Data for multi-carrier ICHRA quoting, delivered via a single API
Published on May 12, 2026
By: Ideon
If you’re building an ICHRA platform, getting fast, accurate quotes from every major carrier is table stakes — and one of the hardest technical problems to solve on your own. IdeonQuote gives benefits platforms a single API connection to access multi-carrier ICHRA quoting data for entire employee populations, including premiums, affordability calculations, and plan details, without building or maintaining a proprietary rating engine.
Ideon powers the quoting and plan selection experience for 30+ ICHRA platforms. In the last year alone, ICHRA quoting volume across the Ideon network has grown 190% year-over-year. If you’re building an ICHRA quoting experience, here’s how the API works and what it gives you.
The problem with multi-carrier ICHRA quoting
ICHRA has a structural complexity that most benefits products don’t. Unlike traditional group coverage, each employee shops the individual market based on their own location, household size, age, and income. That means a single employer group can have employees in dozens of states, each needing quotes across a different set of carriers and plans.
Building this yourself means negotiating data feeds with individual carriers, normalizing wildly inconsistent data formats, keeping rates current throughout the plan year, and handling edge cases like CSR eligibility and affordability calculations — all before you can show a single employee their options.
Most platforms that try to build proprietary rating engines underestimate the ongoing maintenance burden. Carrier relationships change. Rate files update. Compliance requirements shift. What looks like a one-time build becomes a permanent engineering dependency. (For a deeper look at this tradeoff, see How to build an ICHRA platform via API.)
How IdeonQuote solves it
IdeonQuote provides a single API connection to comprehensive individual-market plan and rate data across carriers — normalized, maintained, and ready to query. For ICHRA specifically, the API supports group-level quoting: you submit the full employee census once, trigger a single quote job, and get back member-specific plan availability and premiums for the entire group.
The API handles the carrier data relationships, rate normalization, and calculation logic on Ideon’s side. Your team integrates once and focuses on building the experience for your customers.
How the ICHRA group quoting workflow works
The IdeonQuote ICHRA workflow is five steps. Quote jobs process asynchronously, so your application doesn’t block while rates are being calculated. Full technical documentation is available in Ideon’s API docs.
1. Create a group
Set up a group resource with company information, broker/agency NPN, tax ID, and office locations. The group resource is reusable — if the underlying data doesn’t change, you can run multiple quotes against the same group ID without recreating it.
2. Add a census
Upload the full employee census, including each member’s zip code, county, date of birth, household dependents, and — if you’re running affordability calculations — annual income. The census can include groups ranging from a handful of employees to 10,000+ members.
3. Trigger the quote
Submit a quote request against the group ID with an effective date. At this step you can also enable optional calculations: Federal Premium Tax Credit (PTC) eligibility, ICHRA affordability (minimum employer contribution based on income and FPL), and Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) eligibility. You can also apply plan filters — for example, scoping results to specific issuers or exchange-only plans — if your use case doesn’t require the full market view.
4. Check quote status
Quote jobs process in the background. Processing times scale with group size: approximately 15 seconds for 100 members, 2 minutes for 1,000, and 20 minutes for 10,000. Poll the status endpoint until the job completes.
5. Pull results
Retrieve quoted rates and calculation outputs in the format that fits your workflow. For smaller groups, paginate through the full member result set via the API. For larger populations, download a JSONL bulk export file with all member data. You can also pull results for a single member on demand — useful for re-quoting after minor census changes.
What the quote response includes
For each member in the group, the API returns:
- Available plans and premiums — member-specific rates across all eligible individual-market plans, including age-banded breakdowns per applicant when enabled
- ICHRA affordability — the minimum employer contribution calculated against each member’s income (safe harbor) and the federal poverty line
- PTC subsidy eligibility — each member’s estimated premium tax credit and CHIP/Medicaid eligibility
- CSR eligibility — whether the member qualifies for cost-sharing reduction plan variants, with CSR plans automatically included in the rates array when eligible
- Plan HIOS IDs — unique plan identifiers that link directly to Ideon’s cached plan benefit data, so you can surface complete plan details to employees without additional carrier calls
For plan-level details like benefits, deductibles, and network information, Ideon provides bulk export files that can be cached on your side and updated on a daily or weekly cadence. This approach enables a fast, real-time quoting experience for employees without latency from live plan lookups on every request. See the full API reference documentation for schema details.
