Pet insurance premiums for dogs have outrun general inflation by a wide margin. The US dog accident-and-illness average rose about 17% over 2022 to 2024, while the BLS all-items Consumer Price Index rose roughly 2.9% over 2024 and 2.7% over 2025 [NAPHIA State of the Industry, Average Premiums, 2024] [BLS: Consumer Price Index 2024 in review, 2025-01]. A dog owner's premium has been rising several times faster than the price of everything else they buy, and that gap is the real cost story, not the headline premium in any single year.
What the data shows
The premium side is NAPHIA's State of the Industry series, the near-census US source. The dog accident-and-illness average went $640.04 in 2022, $675.61 in 2023, and $749.29 in 2024: a 5.6% step, then a 10.9% step, a roughly 17% cumulative rise over two years [NAPHIA State of the Industry, Average Premiums, 2024] [NAPHIA: Pet Health Insurance Industry Continued Exceptional Growth Rate In 2023, 2024-04]. The cat line was essentially flat over the same window, in a $383 to $387 band.
The inflation side is the BLS Consumer Price Index. The all-items CPI rose 2.9% from December 2023 to December 2024 and 2.7% from December 2024 to December 2025, and medical care prices, a broader category that does not isolate veterinary care, rose 2.8% in 2024 [BLS: Consumer Price Index 2024 in review, 2025-01] [BLS: Consumer Price Index 2025 in review, 2026-01]. Set side by side, the 10.9% single-year dog premium increase in 2024 was roughly four times the 2.9% all-items CPI for the same year. The comparison is not close.
Dog accident-and-illness premium, NAPHIA: +5.6% (2022 to 2023), +10.9% (2023 to 2024), about +17% cumulative [NAPHIA State of the Industry, Average Premiums, 2024].
All-items CPI, BLS: +2.9% over 2024, +2.7% over 2025 [BLS: Consumer Price Index 2024 in review, 2025-01].
The 2024 dog premium increase ran roughly 4x the all-items CPI that year. The flat cat premium line, by contrast, lagged inflation, so the "outpaces inflation" finding is specifically a dog story, not a blanket one.
A note on the comparison's limits keeps it honest. The BLS publishes a veterinary-services index, but its current values were not retrievable for this analysis, so this page compares premium growth to the all-items CPI and the broader medical-care category rather than to a vet-services-specific index. That makes the comparison conservative: the all-items CPI is a low bar, and the gap to it is already large. Where a vet-services-specific figure is needed it is marked for sourcing rather than estimated.
Pet insurance against the broader CPI
The reason the premium outpaces the all-items CPI is structural, and it connects to the cost-driver analysis. A premium is not a general consumer good whose price drifts with the overall index; it is priced to the cost of the specific veterinary claims it reimburses, and those costs sit in a category that has been rising faster than the all-items basket. AVMA's owner survey reported the average last-visit cost rising to $200 in 2025 from $147 in 2024, a one-year jump far steeper than 2.9% [AVMA: Evolving pet owner economics: What data reveal for veterinary teams, 2025]. When the input cost rises faster than the general price level, the premium that funds it does too. The full mechanism is on why pet insurance premiums rise.
This is why a buyer's intuition that the premium "should only go up with inflation" is the wrong anchor. General inflation is the price growth of a broad consumer basket; a pet insurance premium tracks a narrow, higher-growth slice of healthcare-style costs plus the aging of the insured book. Expecting it to rise at the all-items CPI rate sets a benchmark the product has not met in any recent year on the dog side, and treating an above-CPI renewal as automatically unfair misreads what the premium is indexed to.
The comparison also reframes the self-insurance math. A common argument for skipping insurance and saving the premium instead assumes the avoided cost grows slowly; in fact the bills a savings account would have to cover are in the fast-rising category, so a fixed savings target erodes against vet-cost growth the same way the premium rises against it. Consumer Reports' survey of 3,583 policyholders found 44% received full reimbursement at their policy level, which bounds the insurance side too: the premium is rising faster than inflation and the payout is often partial [Brian Vines, Consumer Reports Pet Insurance Buying Guide, 2026]. Neither side of that decision is shielded from above-inflation cost growth, which is the honest framing the worth-it question needs.
What it means for you
For a renewing dog owner, the comparison gives a realistic benchmark: do not expect or demand a renewal that only rises at the roughly 2.9% all-items CPI rate, because the cited dog premium series has run several times that. A renewal near the roughly 8% to 11% market move on average pet insurance premium by year is the cost trend, not your carrier being unreasonable. For a cat owner the inverse holds: the flat cat premium line lagged inflation, so a large cat increase is less likely a market trend and more worth questioning with your carrier.
For anyone weighing whether to buy at all, the actionable point is that the cost being insured grows faster than general prices, which strengthens the case for locking in a young pet's age band sooner rather than budgeting against a slow-inflation assumption that the data does not support. That is a cost argument, not insurance advice, and it does not select a provider; the term that decides whether a policy pays out, the deductible type, the annual cap, the exam-fee carve-out, is what the guides hub frames term by term. For the forward read see pet insurance cost trends in 2026; the full tracking desk is at /news/ and the review method is at /methodology/. FurVerdict is an independent editorial site and is not a licensed insurance agent; verify current terms with the provider before purchasing.