Travel insurance USA: 11 policies compared for an Irish resident, from €43.12 for two weeks

Travel insurance for the USA is not compulsory for an Irish traveller, but it is the only thing standing between you and an American hospital bill: your HSE European Health Insurance Card is worthless there, and cover starts at €43.12 for a fortnight.

That figure is not an estimate. On 28 August 2026 we priced a real trip through our own comparator: one traveller of 34, fourteen days in the United States, leaving from Ireland. Eleven policies came back with a price, from €43.12 for Go Protect to €193.60 for Safe Extreme. All eleven include repatriation at actual cost and direct settlement with the hospital, so you are not asked to produce a credit card in an emergency room.

The Department of Foreign Affairs puts it plainly in its travel advice for the United States: "Medical treatment in the US is very expensive. Adequate travel insurance is essential." The uncomfortable part for Irish readers is what fills the gap when you have none. The EHIC does not, because it stops at the edge of the European Economic Area. Your private health plan at home is written around Irish and European care. And the Irish embassy cannot settle a bill for you.

There is one piece of good news that only applies here. Because Ireland is in the European Economic Area, an Irish resident is offered a noticeably wider choice than a UK resident: eleven policies against six on the identical trip, and €65.34 instead of €75.50 on the very same WorldSecure Platinum contract. That is measured, not asserted, and the section below shows the numbers.

Updated August 2026. Every price on this page was computed live on 28 August 2026 for a resident of Ireland, in euro.

Three risks currently shape what travel insurance for the USA needs to do: an active wildfire that can close roads, permanently high medical costs, and a summer storm season that delays flights. Our destination monitoring last refreshed these signals on 28 August 2026.

The wildfire signal comes from the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS) emergency database and is event-driven, so it will clear. The medical one will not: it is marked permanent, which is exactly why the medical ceiling is the number to look at first on any policy.

The best travel insurance for the USA from Ireland is the cheapest policy that still carries a €500,000 medical ceiling, direct hospital billing and real cancellation cover: on our 28 August 2026 quotes that is Go Protect at €43.12 for fourteen days.

Recommended for youA. FruchardCo-Founder & Travel Insurance Expert

Why we put Go Protect first for a trip to the States

If you land in a Boston emergency room, what you actually want is for the hospital to be paid without you advancing anything, and for your fortnight in the States not to be a financial write-off if you have to cancel it. Go Protect does both for €43.12. Its terms of business put the United States in Zone 2 and pay medical expenses up to €500,000 per person, with a €30 excess per claim, and it is the only policy in this shortlist under €50 that also includes cancellation, up to €12,000.

It is not the biggest ceiling on the page. If you want the largest medical cover an Irish resident can buy for this trip, Safe Extreme pays hospitalisation at 100% of actual costs with no excess at all, for €193.60. And if you want a middle position, WorldSecure Platinum at €65.34 pairs a €500,000 ceiling with €9,000 of cancellation and €2,000 of baggage, though it carries a €100 excess per claim and excludes chronic and pre-existing conditions outright.

One thing worth knowing before you compare anything: Go Protect is only sold to residents of the European Economic Area. You can buy it from Dublin. Someone in Belfast or London cannot. That single clause is why this page is not the UK one.

A. Fruchard, Co-Founder & Travel Insurance Expert at HelloSafe

Travel insurance for the USA costs from €43.12 for a solo traveller on a fortnight's trip and from €90.18 for a family of four, with the median policy landing between €99 and €378 depending on who is travelling.

Two of those rows deserve a second look. The 68-year-old pays almost exactly what the 34-year-old pays, which surprises people, but the shortlist shrinks from eleven policies to four. And asking for cancellation cover cuts the field to three, because most of our plans simply do not sell it. If you are travelling with children, the family travel insurance page prices the same policies for a household.

No. The European Health Insurance Card issued by the HSE gives you nothing in the United States: it is valid only in the EU plus Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, so travel insurance for the USA is the only cover you will have.

Citizens Information states it without ambiguity: the card "will not cover you for healthcare outside of the EU, other than Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein (EEA) and Switzerland", and "it does not cover private healthcare". Both halves matter in America, where the care you will receive is private by default and there is no public system for the card to plug into.

