The honest answer is that nobody can price your group from an article. What does exist for Indiana is one federal survey of employers, published with its methods attached, and a short federal rule about what a small-group rate may vary on. Read together they explain the number without producing yours.
The one federal survey that measures Indiana employers
The figures below come from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Insurance Component, run by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and usually called MEPS-IC. It is an annual establishment survey: AHRQ draws its sample from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Register and sends questionnaires to employers asking about the plans offered, the annual premiums, the contributions made by employers and employees, and who is eligible.
The Indiana workbook used here is titled “Table II. State of Indiana, private-sector data by firm size, 2025”
. It carries data year 2025, it was posted in July 2026, and no newer edition exists. You can open the workbook itself and read the rows quoted below out of the file.
Three things about that table have to travel with every number taken out of it, because without them the numbers say something they do not say.
The first is the unit. MEPS samples establishments — single workplaces — and then classifies each one by the size of the firm that owns it. The column read here is headed “Less than 50 employees”
, which means establishments belonging to firms with fewer than fifty employees, not establishments with fewer than fifty people working in them.
The second is that the column is close to, but not the same as, Indiana’s own definition. IC 27-8-15-14(b) defines a small employer as a business that “employed at least one (1) but not more than fifty (50) employees”
, measured by one of two permitted counting methods — an eligibility test with its own formula rather than a survey column (read the chapter). Treat the MEPS column as firms of roughly the size that buy small-group coverage in Indiana, and nothing tighter. The counting rule is its own subject, and one we walk through when a first group plan is being set up.
The third is the denominator. Every premium row in that table is measured at establishments that offer health insurance. It describes employers who already offer. It says nothing about employers who do not.
The single-coverage figure, read with its three qualifiers
MEPS-IC’s 2025 Indiana table puts the average total single premium at $7,330 per enrolled employee, at establishments belonging to firms with fewer than fifty employees that offer health insurance. That is the whole premium for one person’s coverage — the part the employer pays and the part the employee pays, added together by the survey rather than split by it.
The same row carries two other Indiana cells: $8,355 for establishments at all firm sizes, and $8,455 at firms of fifty or more employees. Three cells, three different numbers, one state, one year.
What none of them is, is a quote. A published average sits in the middle of a spread of employers with different ages on the payroll, different plan designs and different mixes of who takes family coverage. Applying it to your business is the move that turns a sourced figure into a made-up one. What your own group would cost comes from a carrier, after a quote is put together.
The family figure, and why it is not a family rate
The same Indiana table, the same column and the same denominator put the average total family premium at $20,362 per enrolled employee at establishments belonging to firms with fewer than fifty employees that offer health insurance.
Read the unit carefully. It is per enrolled employee who holds family coverage — not per family member, not per household, and not a figure that tells you what adding a spouse does to a line on your bill. It is also, again, an average taken only across employers who were offering.
Two Indiana cells that would naturally sit beside that one, the employee-contribution figures for family coverage at this firm-size band, carry AHRQ’s own reliability mark — the mark it attaches to an estimate it does not consider precise enough to lean on. Those cells are not printed here, and that is the publisher’s judgment rather than ours. The single-coverage equivalents do not carry it.
A minority of employers that size offer coverage at all
The same workbook reports something that is not a price and changes how every price above should read. At establishments belonging to Indiana firms with fewer than fifty employees, 17.0% offered health insurance. The comparable cells are 43.1% for Indiana establishments at all firm sizes and 89.7% at firms of fifty or more.
That is the denominator made visible. Every premium figure above describes the minority of small Indiana employers who were offering. It does not describe small Indiana employers generally, and the table does not say why the rest were not offering — the survey did not ask, so this page does not answer.
If you do not offer yet, the useful reading of that row is not that coverage is out of reach. It is that the averages you find online were measured on a population you are not standing in.
Why an average cannot become your number
Federal rules are unusually specific about what a small-group rate is allowed to depend on. Under 45 CFR 147.102(a)(1), a rate in the individual or small group market may vary only by whether the plan covers an individual or a family, by rating area, by age, and by tobacco use. Paragraph (a)(2) then closes the list: “The rate must not vary with respect to the particular plan or coverage involved by any other factor not described in paragraph (a)(1) of this section.”
The section is readable in full at eCFR.
That rule is why a state average and your premium are different kinds of object. The average pools employers whose ages, rating areas, family mixes and tobacco answers all differ from one another. Your rate is built from yours. The regulation also caps how far age and tobacco use may move a rate; those two limits are real and are not printed here, because what an employer needs is which factors are on the list, not how far each may travel.
Rating area is the one factor with a map behind it. In the small group market it is determined, in the regulation’s words, “using the group policyholder’s principal business address” — your address, not each employee’s. CMS publishes the county-by-county table for Indiana, which assigns every county to an area on county lines and never splits one between two. Which area an address falls in is a matter of record; what that does to a number is not something this page will assert.
Real-World Scenario: A hardware store owner near Noblesville hears from a friend across town what that friend’s group plan runs per person, and arrives expecting to be quoted something close to it. The two payrolls turn out to differ in age mix, in how many people are taking family coverage rather than single, and in which plan design each owner picked. Neither number was wrong. They were answers to different questions, and only one of those questions was ever about the hardware store.
A national survey sits beside it, and the two do not compare
Search this question and a second set of figures turns up almost immediately: KFF’s 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey, which reports that “the average annual premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance in 2025 are $9,325 for single coverage and $26,993 for family coverage”
. The survey is published in full on KFF’s site.
