BASMAH and ICP — the levy on a UAE health quote

Why does the same charge have two names?

Because the document you are reading decides which one you see.

Insurers' rate charts carry headings such as Gross Rates (AED) Excluding VAT & ICP. The finished quotation the client receives states a total "including BASMAH + VAT". Same per-member amount, two labels, and a broker working from both documents at once sees both words for one number.

Rabt treats it as one configurable levy rather than pretending the market has settled on a name, because the alternative — modelling BASMAH and ICP as two separate charges — produces a quote that double-counts.

What does it cost?

In the reference quotations Rabt was built and reconciled against, the levy resolves to AED 37.00 per member per policy year, and VAT is 5%.

Whether that AED 37 is precisely a per-member-per-annum ICP charge, or a blended figure covering more than one item, is a question worth putting to your insurer rather than assuming. It is one settings row either way, and Rabt holds it as seeded data rather than as a constant in code for exactly that reason.

Illustrative — 2026 indicative rates from Rabt’s demonstration inventory, not a quotation. Confirm the current levy and its basis with your insurer before quoting. This page describes the mechanism and the arithmetic, not this year's rate.

Where does the arithmetic go wrong?

Two places, both systematic rather than occasional.

Reading the chart figure as the final premium. The heading says the grid excludes VAT and the levy. On a scheme of forty members, quoting the cell figure under-quotes by forty times the levy plus five per cent of everything. It is not a rounding difference and it does not average out.

Applying VAT before the levy. The order is: total the member premiums, add the levy for every member, then apply VAT to the sum.

total = round((premiums + members × 37) × 1.05, 2)

Applying VAT to the premium alone and adding the levy afterwards under-states the total by the VAT on the levy — small per member, and consistently wrong across the whole scheme.

Does rounding matter?

More than it should. Rounding each member's premium to two decimal places before the tax calculation, rather than carrying the unrounded figures through and rounding once at the end, produces totals that differ by a fils.

That sounds trivial until a broker reconciles their quotation against the insurer's policy schedule and the two disagree. Rabt carries exact decimal arithmetic through the whole pricing path and rounds half-up to two places exactly once, in the formatter, because a quote that cannot be reconciled to the fils is a quote somebody has to check by hand.

Is the levy the same in every emirate?

Not necessarily, which is why it is configurable per rule rather than global.

Rabt seeds the per-member levy as a global pricing rule and holds an Abu Dhabi BASMAH rule separately, conditioned on the emirate and disabled by default until a confirmed rate is supplied. Seeding a rate nobody has confirmed is how a wrong number becomes permanent — it gets copied into quotes, quotes get accepted, and by the time anyone checks it is the way things have always been done.

What should appear on the client's quotation?

The premium, the levy as its own line with the member count and unit amount visible, VAT as its own line, and the total. A quotation that shows only a total forces the client's finance team to reverse-engineer it, and they will get a different answer.