This is the single most common misunderstanding we see from Irish readers, and it is easy to see why. The card works beautifully in Spain or Portugal. It has a European look and an official HSE issuer. It is free. None of that changes what it is: a reciprocal arrangement between public health systems inside the European Economic Area, and the United States is not in that club.

Worth knowing while you are checking your documents: the HSE has temporarily paused printing plastic EHIC cards, so new applicants receive a Provisional Replacement Certificate instead, and a digital adult card is available through the HSE Health App. Neither version extends its geography by a single kilometre.

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  Your EHIC: no cover at all in the United States, and no repatriation anywhere.
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  Your Irish private health insurance: written around care in Ireland and Europe, with overseas emergency cover that is usually capped well below what an American hospital charges. Read your own schedule before you assume it travels.
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  Your credit card: we have no HelloCard tool for Irish banks, so we will not quote you a ceiling we have not verified. Ask your issuer for the medical limit, whether it pays the hospital directly or reimburses you afterwards, the trip-length cap and the list of cancellation reasons. Card cancellation cover in particular tends to accept a very short list of reasons.
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  The Irish embassy: it can help you find care and contact your family. It cannot pay a medical bill.

The Department of Foreign Affairs covers the same ground in its guidance on travel insurance and health and on what to do if you fall ill abroad. If you want the mechanics of each guarantee rather than the US-specific case, our page on what travel insurance covers goes guarantee by guarantee.

Because eligibility is written into the contracts: several policies are sold only to residents of the European Economic Area, so travel insurance for the USA gives an Irish resident eleven options where a UK resident gets six, on the exact same trip.

We ran the identical request twice on 28 August 2026, changing nothing but the country of residence. One traveller of 34, fourteen days in the United States, departing 27 October 2026, priced in euro.

The reason is in the policy wording rather than in any pricing algorithm. We read the Go Protect terms of business through our contract reader, and eligibility is restricted to people "residing in the European Economic Area", Switzerland, Andorra, Monaco and the French overseas territories; its insurance product information document lists non-residents of that zone as an outright exclusion. Ireland is in the European Economic Area. The United Kingdom left it, and with it the pan-European contracts that price off it.

The practical consequence is worth stating flatly: a comparison of travel insurance for the USA written for a UK audience is not usable in Ireland. It will show you a shorter list and, on at least one identical contract, a price 15% higher. Even our own guide to the best travel insurance in Ireland is built on Irish quotes for that reason, and the compare travel insurance tool defaults to Irish residence.

Travel insurance for the USA should carry at least €500,000 of medical cover, repatriation at actual cost and direct hospital billing; of the eleven policies open to an Irish resident, only two reach the €1,000,000 medical level we recommend for the States.

Read that table as a shopping list rather than a scoreboard. Repatriation, liability and direct billing are solved problems on this market: every policy an Irish resident can buy handles them. Cancellation is where the market genuinely thins out, and the medical ceiling is where you have to make a deliberate choice between €500,000 at €43.12 and €1,000,000 at €193.60.

The conditions that catch Irish travellers out on travel insurance for the USA are the excess, the pre-existing condition wording and the fact that direct billing is often an advance granted subject to conditions rather than an automatic payment.

We read the binding policy wordings rather than the marketing summaries, and three findings are worth carrying with you.

Direct billing is not always automatic

Go Protect does not simply settle with the hospital. Its terms provide that the assistance company may advance hospitalisation costs, conditional on the treatment being prescribed in agreement with their own doctors and on you undertaking to repay any amount you later recover from another insurer. WorldSecure Platinum is more mechanical but narrower: direct payment applies to hospitalisation exceeding 24 hours, arranged through the medical assistance department. In both cases the phone call to the assistance line comes before the treatment decision, not after it.

Excess and pre-existing conditions

Go Protect applies a €30 excess per claim and excludes unstabilised medical conditions. WorldSecure Platinum applies a €100 excess per case and per claim, and its wording excludes congenital disabilities, hereditary diseases and chronic diseases, along with anything consequent to an accident or illness that occurred before the contract took effect. Safe Extreme is the outlier in the other direction: hospitalisation abroad at 100% of actual costs with no excess at all, and a €30 excess only on non-hospital medical expenses in the USA and Canada.

