Health insurers with mutual status will increase their contributions on average by 4.3% (individual contracts) and 4.7% (company contracts), the French National Federation of Mutual Societies announced on Tuesday, warning of an "absolute urgency" to control health spending.
The increase is less pronounced than in previous years (+6% on average in 2025, +8.1% in 2024, +4.7% in 2023), but it remains at a level far exceeding that observed before Covid (+2.6% per year on average over the decade 2010-2020).
Each year, the announcement of mutual insurance rates provides an indication of the rates across the entire market. Mutuals represent slightly less than half of the supplemental health insurance market, the remainder being held by private insurers and joint bodies.
"The increase in health spending," covered by Social Security and supplementary health insurance, "has intensified since 2020, at +4.4% per year," the Mutualité indicates to justify the increase in its contributions.
Mutuals will also have to absorb in 2026 new transfers of costs from the Health Insurance, and a new tax planned in the 2026 budget of the Social Security, which will cost them 1 billion euros, she adds.
In the Social Security budget for 2026 – which the National Assembly should, barring any surprises, definitively adopt this afternoon – "we have managed to block the doubling of medical deductibles, so much the better, but unfortunately the easy solution of this VAT on health, this one billion tax, will ultimately weigh on our fellow citizens," said the president of the Mutualité, Eric Chenut, on Tuesday morning on RTL.
"With a tax on contracts that has climbed to 16%, France is a 'European anomaly'," the organization denounces. "The government and parliamentarians are knowingly preparing to make policyholders pay, but without taking responsibility and by trying to shift the blame onto supplementary health insurers," it adds.
Faced with criticism that mutuals are profiting greatly from the situation, the head of the Mutualité denounced "an absolutely scandalous accusation: mutuals are non-profit organizations with democratic governance," and "when we adjust contributions, it is to the bare minimum, to guarantee the balance and sustainability of our companies."
Lamenting "a form of collective denial" and "policies that are too short-term" while "our population is aging and health needs are increasing," Eric Chenut warned that "our individual and collective effort to take care of ourselves (...) will become increasingly important if we do not address the regulation of health spending."
“Taking action for efficiency, reducing redundant actions, fighting fraud, investing massively in prevention” are becoming “an absolute emergency”, argues the Mutualité.
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