Cat medical insurance

[Theonewhogotthecake]

Please may I ask how much you are paying in medical insurance for your cat? Mine is 13, 14 this year and helpucover has gone from £43.50 to £93.59! No claims for about 5 years.its crazy!

Is that per month? 😲.
It does go up rapidly as they get older.
We have a 5 year old cat with no medical issues and pay £17 per month for quite a high level of cover.

Vets fees are so high it's worth it. Our last cat got very ill suddenly and needed a couple of nights care and then sadly had to be PTS. The bill was over £1200.

Yes, per month. Please can I ask how much cover are you getting?

Wow that's a lot! Don't think I ever paid that much for any of mine even when they were elderly. Current kitty is 6 and costs around £9 per month. It's not the basic level either. Animal Friends insurance. So far hasn't needed anything major, thankfully.

Edit: Sorry am completely mis-remembering the monthly amount, it's £17.46 monthly. Still not bank-breaking.

I pay £69.82 per month for 2 x 9 year old cats with ManyPets. Its for £15K cover each

Also it's a lifetime policy so cover stays in place even if you claim for an illness/injury

Wow! That’s incredible. Ours is only £4k a year, £1k per condition! I think we need we need to shop around

When we got our first 2 kittens we were just about managing bills etc and a colleague suggested insurance as he’d had a bill for 10k for major surgery on his dog. No way could we have afforded that and as we didn’t want to be put in the position of having to have the cats put down if we couldn’t afford surgery, we got insurance. It was about £6 per cat per month, completely affordable. Luckily they were bog standard tabby’s and were rufty tufty healthy and lived to 17 and 16, and I only claimed once in all that time. By the time my cat was 17 the insurance was about £65 per month. We are in a better financial situation now and I read somewhere ( possibly here) about putting an amount for vet bills in a separate account. We now have another 2 cats and have a direct debit into a “ vets bill account “ . They are 7 now and again luckily are healthy and only one has had to have any treatment and to be fair the cost of that was similar to what the excess would have been. So far 🤞we’ve not needed to draw from that account.

I have a 19 year old cat never had insurance only been to the vets about 3 times in 19 years for minor things. Had 2 other cats who lived to the same age never had insurance either for them maybe I was just lucky.

@TheonewhogotthecakeI can't remember exact figures but for my last cat who died at the end of 2024 at a similar age suddenly the monthly costs had shot up. Presumably they're reaching that age where health conditions are much more likely. In line with vets bills rising the cost of insurance has really gone up unfortunately.

One cat who just turned three, I think it’s about £13 a month, with Admiral. We had him in for his boosters earlier this month and came out with ear drops for a yeast infection - poor thing had been itching so I asked her to check. The receptionist asked if we wanted a receipt to claim then, but I’d never go in on something minor even though that tiny bottle might as well have been a Chanel face serum for what it cost!

Our last cat I think the amount shot up aged nine. We sadly had to have her pts the following year as she developed intestinal lymphoma, and the cost of running the tests/scans for that diagnosis (some at a specialist referral place as her symptoms were atypical and the diagnosis was a total shock to both us and our own vet) came to over £3,000, so it was definitely worth it. We were with John Lewis for her and they were very good, they paid out no bother and actually reimbursed monthly payments as I couldn’t bring myself to cancel/let them know she was gone straight away, and we didn’t make the claim immediately.

11.75 per month for an eight year old, never had to claim.

£15 per month for my 4 year old.

What happens if you can’t afford the cost for insurance each month? What happens if your cat is sick and you can’t afford to take it to the vet?

My lovely cat died last year at 19. I was paying £170 a month!!

I wouldn’t have an animal without insurance as vet bills are so expensive - before we even had this boy through the door I had a policy in place! Insurance doesn’t cover everything anyway, our last cat needed dental surgery (extractions and scale and polish) which wasn’t covered by our policy and cost about £800. That was an unexpected cost, much more than the initial estimate, but we are fortunate to have been able to cover it - I think I might have stuck it on a credit card that day though. We paid the guts of £200 earlier in the month for boosters, flea/worm treatment, plus eardrops, and were in the surgery for about six minutes including paying.

There are charities like PDSA who can help people on a low income, although I think you possibly have to evidence being in receipt of benefits to access the care. From what I see online - which obviously is not a universal truth - there is a big increase in people relinquishing pets because they can’t afford treatment, or even asking vets to euthanise.

£52 for my five year old exotic. But she’s had a lot of claims.

£800 for a tooth out? Sorry but that is nuts. They’re animals. Why are people paying so much money to an insurance company? The vets and insurance companies must be laughing

Over two grand a year? Blimey. And what did you get for that 2k? What did the insurance cover pay for? How often did you claim?

My boy is up to around 6k of insurance paid out for urine issues
that did include a trip to a vet hospital, overnight stay and several emergency trips
for an emergency vet near me you’re looking at around £300 just to be seen

I currently pay £36.91 per month for a lifetime policy with Petplan.
Ivy is 10 years old and only had one claim whilst with me, which was for blood tests. All dental care is excluded as she had tartar removal aged 14 months old whilst still in the cat rescue.

My 17 year old cat died recently and we were paying around £95 per month. Lifetime cover, decent level of coverage, and we had claimed every six months for three years prior to claim back for medication he was on.

It was several teeth plus a scale and polish. What would you have done? Left the cat in pain, suffering, maybe down the line not able to eat properly? I expect the same treatment at a private human dentist would have come in about the same cost - you are paying for medical expertise, facilities etc. The cost of a general anaesthetic is the thing that really bumps it up. A cat can’t get a local, be told to keep its mouth open and look up at the stars on the dentist ceiling while it gets its tooth out, raise a paw if it starts to get uncomfortable or need a break…

I agree vet bills are very expensive (which is why we as a household have insurance to cover most things!) but I also firmly believe that if you take responsibility for any animal then you are signing up to a financial commitment which ranges from daily food to medical care, regardless of how you choose to finance it. My MIL doesn’t insure her cat, and as he’s never needed to see a vet beyond annual vaccines she’s quids in in terms of not paying out monthly premiums over 11 years. She’s also very wealthy and if - god forbid - something happened to him right now she would have no issue finding money to pay for out of hours care regardless of what it came to. I see it as much the same as paying for our home insurance - each month we pay that and we (touch wood) don’t get burgled or have a flood, but if we did, it’s there.

We had insurance but cancelled after a couple of years. We just paid out 2k for an op and lots of investigations. She is 14 possibly 15 as a rescue cat. Last cat was adopted as an older cat of around 8 and he lived for around 7 more years he never had insurance and cost pretty much nothing in fees.

Yes. 2k per year. One lot of investigations and then cat was on Solencia for Arthritis for the last 18 months if her life. We also paid 20% of the monthly bill towards this on top of the £170. Just madness. I did complain to Sainsburys, the insurer, but they knew we had no choice. At 19 it's either whst you've got or no insurance. Total scammers.

We were on about £70 a month for our 16 year old with PetPlan, covered for life. We were just breaking even with medication costs, maybe coming out a little ahead, but I was on the verge of putting a sum aside each month rather than insurance as it would have worked out the same. We’ve had enough experiences of it really paying out though that it’s still worth it.