state-regulated insurance
- Scope and limitations
- Educational estimate only. Insurance in the U.S. is regulated state by state, so rates, required coverages and available discounts differ by where you live. Your premium is set by an insurer's own underwriting — driving record, claims history, credit-based insurance score where permitted, the property itself — and only a quote is binding. What a policy pays depends on its exclusions and limits, not on this estimate.
- Source links checked
- Jul 30, 2026
Built and regression-tested by Smart Tools Lab. It has not been individually reviewed by a licensed financial, tax, or legal professional.
How to use
- 01
Enter the full monthly premium for your plan — the whole group rate, not just the slice that used to come out of your paycheck.
- 02
Add the administrative fee your plan charges; 2% is the usual figure under the standard 102% billing cap.
- 03
Read the monthly cost, annual cost and admin fee to see what continuing the exact same coverage now costs you alone.
- 04
Open Advanced options to set how many months you expect to stay on COBRA and the share you used to pay, revealing the full-window total and how many times more you will now spend.
Formula
The headline COBRA monthly cost is the full group premium plus the administrative fee the plan is allowed to add: monthly = fullPremium × (1 + adminPct / 100). With the defaults of 25,000 and 2% that is 25,000 × 1.02 = 25,500, and the admin fee shown separately is simply monthly − fullPremium = 500. The annual figure is monthly × 12. The two advanced inputs deliberately leave that headline untouched. Months of coverage only scales the 'total over coverage' projection — totalOverPeriod = monthly × coverageMonths — so 25,500 × 18 = 459,000 measures the whole window, not the monthly bill. Your old payroll share only powers the comparison: oldMonthly = fullPremium × priorShare / 100 reconstructs what you used to pay, the jump = monthly − oldMonthly shows how much more leaves your pocket, and the multiple = monthly / oldMonthly tells you how many times larger COBRA is. Change either advanced field and the 25,500 you owe each month stays exactly the same — only the projected total and the comparison move.
Example
Take the defaults: a full monthly premium of 25,000 and a 2% administrative fee. The monthly cost is 25,000 × (1 + 2 ÷ 100) = 25,000 × 1.02 = 25,500. Of that, the admin fee is 25,500 − 25,000 = 500. Multiplied out over a year, the annual cost is 25,500 × 12 = 306,000. The advanced 'months of coverage' default of 18 projects the full window: 25,500 × 18 = 459,000 if you carry it the whole standard term. Now the comparison. With an advanced 'old payroll share' of 25%, the slice you used to pay through payroll was 25,000 × 25 ÷ 100 = 6,250 a month. So COBRA costs 25,500 − 6,250 = 19,250 more each month than you were used to, and 25,500 ÷ 6,250 ≈ 4.1× your old share — because the employer subsidy that covered the other 18,750 has stopped. Raising the months to 36 or changing the 25% share would alter the 459,000 total and the 4.1× comparison, but the 25,500 you owe each month would not move at all.
Definitions
- Full monthly premium
- The complete group health-plan premium — the part your employer paid plus the part you paid — which COBRA now bills entirely to you (0 to 1,000,000, default 25,000).
- Administrative fee
- The surcharge the plan adds on top of the premium to cover billing and administration; federal rules cap ordinary continuation at 102% of the group premium, which is why the default is 2% (0% to 10%, default 2%).
- Months of coverage
- An advanced input for how long you expect to stay on COBRA; 18 months is the standard maximum after a job loss or hours cut, while events like divorce or a dependent ageing out can run to 36. It scales the total-over-coverage projection but not the monthly cost (1 to 36 months, default 18).
- Your old payroll share
- An advanced input: the percentage of the premium you used to pay through payroll while employed. It is used only to reconstruct your former monthly cost and drive the comparison figures, never the headline (0% to 100%, default 25%).
- COBRA monthly cost
- The headline result: the full premium plus the administrative fee, i.e. what you will actually pay each month to keep the same employer coverage.
