How Much of the Premium Does an Employer Pay in Colorado

The survey that prices small group coverage in Colorado publishes the employee side of the premium, not the employer side. What an employer pays is the remainder of the premium, and the survey publishes no figure for that remainder. It is set by each employer’s own plan design, inside whatever minimum employer contribution the carrier applies.

The figure Colorado actually has, and whose side of the premium it is

The federal survey that prices employer coverage state by state is the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey–Insurance Component, run by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. It publishes a Colorado state table once a year, and the 2025 edition — data year 2025, posted in July 2026 — is the newest one AHRQ lists (Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Insurance/Employer Component Overview).

In the Colorado table’s Less than 50 employees column, MEPS-IC reports that employees enrolled in single coverage contributed 16.1% of total premiums in 2025 at Colorado private-sector establishments that offer health insurance — the workbook is Table II. State of Colorado, private-sector data by firm size, 2025 and the row is headed Percent of total premiums contributed by employees enrolled in single coverage at establishments that offer health insurance. AHRQ publishes that estimate with a standard error of 3.10 percentage points, and marks with an asterisk any estimate that falls short of its reliability standard; this row carries no asterisk (MEPS-IC Precision Standards Guidelines).

Read the row label rather than the headline. It is a statement about what employees put in.

Why the obvious arithmetic does not produce an answer

The contribution rows in Colorado’s premium tables are employee-contribution rows. The survey does carry rows whose subject is an employer contributing, and those rows are about deposits into health savings accounts and health reimbursement arrangements inside high-deductible plans — an account contribution, which is a different thing from a share of premium.

So the obvious next step is arithmetic, and that is where this question goes wrong. Take the published employee percentage away from the whole, or take the published employee dollars away from the published total premium, and you have a figure AHRQ has never published anywhere. Putting the workbook’s address next to it would attribute the number to a document that does not contain it. This site prints neither result, and you should be wary of any group health page that does.

The dollar figure on the same question, and what it is per

MEPS-IC publishes the dollar side of the employee share as well. Its row headed Average total employee contribution (in dollars) per enrolled employee for single coverage at establishments that offer health insurance reads $1,295 for Colorado in 2025, in the same Less than 50 employees column, with a standard error of 276.88 (Table II. State of Colorado, private-sector data by firm size, 2025).

That is an annual figure per enrolled employee and it is a survey average across establishments that already offer coverage. It is not a quote, not a starting point, and not a prediction about your census. It also does not get restated monthly here: dividing it would produce a figure the survey does not publish.

Establishments counted by firm size — the qualifier that changes the sentence

The unit the survey counts is not the business. AHRQ describes its sampling this way:

The sample is chosen at the establishment level, and the MEPS-IC data are collected at the establishment level whenever possible.

And it describes the thing the size column is drawn on this way:

FIRM - A business entity consisting of one or more establishments under common ownership or control. Also known as an enterprise… Firm size is the total number of employees for the entire firm as reported on the sample frame.

So the column is a list of workplaces whose parent firm is small, not a list of small businesses. A single branch of a large multi-location employer is outside that column. A small employer’s one location is inside it. If you run several sites under one ownership, the survey is describing your sites individually and sizing them by the whole enterprise.

The survey column and the Colorado statute are two different tests

Colorado defines its own small-employer band, and it is not the survey’s column. C.R.S. § 10-16-102(61)(b)(II), in the 2026 edition of the Colorado Revised Statutes, sets it out as part of this definition:

(61) (a) Repealed. (b) “Small employer” means any person that: (I) Is actively engaged in business; (II) Employed an average of at least one but not more than fifty eligible employees on business days during the immediately preceding calendar year, except as provided in subsection (61)(e) of this section; and (III) Was not formed primarily for the purpose of purchasing insurance.

The survey column has no floor, no eligible-employee test, no preceding-calendar-year average and no common-control aggregation, and under C.R.S. § 10-16-102(61)(b)(II) the two do not even share a cut-point — an employer at exactly fifty sits inside the Colorado band and outside the survey column. The populations overlap heavily and they are not the same set, which is why nothing on this page describes the percentage as what “Colorado small employers” pay. Colorado’s own definitions and the regulator behind them sit on the Colorado page.

Both figures are conditioned on already offering coverage

Every premium and contribution row in that column is measured at establishments that offer health insurance. Establishments that offer nothing are not in the denominator at all. The figures therefore describe the employers who already made this decision, not the Colorado market as a whole — which is a useful thing to know and a bad thing to mistake for a benchmark.

What the rules actually fix, and what they leave to you

Two mechanisms bound the answer from opposite directions, and neither one produces a percentage.

The first is federal, and it is about who has to do anything at all. The employer shared responsibility provisions reach applicable large employers, and the IRS puts the position for everyone else plainly:

The vast majority of employers will fall below the ALE threshold number of employees and, therefore, will not be subject to the employer shared responsibility provisions.

A small Colorado employer that offers coverage is doing it by choice, and choosing the contribution along with it.

The second is the carrier’s. Federal rule at 45 C.F.R. § 147.104(b) confirms that employer contribution and group participation rules exist in the small group market and are applied as allowed under applicable state law. They are real conditions, they are applied when the group is written, and their level is not a published national figure. What that means in practice is that your share has a floor you did not set — and the floor comes from the issuer, in writing, at quote time.

Where your own number actually comes from

Once you know the published figure answers the employee question and the rules set a floor rather than a share, the decision in front of you is a design decision. In practice it is made out of four things: which tier you contribute toward, whether you contribute anything toward dependents, how the plan lineup is built if you offer more than one, and what the carrier’s minimum requires you to clear.

Those are the questions to put to a producer at the same time you put over your census, and they are the reason a group health quote for a Colorado employer is not a single number. Two of the four are decisions nobody will make for you. Whether you contribute toward dependent coverage, and how much of the difference between tiers you absorb, together move the employee side of the premium — and they are the levers an employee actually feels.

The other two are constrained. The carrier’s minimum sets a floor under the employee-only tier, and the shape of the plan lineup decides whether your contribution buys the same thing for everyone or a range someone has to choose from. Writing those four down before the quotes arrive is what turns a spreadsheet of options into a decision you can explain to your staff.

At renewal the same four levers are what make an increase land differently on the company than on the employee, which is worth walking through before you accept a renewal rather than after — that is most of what shopping a renewal consists of.

What the published figures are good for

They are good for calibration and bad for planning. Knowing Colorado’s published employee share for single coverage tells you roughly where the market you are joining sits. It does not tell you what you will pay, what you should pay, or what your employees will be asked for, and no figure in any source read for this page does.

If someone quotes you an employer share as a Colorado average, ask which row of which table it came from. On the evidence available, that row does not exist.