We’ve overhauled this piece to focus on offering advice about how to shop for pet insurance.
August 2021Pet insurance is something you never want to have to use. But, depending on your situation, it may be worth having in an emergency. The right plan can help pay for the astronomical cost of vet care for a major treatment. Yet there’s no one-size-fits-all solution because the best insurance plan is the one that offers you the best benefits and coverage for your pet at a reasonable price—and that can vary by pet age, breed, and even your zip code.
We first approached this guide in search of the best pet insurance company. We spent dozens of hours researching, examining policies, and analyzing more than 100 different quotes across nine different insurers. But pet insurance isn’t centrally regulated, notes the North American Pet Health Insurance Association; policy offerings change from year to year. It proved impossible to definitively say which insurance provider is the best for your pet, their specific needs, and your budget. What we can do is guide you in your research by offering solid advice on the best time to get pet insurance, how to select a strong policy (which includes choosing the right deductible and premiums), and the fine print to watch out for.
I’m Wirecutter’s pets writer, and I’ve covered complex topics that require months of research, including for our guides to dog DNA tests and pet subscription boxes. For this guide, I researched more than 20 pet insurance companies and compared their coverage, benefits, and premiums. I also considered their ratings from Canine Journal, ConsumersAdvocate.org, Consumer Affairs, and Pet Insurance Review, among other sites. And I studied everything on pet insurance from the North American Pet Health Insurance Association.
This guide builds on the extensive work of our original pet insurance guide, which was written by senior editor Mark Smirniotis. He dug into every aspect of pet insurance, analyzing the pros and cons in detail. He also spoke with seven executives at various insurers to fill in any research gaps as he compared more than 100 different quotes from nine major pet insurance companies.
If your pet is relatively healthy and you can afford the premiums, and you wouldn’t be able to afford tens of thousands of dollars in veterinary bills, you should get pet insurance. Good coverage saves you from having to pay huge out-of-pocket expenses—and it also means you won’t have to make the heartbreaking choice of saying goodbye to your pet because you can’t afford their care.
“Relatively healthy” is important. You can and should get insurance even if your pet has had a few minor vet visits or has a chronic but manageable condition. If your pet is older and has already had serious health problems—cancer, surgeries, loss of mobility, and the like—you may not get much value from starting a new insurance plan since preexisting conditions aren’t covered; you’ll be covered only for issues that appear after your pet is enrolled in a particular plan. And if you decide to swap from one insurance brand to another, anything predating the move will again be “preexisting,” even if it was covered by your first insurer. But an insurance plan is still worth considering, depending on your pet’s condition and the likelihood of future diagnoses. Ask your vet to help you figure out the risks of certain diseases (and whether they would necessitate expensive care) based on your pet’s age, breed, and medical history.
You may be tempted to try and self-insure—setting aside money every month for medical bills. But remember that if your pet is uninsured, a single emergency vet visit could wipe out years of personal savings. Saving money is prudent for the predictable expenses in life, but you pay for insurance because so much of life is unpredictable. During the first year of self-insuring, you might save enough to cover a $1,200 vet bill, while your first insurance premium payment will cover most vet bills going forward, depending on the policy. Plus, care costs and the likelihood of illness will increase as your pet ages, likely outpacing your ability to save. It’s not hard to find stories of costs that could wipe out the savings most people can accumulate: Radiation for some tumors can be up to $10,000, kidney transplants can cost up to $15,000, and bone-marrow transplants can be upwards of $20,000. If you never have to make a claim, your premiums weren’t wasted—they were the cost of predictability, and of sleeping easier with a pet at your feet. But if you make a comfortable living and can afford to be hit with a big bill, you may prefer to pocket the cost of premiums, since insuring a pet over their lifetime can cost twice as much as a single radiation treatment, as outlined in When you should get pet insurance. Still, a pet’s illness may become a chronic concern, and without an insurance plan, you could be saddled with thousands of dollars in vet bills for recurring treatments.