Those are not Indiana figures and they are not small-employer figures. They are national, across all firm sizes, from a survey of 1,862 randomly selected non-federal public and private employers with ten or more workers, fielded between January and July 2025, with an overall response rate KFF reports as 13%. Set beside the Indiana numbers above without that sentence attached, they read as a like-for-like comparison. They are not one.
There is a second reason KFF’s own small-firm figures are absent from this page. Beginning in 2025 the survey no longer includes firms with three to nine employees, and it now defines small firms as those with “10-199 workers unless otherwise noted”
. That band starts above the bottom of Indiana’s statutory small-employer definition and runs well past its top. It is a sound measurement of a different population.
The choices that sit on your side of the quote
Once a carrier has your census, the remaining movement is in what you ask it to price.
Plan design is the largest of those choices. Bronze, silver, gold and platinum are not quality grades, network sizes or service levels. Under 45 CFR 156.140 they are labels for actuarial value — the share of expected covered costs the plan design is built to carry, with the balance reaching the member through the deductible and the rest of the cost sharing. Two plans wearing the same label can still differ in network and in how that cost sharing is arranged.
What they cannot differ on is the floor. Coverage sold in the small group market has to include the essential health benefits package under 45 CFR 147.150, and that package is built from a fixed set of categories running from ambulatory and emergency services through hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance use disorder services, prescription drugs, laboratory services and preventive care to pediatric services including oral and vision care. A plan cannot simply leave a category out, which makes what group health coverage contains a shorter conversation than most first-time buyers expect.
Network shape is the other lever, and your team will feel it sooner than they feel the premium. HealthCare.gov’s own plan-type explanations set out how an HMO, a PPO, an EPO and an HSA-eligible plan each gate access differently.
How much of the premium you contribute is a real decision and a separate subject. So are the other lines employers weigh beside medical — dental, vision, life and disability each have a page of their own. If you already have a plan and a renewal letter is what prompted the question, that is a different exercise again.
Figures this page will not print
This agency publishes no premium of its own, in digits or in words. There is no range here we are asserting and no typical figure we are offering. Everything numeric above is a third party’s measurement, quoted as theirs, with its qualifiers attached.
Four things were looked at and deliberately left out.
- The MEPS columns for Indiana firms with fewer than ten employees, and for ten to twenty-four employees, are marked suppressed. Suppressed is not zero and it is not small — it means the cell was not published, and nothing may be read out of it about Indiana’s smallest employers.
- The age and tobacco rating limits in 45 CFR 147.102 were read and are withheld. Naming the permitted factors answers the question; printing the limits invites arithmetic against one particular payroll.
- The Indiana Department of Insurance publishes a rate-filing dataset, and it cannot answer this question. The words “small group” and “small employer” do not appear in it, its nearest category puts large and small group together, the department’s own note says the figures are overall rate changes, and every figure in it is bound to a named carrier.
- No monthly figure appears above. Dividing an annual survey figure by twelve produces a number no source published, and putting a source’s name on that number would be worse than printing it bare.
The Indiana context sitting behind all of this is on our Indiana page, and the rest of the states we write in carry their own. When you want a real number instead of an average, start a quote and we will price your actual payroll.
The bottom line
Indiana has published averages and a federal rule about what a rate may vary on, but the only number that describes your group is the one a carrier produces after it has your census.
Frequently asked questions
Is the average in this article a number I can put in a budget?
No. Every figure here is a third party’s measurement of a population of employers, quoted with the qualifiers its publisher attached to it. None of it has been applied to your payroll, and applying it is what turns a sourced figure into an invented one. A budget number comes from a carrier, after your census, your plan selection and your effective date are in front of it.
Why is a premium quoted per enrolled employee rather than per person on the payroll?
Because someone who declines the plan is not covered by it. The survey figures above use the same unit for the same reason — they average what was actually charged for the people enrolled. It is also why two businesses with the same headcount can be billed very differently. The bill follows enrollment and coverage tier, not the size of the payroll.
We are looking at a plan with a higher deductible. Will that lower the premium?
It moves cost from one side of the line to the other. The metal labels describe actuarial value — the share of expected covered costs the plan design is built to carry, with the balance reaching the member through the deductible and other cost sharing. A design built to carry less is priced accordingly, but by how much is a carrier’s calculation on your group, not something this page can promise.
Why does another business in town pay something completely different?
Because the things a small-group rate may vary on are theirs, not yours. Under 45 CFR 147.102 a rate may turn only on whether the coverage is for an individual or a family, on rating area, on age and on tobacco use. A different age mix, a different address or a different set of people taking family coverage produces a different number from the same carrier.
Are the Indiana figures on this page current?
They are the newest published. The MEPS-IC Indiana workbook cited here carries data year 2025 and was posted in July 2026, and no later edition exists. The KFF survey quoted alongside it was published in October 2025. Both are annual, so both will be superseded, and when they are the figures here get replaced rather than adjusted.
About the author
Nate Jones, CPCU, is the founder of Wexford Insurance and Wexford Health Insurance, an independent agency placing small-business group benefits in 9 states. He reads the MEPS-IC Indiana tables the same way he reads a carrier’s quote sheet — as a source with a method attached and a set of qualifiers that cannot be dropped on the way to a headline. Start with the Wexford Health Insurance quote form.