Five health insurers collect 80% of Australia's private health insurance premiums

APRA's latest private health insurance data provides financial performance information for individual insurers, including premium revenue by state and territory.

Summing those state figures shows Australia's 29 private health insurers collected $31.10 billion in health insurance premium revenue in 2024–25.

The market is dominated by a small number of very large insurers.

Bupa accounted for 25.61% of premium revenue and Medibank another 24.60%. Together, just those two insurers collected 50.22% of industry premiums.

HCF accounted for another 13.25%, followed by nib at 9.07% and HBF at 7.31%. The five largest insurers therefore controlled 79.85% of premium revenue, while the ten largest accounted for 91.57%.

A useful broader measure of competition is the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, or HHI, which squares each insurer's market share and adds the results together.

On this measure, Benchmark Analytics calculates an Australian private health insurance HHI of 1,607.

The ACCC's current merger assessment guidelines describe markets with an HHI above 2,000 as highly concentrated, while stressing that HHI depends upon how the relevant market is defined and is not determinative by itself.

The result therefore provides an interesting baseline: private health insurance falls below that benchmark nationally, despite extraordinary concentration among the largest providers.

Source: Benchmark Analytics calculations from APRA Annual Private Health Insurance Performance Statistics 2024–25.