Private medical insurance (PMI) and protection complaints to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) have increased year-on-year across virtually all major product categories.
Income protection saw the largest uplift in terms of number of complaints and percentage growth, followed by critical illness (CI) insurance and then medical and dental insurance.
Overall health and protection insurance complaints remain a small portion of the FOS caseload accounting for fewer than 5,500 or 2.5% of the 214,600 complaints it received over the 2025-26 financial year.
However it is likely the continued rise in complaint numbers will be somewhat concerning to the sector.
The ombudsman received 1,938 complaints about PMI and dental insurance, the most of all health and protection products, which was 74 or 4% higher than the 1,864 cases in the previous year.
Encouragingly only 22% of the 2025-26 caseload were upheld, compared with 26% a year earlier.
This trend of higher complaints was mirrored across virtually every other major protection insurance category.
Income protection (IP) complaints rose by 17% to 942, up by 137 from 805 in 2024-25. Upheld rates were similar at 21% and 20% respectively.
Meanwhile, CI-related complaints rose by 13% to 647, up by 75 from 572 in the previous year, although upheld rate dropped to 12% from 16%.
Turning to life cover, there was a marginal increase in complaints about term assurance, up from 875 (19% upheld) to 884 (17% upheld) over the same period, while complaints about non reviewable whole of life products also rose from 345 (20% upheld) to 414 (26% upheld) in the current financial year.
More positively, there was a fall in the number of complaints about reviewable whole of life products, with these grievances falling from 523 (43% upheld) to 434 (38% upheld) in this financial year.
It should be noted that individual protection sales declined by 1.7% in 2025 according to Swiss Re’s Term and Health Watch report.
However, IP sales bucked that trend surging 11.9%, which may account for sme of the increase in complaints.
Industry complaints down 30%
In total the FOS received 214,600 complaints about financial products and services, down almost 30% compared to the 305,700 in 2024/25, with 30% of complaints upheld on average.
Hire purchase (motor) was the most complained about product this year with 37,700 complaints received, down from 76,200 the previous year.
There were 32,900 complaints about current accounts, with fraud and scams accounting for 18,900 of these cases.
Credit cards were the third most complained about product, with around 22,800 complaints.