Group renewal season: five questions before you sign.

Published June 29, 2026 · By Tom Wertish, Options.Health

A renewal notice that shows up with a new number and a signature line isn’t a plan review — it’s just an invoice. Before accepting a group health renewal, here are the five questions we push every employer to ask, whether they end up renewing as-is or not.

1. What specifically changed, not just the price?

A renewal increase can come from claims experience, general trend, network changes, or benefit adjustments — and each one calls for a different response. Ask your broker or carrier to break the increase down by cause rather than accepting a single bottom-line number.

2. How did our actual claims experience drive this number?

If your renewal is driven heavily by a small number of large claims, that’s a different conversation than a renewal driven by broad utilization trend across your whole group. Understanding which it is affects whether alternative funding structures, like level-funded plans, might reduce your exposure going forward.

3. Have we actually shopped the market this year, or just accepted the incumbent’s number?

Many employers renew with their current carrier by default, without a real comparison against the market. Even if you end up staying with the same carrier, a genuine market comparison gives you leverage in the renewal conversation — and occasionally surfaces a materially better option you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

4. Would restructuring contribution tiers or plan design blunt the increase?

Sometimes the fix isn’t switching carriers — it’s adjusting how the cost is shared. Changing the employer/employee contribution split, adding a second plan option with a higher deductible, or adjusting tiers for dependents can meaningfully offset a renewal increase without changing carriers at all.

5. Is a QSEHRA or ICHRA alternative worth modeling before we renew?

If your group is under 50 full-time equivalent employees, or you’re finding group plan costs increasingly hard to predict, it’s worth at least modeling what an HRA-based alternative would cost before signing another year of group renewal. We’ve covered how to decide between QSEHRA and ICHRA in a separate post if that’s a real option for your business size.