When does the Lifetime Health Cover loading come off?

The date it is set is the date you first take cover

Lifetime Health Cover is not charged on your age now. It is set on the day you first take out hospital cover and then follows you for ten years. Every year you spend deciding adds two percentage points to a loading you will carry for a decade.

That is the part worth knowing before you hold a policy, and it is the opposite of how the loading is usually described — as something to manage once you already have it.

What we will not tell you

What it costs in dollars. The loading is a percentage of a premium, and no primary source publishes a median premium: privatehealth.gov.au lists individual policies through a comparison form, and any median we computed would be our number, dated the day we ran it, varying by state and by age.

So the figure is withheld rather than estimated. You can get the percentage from us and the premium from a policy you are actually looking at — which is the only way that multiplication means anything.

How it comes off

Ten years of continuous cover clears it. "Continuous" is doing real work in that sentence: gaps count against you, and the ten years restart in ways worth reading at the source before relying on them.