What the wordings simply refuse

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  Unstabilised or chronic conditions: Go Protect excludes unstabilised conditions; WorldSecure Platinum excludes chronic, congenital and hereditary disease outright. Declare before you buy, not after you claim.
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  Cash: theft and loss of cash are excluded, and any theft must be reported to the authorities within 24 hours with the original report supplied.
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  Alcohol and non-prescribed drugs: misuse voids the medical claim.
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  Professional sport and some amateur activities: Safe Extreme excludes professional sport, amateur motorised competition, deep diving beyond FFESSM Level 3 (the French underwater federation's grading) and recurrent sessions of three or more per week unless declared.
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  Tour operator failure: including insolvency, which is not the same thing as your own cancellation cover.
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  Refusal of entry: none of the wordings we read treats being turned back by US immigration as a covered cancellation reason.

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  A medical ceiling of at least €500,000: seven of the eleven policies sit exactly there, so paying more only makes sense if you specifically want €1,000,000.
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  Repatriation at actual cost: every policy on this market provides it, so treat a capped repatriation figure as a warning sign.
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  Direct billing, and the assistance number saved in your phone: the cover is only as good as your ability to call before you are treated.
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  Cancellation, if your trip is expensive: a visa refusal is covered by Go Protect only if you applied at least a month before departure and were never refused before.
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  A declared trip length that matches your ticket: Go Protect disappears from the shortlist entirely at 90 days, where the cheapest option becomes WorldSecure Basic at €181.50.

Yes, but the choice collapses: travel insurance for the USA offers an Irish resident 11 policies at 34 and still 7 at 65, then only 4 from the age of 66 and 2 at 85.

We measured the ladder on the same fourteen-day trip, changing only the traveller's age.

The interesting part is that the price is almost flat while the shortlist is not. Go Protect holds €43.12 all the way to 75 and only rises to €63.47 at 80. What you lose with age is not affordability, it is options: the cliff falls between 65 and 66, where four policies disappear at once. SafeTrip Tourism is the one to know about here, since it carries no upper age limit at all, at €110.00 for the fortnight.

Travel insurance for the USA is not an entry requirement: an Irish citizen needs a valid ESTA or a US visa, and the ESTA now costs 40.27 dollars, not the 21 dollars most search results still quote.

The fee was raised from 21 to 40 dollars on 30 September 2025 under Public Law 119-21, and then adjusted for inflation to 40.27 dollars for fiscal year 2026. It is made up of three statutory components: 17 dollars, 10.27 dollars and 13 dollars. You apply through the official US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) ESTA site and nowhere else; the authorisation is valid for two years.

• Passport: the Department of Foreign Affairs notes that Ireland has an agreement with the US allowing entry on a passport valid only for the duration of your stay, rather than the six months many countries face. On the Visa Waiver Program, if your passport is valid for less than 90 days you will be admitted only until the date it expires. Passport cards cannot be used.
• Stay: up to 90 days on the Visa Waiver Program, for tourism, business or transit.
• Insurance: not required by US authorities and not checked at the border. The DFA still calls adequate travel insurance essential.
• Preclearance: Dublin and Shannon both host US Customs and Border Protection preclearance, so you clear US immigration, customs and agriculture on Irish soil before boarding.

That last point is genuinely specific to Ireland, and it has an insurance consequence nobody mentions. US preclearance at Dublin means the immigration decision happens before you fly, not after you land, and Shannon was the first airport in the world outside the Americas to offer full CBP preclearance. If you are refused, you are refused in Ireland, with a paid-for trip you are not going to take.

Travel insurance for the USA costs an Irish resident between €43.12 and €193.60 for a fortnight, with the median policy at €99.00, and roughly €3 a day at the cheap end.

Trip length moves the price less than you would expect, and then moves it a lot. Seven days costs €25.30 on the cheapest plan, fourteen days €43.12, thirty days €53.24 and sixty days €57.42. At ninety days the picture changes completely: Go Protect drops out of the market entirely and the cheapest option becomes WorldSecure Basic at €181.50. If you are going for a season rather than a holiday, price it as a long stay from the start, or look at backpacker travel insurance instead.

