Health insurance for corporate expats

Corporate expat cover is negotiated for a workforce and worn by individuals — good in general, generic exactly where your household is specific. The gaps are findable at offer stage, when everything is still negotiable.

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Written by Robert Kolar, health insurance

Facts last checked 2026-08-01

The posted position, stated once

Three facts under every expat package.

Before comparing anything: what a corporate posting structurally does to your insurance position.

The package covers the posting, not the person

Corporate expat cover is negotiated for a workforce and worn by individuals. It is usually good — and generic where your life is specific: the spouse's career, the chronic condition, the child's school country, the parents you visit. The gap between the package and the household is your gap to find, because HR is not looking for it.

Treaties can keep you in the home system

Posted workers are the people social-security agreements were written for: the right certificate can keep you in your home scheme instead of the host's — we verified the Japan–Switzerland mechanism and Québec's agreement list directly. Whether that is available, and whether it is better, is a per-pair-of-countries answer worth getting before the flight, not after payroll runs.

Localisation is the cliff nobody dates

Expat packages end: contracts localise, assignments convert, companies change their minds. The day you localise, the group policy's logic changes — and your family's cover with it, in whatever country and at whatever age you have reached. The package has an end date even when the posting does not. Plan for the date.

The strongest version of every fix on this page is the offer-stage version. The week before you sign is worth more than the year after you land.

Why this is a consultation, not an article

Your package, your household, your pair of countries.

Three specifics decide everything, and all three are yours alone. The package: group policies differ by employer and by negotiation round — the ceiling, the family clause, the home-country cover, the localisation terms. The household: a working spouse, a child’s school country and a chronic condition each test different pages of it.

And the pair of countries: whether a social-security treaty lets you stay in the home system with a certificate of coverage is a per-pair answer — real and verified for some pairs (Japan–Switzerland since 2012; Québec’s agreement list), absent for others — and the host state may mandate local cover regardless of any package, as the Gulf does and Japan does differently. We hold the verified rules for twenty-three countries.

Bring the offer letter and the policy summary before you sign, and we read them against the household and the country pair — the ceiling against real local prices, the clauses against your actual family, the treaty against your actual passports. An hour, in writing, while it is still negotiable. That is the consultation.

What the benefit line is actually worth

Same sentence in the offer letter. Very different sum.

"Health insurance covered" means something different in every posting. On comparable international cover the index puts the United States at roughly $17,970 a year and Malaysia at about $7,330. Same employer, same grade, same clause — two and a half times the value.

Which matters for three reasons, none of them abstract. It tells you what the benefit is worth when you are comparing two offers. It tells you what you are exposed to if the scheme covers you but not your family — the gap is priced per person, and in Hong Kong or Singapore it is a large one. And it tells you what you would be buying on your own if the job ended, which is the month the cover ends too.

The figures are for individual policies. A corporate scheme is negotiated and will not match them. But the ratios between countries hold, and the ratios are the part that decides whether a package is generous or merely worded generously.

Six postings, from an independent fifty-country benchmark. Ranks are out of fifty. Corporate schemes are negotiated and differ from individual pricing — the index's own note is that it remains a good approximation of the effective cost per country.
Rank	Country	At 24	At 35	At 50	Average
1	United States	$12,773	$18,765	$22,368	$17,969
2	Hong Kong (SAR)	$11,360	$15,822	$21,344	$16,175
3	Singapore	$10,065	$13,967	$18,662	$14,231
15	Switzerland	$6,392	$8,017	$12,328	$8,912
34	Germany	$5,081	$7,099	$9,741	$7,307
33	Malaysia	$5,146	$7,242	$9,612	$7,333

Source: SIP Health Cost Index 2025, SIP Medical Family Office. Data as at August 2025, published 1 December 2025. Averages across seven international insurers and three standard profiles — not quotes, and not a comparison of those insurers against each other. Any comparison or tax-adjusted figure above is our own arithmetic on SIP's published numbers.

All fifty countries, and the three things the ranking hides

For corporate expats specifically

Three ways good packages go wrong.

Filing the group policy unread

It arrived with the contract, it sounds comprehensive, and its edges are precisely where your household is unusual: the annual ceiling against the host country's prices, the family definition against your family, the home-country clause against your visits, the exclusions against your history. One reading, at the start, with your actual life beside it.

Missing the treaty window

Certificates of coverage are typically arranged around the posting's start — through employers and institutions that move at institutional speed. Discover the treaty a year in and you may have paid twice, or fallen between two systems' contribution histories. The check costs twenty minutes at offer stage. We keep the verified mechanics on file for the countries we cover.

