How Much Travel Insurance Cover Do You Actually Need in 2026? Sizing Every Limit

The travel insurance question that trips people up is not "am I covered?" but "for how much?" Nearly every policy pays out for medical bills, cancellation and lost bags — the difference between a good policy and a dangerous one is the size of the limit next to each of those promises, and whether an exclusion quietly cancels it. Get the numbers wrong and you are technically insured but practically exposed. Here is how to right-size cover to your trip in 2026, limit by limit.

Medical and repatriation: the one that can bankrupt you

This is the limit to obsess over, because it is the only one where a shortfall is measured in six figures rather than the price of a flight. GOV.UK's foreign travel insurance guidance makes the point with hard numbers: a broken leg needing hospital treatment and a flight home from Spain can cost £25,000 or more, while a stomach bug needing hospital treatment in the United States has run to £150,000 or more. Those are not the bills — those are examples of what travellers have actually paid without cover.

Two things follow. First, "medical expenses" and "repatriation" are two separate promises: one pays the hospital, the other pays to fly you home (sometimes on a stretcher, with a medical escort). You want both, with high limits. Second, your destination sets the number. Europe on a reciprocal health card is one thing; the United States, where an intensive-care week can eclipse everything else on this list, is another entirely. As our guide to travel insurance for visiting the USA spells out, six-figure US medical cover is a floor, not a flex.

Right-sizing the other three limits

Cancellation, baggage and personal money are where people either over-pay for cover they will never claim or under-insure the one thing they would. The rule for each is different, and none of them is "pick the biggest number".

Cancellation is the section most people mis-size. The right figure is your total non-refundable outlay on the day you book — and it climbs as you add flights, trek permits and lodge deposits. If your trip costs £4,000 and your policy caps cancellation at £2,000, half your money is uninsured. Baggage is the mirror image: the headline total looks reassuring until you hit the single-article limit, which is often a fraction of the total and can leave an expensive lens or a technical jacket only partly covered. And as Wikipedia's overview of travel insurance notes, the standard components — medical, evacuation, cancellation and baggage — all sit alongside exclusions that can quietly void them.

The exclusions that cancel the limit

A limit is only real if no clause switches it off. GOV.UK's checklist of things to verify includes alcohol and drugs, high-risk destinations, mental-health conditions, age restrictions, specific sports, quad bikes and mopeds, driving overseas, and natural disasters. Any of these can turn a generous headline figure into a rejected claim. This is why we always tell travellers to read the exclusions first — our guide to what travel insurance does not cover walks through the ones that most often void a claim.

The Nepal case: where the altitude number outranks the medical number

For a Himalayan trek, sizing cover is not just about how many millions of medical cover you carry — it is about two specific clauses. Your policy must fund an emergency helicopter evacuation, and it must cover you at or above your trek's maximum altitude. Everest Base Camp sits at 5,364m; many standard policies stop covering trekking well below that. A £10m medical limit is worthless on the trail if the small print excludes anything above 4,000m — the claim is void before the rotors turn. We cover exactly how to check this in our guide to the best travel insurance for high-altitude trekking. If you are planning the classic route, our 14-day Everest Base Camp trek team will tell you precisely which altitude and helicopter clauses your certificate needs before you fly.

Right-sizing cover is a five-minute job that saves a five-figure surprise: set medical and repatriation high (higher for the USA), match cancellation to your real non-refundable spend, size baggage to your gear and its single-item cap, and — above all — make sure no exclusion applies to what you actually intend to do. The certificate with fewer holes wins.

Cover photo: Kari Alfonso via Pexels (Pexels License).