Good to know
What COBRA actually is, and why the price doubles overnight
COBRA is the federal rule that lets you keep the exact health plan you had at work after the job ends, the hours drop, or another qualifying event would otherwise cut you off. Nothing about the coverage changes — same network, same doctors, same deductible — which is precisely why people reach for it during the upheaval of leaving a job. What changes is who pays. While you were employed, the premium was split: your employer covered the large majority and a modest slice was deducted from your paycheck. The moment you go onto COBRA, that subsidy disappears and the full premium lands on you, plus a small administrative fee for the privilege of being billed directly. The calculator makes the shock concrete. With the default 25,000 premium and a 2% fee, your monthly cost is 25,500. Compared with the 6,250 you used to pay when your old payroll share was 25%, that is 19,250 more every month and roughly 4.1 times the cost of the same insurance. The plan did not get better; the hidden employer contribution simply stopped. Understanding this is the whole point of running the numbers before you elect: COBRA is not a discounted bridge plan, it is the true, unsubsidised cost of the coverage you already had. Once you see that figure beside your old payroll deduction, the decision stops being about familiarity and starts being about whether 25,500 a month is genuinely the best deal available to you, or simply the most convenient one to keep paying.
Reading the four numbers the calculator gives you
The tool returns one headline and three supporting stats, and each answers a different question. The COBRA monthly cost — 25,500 with the defaults — is what you must pay every month to keep the plan, and it is the figure your budget has to absorb starting immediately. The annual cost of 306,000 reframes that monthly bill as a yearly commitment, which matters because COBRA tends to coincide with a period of reduced or zero income; seeing a full year laid out stops the monthly number from feeling deceptively small. The admin fee, shown as 500, isolates the surcharge alone so you can confirm your plan is billing within the normal cap rather than padding the price. The total over coverage — 459,000 across the default 18 months — is the most sobering line, because it projects the entire window you might carry the plan and turns an open-ended decision into a single, comparable lump sum. Read together, these four numbers move you from a vague sense that COBRA is pricey to a precise statement of the monthly hit, the yearly hit, and the worst-case total. That precision is what lets you weigh COBRA against a marketplace plan or a spouse's plan on equal terms. A plan that quotes a lower monthly premium but a thinner network can be judged against your real 25,500, and a subsidy that knocks a few thousand off the marketplace price can be measured against the 459,000 you would otherwise spend over the full term.
Where the administrative fee comes from
The administrative fee is the only mark-up COBRA adds, and it is tightly bounded by law for a reason. Under standard continuation, a plan may charge you no more than 102% of the applicable group premium — the actual cost of the coverage plus a 2% allowance to cover the paperwork of billing former employees individually. That 2% is why the calculator defaults the administrative fee to exactly that figure, and why your default monthly cost of 25,500 sits just 500 above the raw 25,000 premium. The fee is not a profit centre; it reflects the genuine cost of running the continuation program for people no longer on payroll. The field allows values up to 10% so you can model the narrow exceptions to the 102% rule. The most common is the 11-month disability extension, during which a plan is permitted to charge up to 150% of the group premium because the extended coverage is statistically more expensive to provide. If you qualify for that extension, raising the fee shows how much the back end of a long COBRA period can cost. For almost everyone else, though, the fee should stay at 2%, and a quote that adds materially more than that is worth questioning. Knowing the cap also protects you: if a former employer or third-party administrator bills you for more than 102% of the group rate without a disability extension in play, the calculator gives you a baseline to push back against. The fee is small in absolute terms, but understanding it confirms that the bulk of your cost is the premium itself, not a hidden surcharge.
Why 18 months is the default window — and when it stretches to 36
The months-of-coverage input defaults to 18 because that is the standard maximum length of COBRA continuation following the most common trigger: losing your job or having your hours reduced below the threshold for benefits. Eighteen months is meant to be a bridge — long enough to find new employment with its own coverage, enrol in a marketplace plan at the next opportunity, or join a spouse's plan, but not an indefinite arrangement. That is why the calculator multiplies your monthly cost by 18 to produce the 459,000 total: it shows the price of riding the bridge all the way across. Some qualifying events carry a longer entitlement of up to 36 months, which is why the field reaches that far. These are typically events that affect dependants rather than the employee directly — a divorce or legal separation, the death of the covered employee, or a child ageing out of dependent eligibility — where the people losing coverage may need more time to secure their own. By adjusting this input you can model your specific entitlement and see the realistic total rather than assuming the headline 18-month figure. Crucially, changing the months never alters the 25,500 you pay each month; it only changes how many of those payments you are projecting. That separation matters when you compare options: the monthly cost decides whether you can afford COBRA at all, while the total over the window decides whether it is worth committing to versus switching to something cheaper partway through. Many people elect COBRA for a short bridge of a few months and move on, so setting a realistic horizon keeps the projected total honest.