Confusing the employer’s continuity with yours

Group cover follows the contract; your insurability follows you. Build nothing personal during the covered years and localisation, separation or retirement arrives with no private history at an age underwriting notices. The covered years are exactly when a personal layer is cheapest to start — and when it feels least necessary. Both facts are the point.

Any of these sound like your situation? See how a review works

How a review works

What a first review actually looks like.

Arranging international cover for the first time, or checking what you already hold — the process is the same, in this order.

The demand intake

Right after you book, we email you a short intake form. Where you are, where you're going, who's coming with you, anything you already hold. It takes a few minutes, and it means the 45 minutes start prepared — with your situation, not with paperwork.

We study your situation

Not products first. Your life first. We look at the country you're moving to and what it legally requires, the country after that if there is one, who depends on you, and where the real exposure sits. We don't quote anything at this stage.

The consultation

45 minutes, by video, in English. Every question you bring gets an answer. We compare the international insurers on how each of them behaves in your situation — underwriting, renewal, exclusions, and what happens on the day a claim is filed. If there is already a policy in force, we go through it clause by clause. Nothing is pitched at the end of it.

Your Private Client Report

One working day later, your Private Client Report arrives — around twelve pages setting out what we found, what we weighed it against, what each option costs, and why we would choose one over the others. What to arrange, what to keep, and where you are paying for something that isn't doing any work. Sometimes the report says: keep what you have. It is yours either way.

45 minutes. By video, wherever you are. Free. Nothing has to change afterwards.

Book a review

The Cleveland Clinic charges $1,690 for a written second opinion. Ours comes with the review, and there is no fee for it.

The team

The people who'll actually review your situation.

Specialists by topic, not a rota. You'll know who you're speaking to before you book, and you'll speak to the same person again next year.

Robert Kolar

Health insurance

Twenty-plus years spent on the distance between what a health policy promises and what it pays when a claim actually lands. German and English. He has been the foreigner working out somebody else's health system from the outside, which is its own kind of qualification.

Book with Robert

Nicole Bohne

Life · Protection · Planning

Spent her career inside Basler Versicherung and Zurich Insurance before crossing to this side of the table. Nicole reads a life-cover decision against the whole household — who depends on whom, what already exists, and whether the answer is a policy at all.

Book with Nicole

Hans Steiner

Pension · Tax · Cross-border

Financial Planner IAF, Federal Diploma of Higher Education. German, English and French. Hans takes the cases where a move collides with a pension, with two tax systems, or with both at once.

Book with Hans

Corporate expat questions

What posted employees actually ask us.

My employer provides international health insurance. Is that enough?

Often nearly — and the "nearly" is household-shaped. Group policies are negotiated for a workforce: read yours against your specifics — the ceiling versus your host country’s prices, the family definition versus your family, home-country cover versus your visits, and what happens at localisation or separation. Where it is genuinely enough, our review says exactly that, in writing, and you buy nothing.

Can I stay in my home country’s social security while posted abroad?

Frequently, if a social-security agreement covers your pair of countries: posted workers can remain in the home system with a certificate of coverage — the Japan–Switzerland agreement, in force since 2012, is a mechanism we verified against the official guides, and Québec’s agreement list can waive its waiting period for arrivals from treaty countries including Switzerland. The certificate is usually arranged at posting start — check at offer stage.

What should I check before accepting a posting?

Four things, all cheaper to fix at offer stage: exactly who of your household is on the employer policy and to what ceiling; whether a social-security treaty applies to your country pair and who files the certificate; what the host country legally requires regardless of your package (some mandate local enrolment or local policies — the Gulf and Japan differently, both verified on our country pages); and what the package becomes at localisation. Bring the offer; we read it with you.

What is localisation and why does everyone warn about it?

The conversion of an expat package into a local contract — usually years in, usually framed as administrative. For insurance it is structural: group expat cover typically ends or shrinks, and you join the host system and market at your current age and history, in whatever country the career landed. The warn is because the date is movable by negotiation while the consequences are not — households that saw it coming negotiated cover into the localisation; households that did not, discovered it at renewal.

We are a family where only one of us has the corporate package.

The most common corporate-expat household, and the package rarely says clearly what it does about it: a working spouse may be outside the group policy and outside the host system’s automatic cover, children may be covered only in named countries, and the whole family’s position can differ from the employee’s. We map each person separately against the package and the host country’s actual rules — it is an hour, and it is the hour that finds the uninsured member before a hospital does.

From the journal

Reading on this situation.

facts checked 2026-08-10

Sponsoring staff into Australia: the visa health condition

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Health insurance for corporate expatriates and posted employees