How to Get Free At-Home COVID-19 Tests

You can get four free tests from the government, and your insurer is required to cover up to eight tests per month. The devil is in the details.

By Lori Ioannou

With the omicron variant sweeping across the U.S., many people are relying on testing to determine whether that sore throat is COVID-19 or that exposure at work led to an active infection. Until recently, at-home antigen tests like BinaxNow—which can help answer those questions quickly and easily—were expensive (generally at least $10 per test) and often out of reach.

Now, however, anyone in the U.S. can order a total of four free tests per household via COVIDtests.gov. The U.S. Postal Service will ship the tests directly to your door free of charge.

For people who need more tests, private health insurers are now required to cover the cost of up to eight at-home antigen tests per person per month, beginning with any tests purchased on or after Jan. 15. What exactly you have to do to get those tests at no cost to you will vary depending on your insurance plan. (PCR tests and rapid tests ordered or administered by a health provider continue to be fully covered by insurance.)

“There is a lot of confusion on how this initiative will roll out,” says Caitlin Donovan, a spokesperson for the National Patient Advocate Foundation in Washington, D.C. “So much of it is up to the individual health plans, and most are now scrambling to develop a strategy.”

Here’s what to know.

The Basics

The new federal rules give insurance companies a few options. If your insurer sets up a network of pharmacies and retailers, you should be able to pick up tests from one of them with no up-front costs. This may involve taking the tests to the pharmacy counter and checking out using your insurance card. If you buy tests from an out-of-network store, you can submit a reimbursement claim for up to $12 per test. If your insurer doesn’t set up a network of stores, it will be on the hook to reimburse you for the full cost of any covered tests.

There are a few caveats. Your insurer doesn’t have to cover the cost of tests required by your employer or your school. The reimbursement policy also doesn’t apply to people without private insurance. People with Medicaid should contact their state Medicaid office for specifics on coverage of at-home COVID-19 tests. And people enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan should check it for details. People with Medicare and those who are uninsured are still eligible for free in-person testing (with some restrictions) but aren’t covered by the new rules on home tests.

Another challenge is the current national shortage of at-home COVID-19 antigen tests. Lindsay Dawson, director of healthcare policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, analyzed the availability of at-home rapid tests during the week of Jan. 3 and found that they were available from the websites of six major retailers less than 10 percent of the time.

“It’s great that you can get them for free, but you have to be able to find them first,” she says.

How to Get a Covered Test

While the federal rules require insurers to cover up to eight tests per month, the specifics are left up to the individual insurance companies. That means consumers need to check with their health plan insurer to see exactly how it’s complying with the federal requirements. Check your insurer’s website; many have posted instructions or FAQs for finding covered tests or getting reimbursed for tests.

“How successful this new policy will be hinges on how quickly insurers can put processes in place to make it easy for consumers to buy at-home COVID-19 tests with no up-front costs,” says Katie Keith, principal of Keith Policy Solutions, a healthcare consultancy for foundations and nonprofits, and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “It will take a bit of time for this to all work out. It will be messy at the start.”

Initially, as insurers work to set up networks of online and in-person stores where members can pick up at-home test kits with no up-front costs, a more labor-intensive process will likely be more common: submitting receipts for reimbursement. Some pharmacy chains gave us statements indicating that they are in the process of working out details with certain insurance companies to allow customers to get free tests by showing their insurance card, but that in the meantime, people should expect to pay at the register for tests and submit claims for reimbursement.

Navigating Your Insurer's Rules

As of late January, 13 large insurers were about evenly divided in their methods of providing at-home rapid COVID-19 tests, with six providing direct coverage of tests at no up-front cost and seven requiring members to submit claims for reimbursement, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation report. Notably, only two of the seven companies with a reimbursement process (Anthem and Kaiser Permanente) offered a way to submit a reimbursement request online, according to the report.

Here, we provide more details on the current policies of a few of these insurers. Many are short on the details; we’ll continue to update this post as insurers clarify and perhaps streamline their processes.

Be sure to check with your health plan to find out what’s needed. As a Blue Cross Blue Shield spokesperson told us, “Things are evolving in real time.”

Aetna members must submit a request for reimbursement. In most cases, tests will be covered under members’ pharmacy benefits.

Cigna has posted a new COVID-19 over-the-counter test kit claim form in its coronavirus resource center. Members should fill out the form for reimbursement and be sure to include the product/brand of the test kit, the purpose of the test, information on the insured, and a copy of the purchase receipt that shows the date of purchase and the charges. Cigna says a method of submitting a claim form online will be available soon.

Humana says its members can purchase COVID-19 tests at a network pharmacy with no up-front cost as long as they have the pharmacy staff process the kits as a claim. The company cautions that because the process is so new, a pharmacy might not be prepared to process the test kits through your insurance. Members can also purchase tests and send an itemized receipt along with a special reimbursement form to the address on their membership ID card. It can take up to 30 days to process the claim, and the reimbursement will be sent as a check to the home address the company has on file.

UnitedHealthcare members with an OptumRx logo on their membership ID card should be able to get over-the-counter at-home COVID-19 tests at no up-front cost if they buy them at an in-store Walmart, Sam’s Club, Rite Aid, Bartell Drugs, or Kinney Drugs pharmacy. Members will need to show their insurance card at the pharmacy counter. If tests are purchased at a different store or at any online retailer, members can submit a receipt for a $12 reimbursement at myuhc.com or by using a special reimbursement form.