Let’s start with a very human moment. You open your pet insurance renewal notice, see a bigger number, and think: “But my pet didn’t even go to the vet this year. That money feels wasted.”
We get it — it happens with travel insurance too. You buy it in case your holiday goes wrong. If it goes perfectly, in hindsight the premium can feel like money down the drain, even though buying it was exactly the right call at the time.
With pet insurance, this moment can hit every year at renewal. It’s tempting to think: nothing went wrong last year, so why keep paying? That instinct is understandable, but it’s also exactly the thinking that can undo the planning that led you to insure your pet in the first place.
The short version: your premium mainly moves because your pet is getting older and vet care is getting more expensive across the board — not because of anything you did. And below, we’ve included what we do to keep that increase as fair as possible.
Two real reasons your premium rises
- Your pet is ageing — and pets age faster than people.
You’ve probably heard “one dog year equals seven human years.” That’s a rough rule of thumb, and scientists have since worked out a more accurate version. Researchers at UC San Diego compared DNA ageing markers in dogs and humans and found dogs age very fast early on, then level off — so a middle-aged dog is “older” in human terms than the old x7 rule would suggest.
Whichever formula you use, the takeaway is the same: as your pet ages, their medical needs tend to increase, just like ours do — so the cost of insuring them rises too.
- Vet care itself is getting more expensive.
Even before COVID made everyone inflation-aware, Australian vet costs were climbing by roughly 5–9% a year.
This isn’t vets overcharging. It’s mostly because veterinary medicine keeps getting better: new diagnostics, new treatments, new surgical options — all great for your pet, but each advance costs more than what it replaces. The MRI or CT scan that was rare five years ago is close to standard now.
These two things — an older pet, and pricier vet care overall — stack on top of each other every renewal.
Why this is a genuine challenge for every insurer
Here’s the part we think you deserve to know and understand, even though it’s a little uncomfortable to explain.
Pet insurance, like most insurance, works because it’s a shared pool: people who don’t need to claim in a given year are effectively helping to cover the people who do.
Insurers know this, which is part of why most policies (Knose’s included) have a short exclusion period before cover starts. It helps keep the pool healthy for everyone, rather than only attracting pets who need immediate treatment.
The tricky part: when premiums rise because of ageing and vet cost inflation, it’s naturally the owners of the healthiest pets — the ones who haven’t needed to claim — who feel it the most, since they don’t see anything “in return” that year.
Some of those owners understandably shop around or leave. If a pool loses too many of its healthiest members, the average cost of protecting the pets that remain goes up, which can push premiums higher still.
It’s one of the fundamental balancing acts in insurance, and it’s something we actively manage at Knose.
How Knose keeps things fair
- If your pet has a claim-free year, your renewal premium typically increases by less than a brand-new customer would pay for the same pet. We call this the healthy pet discount, and it’s specifically there to make staying with us worth it.
- Whatever kind of year your pet has had, we cap your renewal at the “rack rate” — the standard price a new customer would pay for a pet just like yours. You will not pay more than that.
- If a renewal still doesn’t work for your budget, you can adjust your annual excess, benefit percentage, or annual limit to bring the price down without cancelling cover altogether.
The bottom line
A bigger renewal premium isn’t a penalty, and it isn’t random. It reflects your pet getting older and vet care getting more expensive everywhere, not just with us.
It’s also not the full story: we provide a discount for healthy pets, and you typically won’t pay more than what new customers pay for the same type of pet as yours — specifically because we know this moment can be frustrating.
If your renewal premium still feels like too much, talk to us. We’d always rather adjust your cover than see you walk away with no safety net.