Scale and coverage
IdeonQuote is built to handle the geographic complexity that defines ICHRA. Individual-market availability varies by state and county — an employee in rural Ohio has a different carrier set than an employee in downtown Austin. The API accounts for this automatically, returning member-specific plan availability based on each person’s location in the census. For context on which carriers participate where, Ideon’s data covers individual-market availability down to the state and county level.
The workflow scales from small employers to large populations without changing your integration. A census of 10,000 members processes the same way as a census of 50 — you upload, trigger, and pull.
Quote data is retained and accessible via quote ID for six months after creation, giving you a consistent reference point for employer reporting, re-quoting, and support workflows.
Who's building with IdeonQuote
Ideon powers ICHRA quoting and other features for 35+ ICHRA administration platforms, including Gravie, Take Command, Zizzl, Remodel Health, and others. Nationally, Ideon added approximately 10 new ICHRA platforms to its network in 2025 alone, with strong continued interest from new administrators and brokers building their own quoting experiences. Learn more about Ideon’s ICHRA infrastructure.
Beyond quoting: the full ICHRA data stack
Quoting is where the ICHRA platform experience starts, not where it ends. Ideon’s products cover the full workflow:
- IdeonSelect — real-time provider network data from 300+ carriers, so employees can check if their doctors are in-network before they choose a plan
- IdeonEnroll — automated enrollment and member update submissions to carriers, replacing point-to-point integrations with a single connection
- Payments — automated premium payment submission to carriers on behalf of ICHRA enrollees
Most ICHRA platforms using IdeonQuote for plan and rate data expand into IdeonSelect and IdeonEnroll as their product matures. Connecting once to Ideon’s infrastructure gives you a path to all four products without rebuilding your carrier data architecture.
Frequently asked questions
What is ICHRA quoting data?
ICHRA quoting data is the set of individual-market health plan options, premiums, and eligibility calculations — like ICHRA affordability and PTC subsidies — that an ICHRA platform needs to show each employee their coverage options and help employers set appropriate contribution amounts. Ideon provides this data via API, aggregated across carriers and normalized into a consistent schema.
How do ICHRA APIs improve connections between administration platforms and carriers?
Rather than each platform building and maintaining direct data feeds with individual carriers, an ICHRA API like IdeonQuote centralizes that connectivity. Platforms integrate once with Ideon, and Ideon manages the carrier relationships, rate normalization, and data freshness. This eliminates duplicated integration work across the industry and reduces the operational burden on both platforms and carriers.
What data and integrations power an ICHRA platform?
A complete ICHRA platform typically needs four types of data: (1) individual-market quoting data to show plan options and premiums, (2) provider network data so employees can check doctor availability, (3) enrollment connectivity to submit applications and member changes to carriers, and (4) payment infrastructure to route premiums from employees to carriers. Ideon’s products — IdeonQuote, IdeonSelect, and IdeonEnroll — cover all four.
How do I get ICHRA quotes from every carrier?
Through a single Ideon API connection. IdeonQuote aggregates individual-market plan and rate data across carriers into one normalized API. You submit the employee census, trigger a quote job, and retrieve member-specific results without building or maintaining separate carrier integrations. Full documentation is in Ideon’s Quote and Select API guide.
Can IdeonQuote handle large employee populations?
Yes. The ICHRA group quoting workflow is designed to scale. A group of 10,000 members processes in approximately 20 minutes asynchronously, and the results can be retrieved via paginated API response or bulk JSONL export. There is no need to change your integration approach as your customer base grows.
Does IdeonQuote include ICHRA affordability calculations?
Yes. When enabled at quote time, the API returns minimum employer contribution amounts for each member based on their income and the federal poverty line. These calculations are included in the member-level rate response alongside plan premiums and are available for groups of any size.
Get started
Benefits platforms and ICHRA administrators that want accurate, multi-carrier ICHRA quoting data without building a proprietary rating engine connect to IdeonQuote. Explore the API documentation or contact Ideon to discuss your ICHRA quoting use case