Total enrollment barely moved. Silver enrollment did not
192,811 Kansans had selected a plan or been automatically re-enrolled for the 2026 plan year when the open enrollment period closed on January 15, 2026[1]. That is 7,235 fewer than the 2025 period, a fall of 3.6 percent, and it is the first fall after four consecutive years of record Kansas enrollment[2]. Held next to what moved underneath it, the headline is the least interesting figure on this page.
Silver plan selections fell by 24,679 over the same year, against a total decline of 7,235[2]. The share of Kansas enrollees choosing bronze or expanded bronze rose from 34.1 percent in 2025 to 47.1 percent in 2026, and the silver share fell from 56.1 percent to 45.4 percent. Cost-sharing reductions can only be applied to a silver plan, so the share of Kansas enrollees receiving them fell with it, from 54.9 percent to 43.0 percent.
A bronze plan costs less each month and covers about 60 percent of health care expenses for a typical population where a silver plan covers about 70 percent, and the Kansas Health Institute reads the shift as leaving many Kansans with lower premiums and higher costs at the point of care[2]. That reading is the institute’s. The counts are the federal file’s.
| Metal level | Plan selections |
|---|---|
| Bronze and expanded bronze | 90,801 |
| Silver | 87,620 |
| Gold | 14,260 |
| Catastrophic | 130 |
| All plans | 192,811 |
What $160 is the average of
Across the enrollment period that ended on January 15, 2026, the average monthly premium for a Kansas enrollee was $779 before the advance premium tax credit and $160 after it[1]. Those two figures cover different populations in the same sentence, which is why the same file also reports, for the same period, that 170,974 Kansans received an advance credit, that the credit averaged $697 a month, and that the people receiving one paid $80 a month on average.
Of the plans selected in that period, 54,975 carried a premium of $10 a month or less after the credit[1], which is more than a quarter of Kansas enrollees at 28.5 percent, against 47.4 percent in 2025[2]. The average net premium across all Kansas enrollees rose $54 over the year to reach $160, which was 16.8 percent higher than the $137 average across the 30 states running on the federally facilitated marketplace.
One caution the file states about itself and this page repeats: the field that gives 192,811 counts plan selections, not people paying for coverage, and the two diverge sharply within weeks[1].
The benchmark rose most where the fewest insurers are left
Six insurers offered 64 plans on the Kansas marketplace for 2026, down from seven insurers and 81 plans in 2025[3]. For the first time, 14 counties, mostly in the southwest, had a single insurer offering coverage. The institute attributes the reduction to one insurer leaving the marketplace nationwide and another reducing the counties it serves in Kansas[3].
The average monthly premium for a benchmark silver plan for a family of four rose from $1,848 to $2,381 before any credit, an increase of 28.9 percent and the largest since 2019[3]. The benchmark silver plan is the second lowest-cost silver plan in a county, and it is what the size of the credit is calculated from, which is why it matters more than its own price suggests.
The increase was not even. Across the seven Kansas rating areas, the change in the benchmark silver premium for an individual aged 27 ran from 16.1 percent in rating area 5 to 39.5 percent in rating area 2, and the premium itself ran from $475 in rating area 1 to $785 at the top of rating area 4[3]. The Kansas Department of Insurance, which conducts the actuarial review of the rate filings, recorded filed average rate revisions for individual policies on the 2026 marketplace ranging from minus 6.14 percent to 33.66 percent[4].
Enrollment moved differently across the same map. Every part of Kansas except the Kansas City area recorded a decrease, with the largest falls in southwest Kansas, down 9.5 percent, and north central Kansas, down 9.3 percent, against a rise of 0.3 percent around Kansas City[2]. What people paid after the credit varied the same way: enrollees in northwest Kansas paid the most at $183 a month on average, 32.6 percent more than the $138 paid on average in southeast Kansas.
A plan selection is not a policy anyone is paying for
165,435 Kansans had effectuated coverage in January 2026, meaning a first month’s premium had been paid. By February the figure was 143,880, which is 25.4 percent below the open enrollment count and more than double the decline of roughly 10 percent seen over the same weeks in each of the previous four years[2]. Anybody comparing 192,811 to a figure from another source has to check which of these two measures the other figure is, because the gap between them here is about 49,000 people.
Who selected is in the same file. Of the 192,811 selections made in the period that ended on January 15, 2026, 42,341 were by Kansans aged 55 to 64 and 19,078 by people under 18, and 69,456 were by people living in areas the file classifies as rural against 123,355 who were not[1]. Race and ethnicity are in the file as well and are not usable. About half of Kansas enrollees did not report either, 51.7 percent for race and 45.5 percent for ethnicity, which is why the Kansas Health Institute leaves that breakdown out of its own summary and why it is left out here[2].
What is not settled, and where the next figures come from
The enhanced premium tax credits first authorized in 2021 and extended through 2025 were set to expire on December 31, 2025 when the Insurance Department wrote its plan year 2026 brief[4], and they did[2]. Financial assistance for 2026 is at the levels the Affordable Care Act originally set[2].
Every Kansas figure on this page comes from the state-level public use file rather than from the agency’s narrative report, because the narrative report contains no state figures at all: a full-text search of it finds no occurrence of the word Kansas[5]. Any Kansas number attributed to that report elsewhere did not come out of it. The next set of comparable figures arrives when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services publish the 2027 public use files, and the effectuated figures move monthly in between. The other four sections at this publication's front page are built to the same rule, which is that a figure with no document behind it does not go up.