Using your old payroll share to feel the true jump
The old-payroll-share input exists for one purpose: to translate COBRA's cost into terms you already understand. When you were employed, you saw only the deduction on your payslip — perhaps a quarter of the premium — never the full price your employer was quietly paying. By entering that share, the calculator reconstructs your former monthly cost and lines it up against the new one. With the defaults, a 25% share means you used to pay 6,250 a month; against the 25,500 COBRA charges, the jump is 19,250 and the multiple is about 4.1 times. That comparison is more useful than the raw number alone, because it tells you exactly how large the employer subsidy was and therefore how much you now have to replace from your own pocket. The multiple is especially revealing: a 4.1× figure means roughly three-quarters of your premium was previously hidden from you, which is typical of employer plans that pay the lion's share. If your old share had been higher — say 50% — the jump would be smaller because you were already absorbing more of the cost. Like the months input, the payroll share never touches the headline; it only feeds the jump and multiple. That design keeps the figure you owe each month clean and objective while still letting you see the psychological gap between what felt affordable on payroll and what the same plan costs unsubsidised. Seeing 19,250 more leaving your account every month is often the line that pushes people to seriously price the alternatives rather than passively renewing the plan they know.
Comparing COBRA against the alternatives before you commit
COBRA's great convenience — keeping the identical plan with no gap — is also its trap, because convenience makes it easy to enrol without checking whether it is the cheapest route. The calculator's purpose is to give you a hard number, 25,500 a month or 459,000 over the window, that you can carry to every alternative and compare like for like. The most common alternative is an ACA marketplace plan: losing job-based coverage opens a special enrolment period, and income-based subsidies can cut the marketplace price dramatically, especially in a year when your income has dropped because you left work. A second option is joining a spouse's or partner's employer plan, which the same loss-of-coverage event usually permits outside the normal enrolment window. If you are approaching 65, Medicare may be both cheaper and more appropriate than continuing COBRA. There is also a timing lever worth knowing: you generally have 60 days to elect COBRA, and coverage is retroactive to the date your old plan ended, so you can shop the marketplace and a spouse's plan first and elect COBRA only as a fallback if a claim arises in the gap. The discipline this tool encourages is simple — never default to COBRA because it is familiar. Put its 25,500 monthly cost beside a subsidised marketplace premium and a spouse-plan option, weigh the networks and deductibles, and choose deliberately. For many people COBRA is the right short bridge; for many others it is an expensive habit they could have replaced for a fraction of the cost had they run the comparison first.
Frequently asked questions
Why is COBRA so much more expensive than what I paid at work?
While you were employed, your employer quietly paid most of the premium and only a slice came out of your paycheck. COBRA lets you keep the identical plan, but now you pay the entire premium yourself plus a small admin fee. With the defaults that turns a 6,250 payroll share into a 25,500 bill — about 4.1 times more — even though the coverage has not changed at all.
What is the administrative fee and how high can it go?
It is a surcharge the plan adds on top of the raw premium to cover the cost of billing you directly. For standard continuation, federal rules cap your total at 102% of the group premium, so 2% is the typical fee. The calculator lets you model up to 10% to cover disability extensions and unusual plan terms, but most people should leave it at 2%.
How long can I stay on COBRA?
The standard maximum is 18 months when coverage ends because of a job loss or a cut in hours, which is why the default 'months of coverage' is 18. Other qualifying events — divorce, a covered employee's death, or a dependent ageing out of the plan — can extend continuation up to 36 months, so the field allows that range. Set it to match your own situation to see the full-window total.
Do the advanced options change my monthly bill?
No. Your monthly cost is fixed by the full premium and the admin fee alone. The months-of-coverage input only multiplies that monthly figure into a total over the whole window, and the old-payroll-share input only reconstructs what you used to pay so the tool can show the jump and the multiple. The 25,500 headline stays put no matter what you set them to.
Is there a cheaper alternative to COBRA?
Often, yes. A loss of job-based coverage opens a special enrolment window for an ACA marketplace plan, where income-based subsidies can cut the price sharply, and you may instead qualify to join a spouse's employer plan. If you are nearing 65, Medicare may be cheaper still. Always price those options before defaulting to COBRA, because keeping the same plan is rarely the lowest-cost route.
What happens if I wait before electing COBRA?
You generally have a 60-day window to elect COBRA, and coverage is retroactive to the day your employer plan ended, so claims in the gap can still be paid once you enrol and pay. That lets you shop marketplace and spouse-plan options first and fall back on COBRA only if you need it. The trade-off is that electing late still means paying premiums back to the start date, so the saved months are not free.