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How much does Schengen visa insurance actually cost?

Last updated: July 16, 2026 · By the SchengenCompare editorial team

Somewhere between €0.80 and €3 a day for most people — but that range hides more than it tells you. Four things move the number, and only one of them is the provider you pick.

The short answer

For a healthy adult in their 20s or 30s on a two-week trip, expect to pay roughly €15 to €45 total for a compliant policy, depending on provider and cover limit. Run your own dates through the price estimator on our homepage — it's faster than working through this math by hand, and it pulls from the same rate patterns we use below.

What actually changes the price

Age. This is the biggest single factor. Insurers price in brackets, and the jump after 60 is steep — a 65-year-old can end up paying two to three times what an 18-39-year-old pays for an identical trip on the same plan. This isn't the provider being difficult; older travelers file more claims, and pricier ones, so the actuarial math reflects that.

Trip length. Per-day rates drop the longer you travel, the same logic as a bulk discount. A 60-day trip won't cost four times what a 14-day trip costs, even though it's more than four times the days — insurers front-load some of the price into the first couple of weeks. The total still goes up with trip length, it just doesn't scale linearly.

Cover limit. €30,000 is the legal floor and the cheapest tier on most plans. Bumping up to €50,000 or €60,000 usually costs a euro or two more per day, not a multiple — worth it if you're applying through a consulate known for preferring higher limits, or if anyone on the trip has a health condition that makes a bigger claim plausible.

Provider. At the same age, trip length and cover limit, prices between insurers can still differ meaningfully. EKTA and Heymondo tend to sit at the lower end for a standard trip; AXA and Europ Assistance cost more per day but bring stronger brand recognition at the border or higher default cover. SafetyWing prices differently again — a flat subscription per 4 weeks rather than a daily rate, which favors longer stays over short ones.

Total price by trip length and age

This is the number people actually want: total cost for the whole trip, not a per-day abstraction. Each cell is the range across AXA Schengen, Europ Assistance, Heymondo and EKTA for a single traveler on the base €30,000 plan — cheapest provider to most expensive, for that exact age and duration:

EKTA's figures come from this site's own rate model rather than a live published quote — treat them as directional until you check ektatraveling.com directly. The other three are calibrated against provider-published per-day pricing. Multiply by traveler count for a family or group; group discounts exist at a few providers but aren't universal, so don't assume a family of four costs exactly four solo quotes. SafetyWing isn't in this table since it bills a flat 4-week block ($62.72 at 18–39) rather than a daily rate — see below for how that changes the math.

SafetyWing vs Heymondo vs AXA vs EKTA: how they actually differ on price

EKTA is consistently the cheapest of the four on paper, roughly 25–30% below AXA for the same trip — it's a bare-bones certificate provider with no app, no direct billing and a narrower service layer, which is exactly why the sticker price is lower.

Heymondo starts close to AXA on short trips but climbs faster with age, since its 60+ and 70+ multipliers are the steepest of the four (1.7× and 2.3× the base rate). What you get for that is direct hospital billing and 24/7 doctor chat — real service, not just a document, which matters if you're actually likely to need care.

AXA Schengen sits in the middle on price but wins on embassy recognition — it's the name visa officers see most often, and it's one of the few that refunds the premium outright on a documented visa refusal.

SafetyWing breaks the daily-rate logic entirely: you pay $62.72 for a 4-week block regardless of whether your trip is 5 days or 27, so a one-week trip on SafetyWing is one of the worst deals on this page, while a 25-day trip on SafetyWing can undercut all four daily-rate providers. It's also the only one of the four sold as a rolling subscription rather than a one-off policy, and the only one with no rate at all for travelers 70 and older.

Bottom line: if the trip is under three weeks, compare EKTA, AXA and Heymondo directly. If it's a month or longer, or open-ended, run the SafetyWing math before assuming a daily-rate plan is cheaper.

Indicative per-day rates by provider

Same trip, same traveler, five very different bills. These are the starting per-day rates we've observed for a healthy adult (18–39) on the base compliant plan — your final quote moves with age, duration and options:

Read it as a menu of trade-offs rather than a ranking: the cheapest row and the most expensive row both produce a certificate that passes the same Article 15 check.

The hidden costs nobody quotes

Currency conversion. Most providers charge in EUR or USD. If your card is denominated in rupees, naira, pesos or lira, your bank adds a foreign-transaction margin — typically 1.5–3.5% — on top of the exchange rate, and some markets add government levies on foreign card spending. On a €25 policy that's pocket change; the reason it matters is that the same margin applies when you compare two providers quoting in different currencies, so a "cheaper" USD quote can land more expensive in your statement than a EUR one.

Failed-payment time. Not a fee, but a real cost. If your bank blocks international online payments by default — common in India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Egypt — you can lose days to declined transactions right before an appointment. Our country-specific guides cover which toggle to flip in your banking app before you try again.

Date-change fees. If your appointment slips or your itinerary shifts, some insurers reissue the certificate with new dates for free, others charge, and a few make you cancel and rebuy. If your travel dates are anything less than certain, check the reissue policy before buying — it's the line item that separates otherwise identical cheap plans.

Family and group pricing

Insurance is priced per person, per day — so a family of four pays roughly four solo premiums, with two wrinkles worth knowing. Children usually price slightly below adults (a 0.9× multiplier is typical), and a couple of providers offer group or family discounts at checkout, but it's not universal enough to assume. The bigger family-budget lever is the age mix: one traveler over 70 in the group can add more to the total than two extra children, because the 70+ bracket multiplier runs 2–3× at most providers. For a multi-generation trip, it's often worth quoting the grandparents separately on a higher-cover plan and the rest of the family on the base plan, rather than putting everyone on one policy tier.

Where people overpay without noticing

The most common mistake isn't picking an expensive provider — it's buying more cover than the trip needs out of caution, or buying a plan bundled with extras (baggage loss, trip cancellation) that add cost without affecting whether the visa gets approved. If the goal is purely a compliant, low-cost certificate, the base plan at the €30,000–€50,000 range from a budget provider does the job. If the goal is genuine peace of mind for a family trip with older relatives, spending more on cover limit and service quality is a different, reasonable decision — just make it on purpose rather than by accident.

Next step

Plug your own age and trip length into the estimator, then check the cheapest options guide if the number that comes back is higher than you expected.

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