Key Takeaways
- The California Department of Insurance approved a 28.1% overall rate increase for American Pet Insurance Company, which underwrites Trupanion in California — the largest approved hike of the two, affecting 94,326 policyholders with some individual policies seeing effective increases of up to 70%.
- Independence American Insurance Company, which underwrites Figo, V4, and PetPartners programs in California, won approval for a 7.9% overall increase effective today, July 1 — but some policyholders will see their actual premiums climb more than 37%, depending on plan type and pet profile.
- If you hold a Trupanion, Figo, or PetPartners policy in California, your renewal letter will show a new annual premium — not a percentage change. Check the math yourself: a base rate increase of 7.9% or 28.1% lands on top of the age-based escalation that most carriers apply separately each year, meaning the real-dollar impact is often substantially larger than the approved ‘overall’ rate figure suggests.
What California Just Approved, and Who It Hits Today
Two pet insurance rate increases hit California policyholders this month, both approved by the California Department of Insurance. The first, a 7.9% overall increase from Independence American Insurance Company, which underwrites Figo, V4, and PetPartners programs in California, takes effect today, July 1, 2026. It affects 197,543 policyholders. Depending on policy type and individual rating factors, some customers will see premium reductions, while others face actual premium increases of more than 37%, according to documents the company filed with the CDI.
The second is sharper. The CDI approved a 28.1% overall rate increase for American Pet Insurance Company, which underwrites Trupanion’s California policies. That increase takes effect July 19, 2026, for 94,326 policyholders. Effective premium increases for individual policyholders will range from less than 5% to as high as 70%, depending on the pet’s age, deductible structure, and policy tier. Combined, the two approvals affect more than 291,000 California pet insurance customers.
The Insurify analysis that surfaced these filings, published April 23, 2026, draws directly from documents filed with the CDI. Rate filings are public record in California, one of the more transparent DOI environments in the country for this purpose.
The Double Hit Most Renewal Letters Won’t Explain
Here’s what the press release version of this story leaves out. The 7.9% and 28.1% figures are approved base rate changes. They aren’t the only rate change hitting these policies at renewal.
I spent nearly a decade on the agency desk before moving to writing, and I watched the same pattern play out repeatedly across every insurance vertical. Most renewal letters lead with the new annual premium on page one. The percentage change, if it appears at all, is buried. The reason a policyholders’s premium climbs more than the approved base rate is that carriers apply two separate adjustments: the base rate change, and the age-based escalation that runs as a separate factor. Most pet carriers raise rates 10% to 30% annually as the pet ages, independent of any regulatory adjustment. A $60 monthly premium for a four-year-old dog can become $75 to $85 by year six, and that’s before a state-approved base rate increase gets layered on top.
For a California Trupanion policyholder whose pet is now age eight or nine, the effective hit at their next renewal isn’t 28.1%. It’s 28.1% applied to an already age-escalated premium. That math can push actual renewal increases past 40% in a single cycle for older dogs.
This is exactly why the Insurify filing analysis shows some individual policyholders facing effective increases of up to 70%, even though the CDI-approved figure for American Pet Insurance Company is 28.1% overall. The overall approved rate is an actuarial weighted average across the entire California book. The tails, senior pets, high-cost plan tiers, urban ZIP codes, see something quite different.
Why These Two Underwriters, and Why Now
The underwriter identities here matter more than the brand names on the customer portal. Trupanion is one of the few vertically integrated pet insurers in the U.S., it underwrites its own policies through American Pet Insurance Company, a Trupanion subsidiary. That structure means Trupanion controls its own rate filing process directly, rather than deferring to a third-party underwriter. The 28.1% California increase reflects Trupanion’s own actuarial judgment about where its loss ratios are running in the state.
Figo and PetPartners are a different structure. Both are customer-facing distribution brands on top of Independence American Insurance Company, an IHC Group subsidiary that also underwrites Pets Best in most states. The 7.9% approved increase from Independence American affects every policy using that underwriting paper in California, Figo, PetPartners, and V4 products alike. Policyholders buying Figo’s brand directly and policyholders who accessed PetPartners through the AKC Pet Insurance program are sitting on the same underlying policy form and the same rate increase. The customer-facing brand is distribution. Independence American is who actually files the rates and pays the claims.
The timing isn’t surprising. Veterinary service prices rose faster than general inflation in 2025, continuing a trend that has run since 2019, according to Brakke Consulting data presented at the January 2026 North American Veterinary Community’s Veterinary Meeting and Expo. Companion animal practices saw roughly 2.5% revenue growth while visit volumes fell about 3%, meaning price increases are doing the revenue work that volume growth once did. Higher per-claim costs run through to underwriter loss ratios and then to rate filings. California, as the largest single pet insurance market in the U.S., accounting for approximately 18.3% of U.S. insured pets according to NAPHIA’s 2026 State of the Industry Report, tends to be where these pressures surface most visibly in filings.
California is also the state whose original 2014 pet insurance law became the model for the NAIC Pet Insurance Model Act adopted in 2022. The CDI’s rate-filing transparency requirements make California filings among the most detailed and publicly accessible in the country. That transparency is why these specific policyholder count and effective-increase-range figures are available at all, most states don’t produce filing documents with this level of granularity.
What You Should Do If You Hold One of These Policies
If you have a Trupanion, Figo, or PetPartners policy in California, you need to do one thing before your next renewal: calculate the real-dollar increase, not just the percentage. Take your current monthly premium, apply the approved overall increase, and then separately account for your pet’s age-based escalation for the new policy year. The number you get is your actual renewal premium, and it will be higher than either rate alone suggests.
For best pet insurance for dogs comparison purposes, the Independence American approval affects policies that are among the more competitively priced on the market. If your Figo or PetPartners premium was sitting at $45 per month and your dog just turned seven, a 7.9% base rate increase plus an age escalation could push your monthly cost above $55 before July ends. A Trupanion policyholder with an older dog facing a 28.1% base rate increase is looking at a meaningfully larger jump.
The practical question is whether switching makes financial sense. The answer is often no for senior pets, because pre-existing conditions established during the current policy become permanent exclusions at any new carrier. A dog that developed hip dysplasia under a Trupanion policy has that condition covered for life under the existing policy. Switch carriers, and that condition becomes a lifetime exclusion under the pre-existing condition definition at the new insurer, regardless of whether the pet is symptomatic at the time of enrollment.
For anyone still in the early years of a policy, with a young, healthy pet, this is a reasonable moment to compare alternatives. The best pet insurance options available at enrollment are much wider than the options available after years of claim history. Locking in a new policy now, before any diagnosed condition creates a pre-existing exclusion, preserves the most flexibility. Waiting for another renewal cycle narrows it.
The CDI approvals are a reminder that pet insurance pricing is not static and not uniform across a book. The average masks the distribution. The policyholders at the high end of that distribution are finding out this month.
