What does ‘co-pay’ mean in pet insurance?

When you’re taking out your pet insurance quotes, you might be asked if you want to include results with “co-pay” – and you might be thinking, ?!

Co-pay is one of those jargon-y insurance terms, like excess, that can be hard to understand. But in practice it’s all quite simple.

If you have a standard policy without co-pay applied, here’s what it looks like when you make a £1,000 vet fee claim and it’s accepted. 

With Napo, your excess would be set at £99 and we would pay out the rest of the bill – either directly to the vet, or to you.

When buying your policy, you have the option to include a set 20% co-pay (or contribution) on all of your accepted vet fee claims after the excess. (And for pets over 9 years old, this is mandatory.)

The same £1,000 claim would instead look like this:

With excess paid off the top of the bill amount, you would then be responsible for 20% of what’s left. Read our FAQ for more details.

And, as above, Napo would pay the rest of the claim either directly to the vet or to you as preferred.

You’ll see in your quotes that including co-pay in your policy reduces your monthly or annual premium by quite a bit.

So, although you’d pay more if and when you do claim, if you have a healthy pet and manage to avoid major accidents and illnesses, you could save some money overall. 

If you’re with Napo and your dog or cat hasn’t turned 9, then yes you can opt in or out of voluntary co-pay at the point of renewal. Our Customer Support team will be only too happy to talk you through what this looks like. You can request a callback with our team via our chatbot – see more in our FAQ.

Once pets turn 9, Napo’s co-pay gets applied automatically. Senior pet co-pay is common in pet insurance, simply because they’re more likely to need higher levels of healthcare. 

The co-pay contributions mean we can keep insuring pets as they grow into their ‘wise years’ including for ongoing and breed-specific conditions. Again, feel free to get in touch if you have questions about this.