Health Insurance After Quitting Your Job: The Real Numbers

A single 40-year-old leaving a job in 2026 should expect to pay somewhere between $0 and $515 a month for marketplace coverage if income lands under $62,600, or about $793 a month for average single COBRA, per the numbers worked in the Health Insurance After Quitting guide. Family COBRA averages roughly $2,294 a month. The whole decision runs on a 60-day clock that starts when coverage ends, and the single most important number in it, the subsidy cutoff at $62,600 of income for one person, changed shape at the end of 2025. Here is the pricing, worked straight.

Door one: COBRA, priced honestly

COBRA lets you keep your exact employer plan, usually for up to 18 months, at up to 102 percent of the full premium. That is the full premium, not your old worker share. Average employer plans cost $9,325 a year single and $26,993 family in 2025, per KFF, so COBRA runs near $793 and $2,294 a month respectively. Federal COBRA applies to employers with 20 or more workers; smaller firms fall to state mini-COBRA, which runs 9 to 18 months depending on the state.

Two facts make COBRA more useful than its price suggests. Coverage is retroactive to the loss date, and you have 60 days to elect. A known operator strategy, labeled as consensus in the guide, is to enroll in a marketplace plan and elect COBRA only if something terrible happens inside the window. One caution: voluntarily dropping COBRA later does not open a new marketplace special enrollment period. Exhausting it does.

Door two: the marketplace, and the 2026 rulebook

If you priced marketplace coverage before 2026, some of what you read is now wrong. The enhanced premium tax credits that capped anyone's benchmark premium at 8.5 percent of income expired at the end of 2025, and Congress did not extend them. The old structure is back: a sliding scale of required contributions, and a hard cutoff above 400 percent of the poverty line where subsidies stop completely. Across marketplace consumers, the average net premium payment jumped 58 percent this year, from $113 to $178 a month, and more than a million people did not come back at all.

For 2026 coverage, a single person's subsidy dies at $62,600 of income. For a household of two, the line is $84,600. Below the line, the scale runs from about 2.1 percent of income at the bottom to 9.96 percent in the 300 to 400 percent band.

The mechanism is simpler than it sounds. The government prices the second-lowest silver plan in your area, called the benchmark, which averaged $625 a month nationally in 2026. It decides what share of that you pay yourself, as a percentage of income. Whatever your share does not cover, the subsidy pays, and you can apply it to any metal level.

Worked case one, from the guide: Priya leaves a $74,000 job and projects $30,000 for the calendar year counting wages through her last day. At 192 percent of poverty, her required contribution is about 6.2 percent, or $155 a month for the benchmark silver. Her subsidy is $470. Apply that to a $456 bronze plan and the bronze costs zero. Zero-premium bronze is common this year precisely because the subsidy attaches to the benchmark and bronze is cheaper than the benchmark.

Worked case two: Marcus lands at $62,000 for the year, inside the top band. His benchmark share is 9.96 percent, about $515 a month, roughly $280 cheaper than average single COBRA. One more contract pushes him to $63,000, over the line at 402 percent of poverty. The subsidy goes to zero, not smaller. His benchmark goes from $515 to $625, his bronze from $346 to $456, and about $1,320 a year of premium damage traces to $1,000 of extra income. That is the cliff.

A real couple makes it concrete. A West Virginia pair, both 63, earned $85,000, just over the two-person line. In 2025 their lowest gold plan ran about $300 a month and their bronze was effectively free. In 2026 the same gold plan costs $4,562 a month and the bronze $3,648. Their income did not change. The law did.

The trap that changed in 2026

Two more numbers matter as much as the cliff.

First, the marketplace prices your full calendar year, including salary and severance from the job you left, and for the self-employed it prices net profit after expenses, not revenue. Second, and this is new: the caps on repaying excess advance subsidies are gone for 2026. Underestimate your income and you now repay every dollar of the excess at tax time. A $60,000 estimate that lands at $66,000 costs roughly $1,500 back. Estimate honestly, and if the year shapes up near $62,600 single or $84,600 for two, treat the last December contract as a coverage-pricing event. The guide teaches estimation and reporting, never income-hiding.

On the deductible side: the average marketplace deductible rose 37 percent to $3,786 in 2026, and standard silver deductibles run $5,304. But below 250 percent of poverty, silver plans carry cost-sharing reductions, and the average silver deductible for enrollees at or below 150 percent of poverty was $80 this year. Eighty dollars. If your first self-employment year will be thin, that fact alone can decide your metal level. The 2026 out-of-pocket maximum is $10,600 individual and $21,200 family.

Doors three and four: the spouse plan and Medicaid

A spouse's plan often looks like the obvious exit, and adding you typically costs $300 to $600 a month incremental, by benefits-market consensus anchored to the $571 average worker family contribution. Two rules govern it. Employer-plan special enrollment must be requested within 30 days of losing other coverage. And if the spouse's employer offers affordable self-only coverage, defined as 9.96 percent of household income or less for 2026, that offer blocks your marketplace subsidy whether or not you accept it.

Medicaid is near $0 a month in expansion states, where the line sits around $22,000 of income for a single adult. Forty states plus DC have expanded. Ten have not, mostly across the South, and about 1.2 million people fall into the resulting coverage gap.

The deadlines, in one list

Losing job-based coverage opens a 60-day marketplace special enrollment window, and marketplace coverage starts the first of the month after you select it. COBRA gives the employer 44 days to notice you, 60 days to elect, and 45 days after electing for the first payment. Medicaid or CHIP loss opens a 90-day window. A dependent under 26 can go on a parent's plan regardless of school, marriage, or residency, on both job-based and marketplace plans. Open enrollment, if you miss all of these, runs November 1 through mid-January.

What is not on the list: short-term plans, which federal limits on are in genuine flux after an August 2025 non-enforcement announcement, and health care sharing ministries, which are not insurance and carry no guarantee of claim payment. Several states, including California and New York, ban short-term plans outright.

Work the numbers the week you give notice, not during the exit interview. The guide walks your income case line by line with a worksheet. The quit decision itself has its own runway math. And if the whole leap is still hypothetical, the fit quiz is a fast first read on which business would pay the premium.