Our own funnel gives a sense of what Irish travellers actually shop for. We have 142 recorded Irish quote journeys, 34 of them to the United States. Across those American trips the median trip length is 13 days, the median traveller is 35, and 74% are travelling alone. Only 7 of the 34 went as far as selecting a policy, which is too small a sample for us to publish a most-popular plan, and our records do not store the price finally paid, so we will not quote you a median amount actually spent.

If you cross the Atlantic more than twice a year, run the numbers against annual travel insurance before buying a second single-trip policy. And if your American trip involves a week in Colorado or Utah, check ski travel insurance, because winter sports are an option rather than a standard inclusion on most of these plans. The full Irish market view sits on our travel insurance hub.

• Is travel insurance compulsory for the USA?

  No. Neither the ESTA application nor US border officers require proof of travel insurance for the USA. The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs still describes adequate travel insurance as essential, because medical treatment in the US is very expensive and no Irish public scheme covers it.

• Does my HSE EHIC work in the United States?

  No. The European Health Insurance Card issued by the HSE covers public healthcare in the EU plus Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland only. Citizens Information states it will not cover you outside that zone and does not cover private healthcare, which is what you will receive in America.

• How much is travel insurance for the USA from Ireland?

  From €43.12 for one traveller of 34 on a fourteen-day trip, with a median of €99.00 and a top price of €193.60 across the eleven policies open to an Irish resident. A family of four starts at €90.18. Quotes computed 28 August 2026, in euro.

• What medical ceiling should I look for?

  At least €500,000, which is where seven of the eleven policies sit. Our destination monitoring recommends €1,000,000 for the United States, a level reached only by Safe Extreme at €193.60 and by Safe Nomad, which pays actual costs with no stated cap.

• Why do I get more choice than a traveller from the UK?

  Because several policies restrict eligibility to residents of the European Economic Area. Ireland is in the EEA and the United Kingdom is not, so the same request returns eleven policies for an Irish resident and six for a UK resident, and WorldSecure Platinum costs €65.34 rather than €75.50.

• How much does the ESTA cost in 2026?

  40.27 dollars. The fee rose from 21 to 40 dollars on 30 September 2025 under Public Law 119-21 and was adjusted for inflation to 40.27 dollars for fiscal year 2026. Apply only through the official CBP site; the authorisation lasts two years.

• Am I covered if I am refused entry at Dublin preclearance?

  Almost certainly not. None of the policy wordings we read lists refusal of entry by immigration authorities as a covered cancellation reason. Go Protect covers a tourist visa refusal only if you applied at least a month before departure and had never been refused before, and covers denied boarding after a health-authority check with written proof.

• Will my policy pay the hospital directly?

  All eleven policies include direct billing, but the mechanics differ. WorldSecure Platinum applies it to hospitalisation over 24 hours through its medical assistance department. Go Protect frames it as an advance of hospitalisation costs, conditional on its doctors agreeing the treatment and on you repaying anything you later recover elsewhere. Call the assistance line before treatment in every case.

• Can I still get cover if I am over 70?

  Yes, but only three policies price a fourteen-day US trip at 70, and two at 85. Go Protect stays at €43.12 up to 75 and €63.47 at 80. SafeTrip Tourism carries no upper age limit at all, at €110.00.

• Are pre-existing conditions covered?

  Rarely, and never by default. Go Protect excludes unstabilised medical conditions. WorldSecure Platinum excludes chronic, congenital and hereditary diseases and anything consequent to an illness or accident predating the contract. Declare your situation before you buy rather than at the point of claim.

• How long can my trip be?

  Up to sixty days keeps nine policies in play, with Go Protect at €57.42. At ninety days only seven policies remain, Go Protect is no longer sold and the cheapest option becomes WorldSecure Basic at €181.50.

• When should I buy travel insurance for the USA?

  As soon as your trip is paid for, because cancellation cover only protects money that is already at risk and some cancellation reasons carry conditions tied to the booking date. Medical and repatriation cover can be bought right up to departure.