What Happens If You Are Late Paying Your COBRA Premium

If you’re using COBRA health insurance, chances are you’ve lost (or left) your job, gotten a divorce, aged off a parent's health plan, or your spouse transitioned to Medicare or passed away. Any of these situations can make your finances fragile and your bills harder than usual to pay. Likewise, the stressfulness of these situations can make you prone to lose track of details here or there.

Although the deadline to pay your COBRA health insurance premium is a bad detail to forget, you aren’t the first person to be late paying your COBRA premium. The consequences of being late paying for COBRA can range from a bit of a hassle to permanently losing your COBRA coverage. What happens in your situation depends on whether you’re late on your initial COBRA premium payment or late with a payment for ongoing COBRA coverage.

This article will explain how COBRA deadlines and grace periods work, and what you need to know about making sure that you don't inadvertently lose your coverage due to failure to pay your premiums.

It's important to note that under COBRA rules, the health plan is not required to send monthly premium notices. Your plan may do so, but it's wise to set yourself some sort of reminder to ensure that you remember to pay your premium, even if you don't get a premium notice from the insurance company.

Deadline Extension Due to COVID Ends July 10, 2023

During the COVID national emergency, COBRA election and payment deadlines were extended. They could last for up to one year, instead of the normal timelines discussed below. These deadline extensions end July 10, 2023, and the normal rules will once again apply as of July 11, 2023.

Late Paying Your Initial COBRA Premium

Your Initial COBRA premium must be paid within 45 days of the time you elect COBRA coverage. Your COBRA administrator will consider the date your COBRA election form is postmarked to be the date you elect COBRA. That postmark sets your 45-day clock ticking.

This initial COBRA premium payment might be larger than subsequent monthly payments since it could cover more than one month of health insurance coverage, depending on how soon you elect COBRA.

For example, let's say you get laid off on June 15, your coverage is scheduled to end on June 30, and you elect COBRA on August 10. You'll have another 45 days to pay your first premium (so it will be due September 24), but you're going to have to get caught up on premiums for July, August, and September at that point.

There is no grace period if you’re late paying your initial COBRA premium payment. If it isn’t paid on time (ie, within 45 days of electing COBRA), you lose your right to have COBRA coverage; you’ll have to find other health insurance options or you’ll be uninsured.

However, in a situation like the one described above, in which a person has to pay multiple months of COBRA premiums, the health plan must allow at least a 30-day grace period for the months after the first month (this applies to all months after the first month, as described below).

So in the example above, if the person is paying their initial payment by September 24, they'd need to pay the July and August premiums in full. But assuming payments are due on the first of the month, they'd have until September 30 to pay September's premium.

Late Paying for Ongoing COBRA Health Insurance

While premium payments for ongoing COBRA coverage should be paid by the date the plan says they’re due, you have a little more flexibility than you did with your initial COBRA payment. There’s a minimum 30-day grace period for late premium payments, so the plan cannot terminate your coverage if, for example, you're 10 days late in paying your premium one month.

But if you don’t make your premium payment within the 30-day grace period, your coverage can be canceled permanently.

You're still covered during the grace period, as long as you ultimately do end up making your payment by the end of the grace period. But if you don't, your coverage will be terminated back to the last date for which you paid a premium. Any medical bills that had been incurred during the grace period would not end up being covered under the COBRA policy.

An Example

Let’s say you’ve been on COBRA continuation health insurance for six months. Your health plan sets May 25 as the due date for your premium for coverage from June 1 through June 30. You miss the May 25 deadline and enter your grace period.

You break your ankle on June 10 and rack up an emergency room bill for $4,000. On June 15, you hobble to the post office on crutches, mailing your late COBRA premium payment well within the 30-day grace period. Your health insurance company has to credit your payment for June, ensuring that you continue to have seamless coverage.

If you had waited until June 26 to make your late COBRA premium payment, you would have been beyond the 30-day grace period and your COBRA coverage would have been canceled permanently (assuming your plan uses the minimum required grace period; plans can offer longer grace periods if they choose to do so).

You would be uninsured, and you would have no help paying that ER bill. The 30-day grace period is measured from the premium due date, not from the start of the coverage period.

Loss of health coverage due to failure to pay premiums does not count as an "involuntary" loss. So the loss of COBRA in that circumstance would not be counted as a qualifying life event. This means you would not have an opportunity to sign up for a new plan until the next annual open enrollment period (unless you were to be offered coverage by a new employer mid-year).

Summary

You have 60 days to elect COBRA, another 45 days to make your first premium payment, and then 30-day grace periods for each monthly premium payment after that. During the COVID pandemic, all of these deadlines have been extended by up to a year, giving people additional time to elect COBRA and pay the premiums. But that extension ends July 10, 2023 and the normal rules will once again apply.

A Word From Verywell

If you're enrolled in COBRA, it's important to stay on top of the monthly premiums. Your plan may send invoices, but they aren't required to; it's up to you to make sure you send in your premiums on time each month.

If you decide to cancel your COBRA, you do do so at any time. But the termination of your COBRA due to failure to pay premiums (or your choice to cancel it) will not trigger a special enrollment period to sign up for an individual/family plan or another employer's plan. So if you're letting your COBRA lapse, you'll want to make sure that you have other coverage in place, without needing to rely on a special enrollment period.