How to Keep Israeli Health Insurance While Living Abroad
You keep your Israeli health insurance for as long as Bituach Leumi (Israel's National Insurance Institute) treats you as a resident and you keep paying health insurance contributions. Bituach Leumi normally keeps you registered as a resident for the first five years abroad. If you stop paying for 12 months or more during a stay of 18 months or more, or your residency ends, you face a waiting period of two to six months when you come back — which you can buy out with a one-off payment (16,860 ₪ from 1 January 2026). The right depends on residency and contributions, not on citizenship.
Residency after you move
Bituach Leumi decides residency by your centre of life: where your home, family, work and property are, and where you yourself see your life. A resident who moves abroad stays registered as a resident for the first five years, and during that time keeps entitlement to benefits and state health insurance. Bituach Leumi may review residency earlier if it has information that you have stopped being a resident. After five years residency is revoked unless you show that your stay abroad is still temporary; the decision can be appealed (Bituach Leumi).
Contributions while you are abroad
In principle every Israeli resident staying abroad must keep paying contributions at the statutory rate. If you work in a country that has a social security agreement with Israel and pay contributions there, you may be exempt from national insurance contributions in Israel for that period — but the agreements do not cover health insurance, so health contributions continue for the whole stay abroad (Bituach Leumi). Once you are no longer a resident you stop paying, and you lose state health insurance with it.
The waiting period if you return
The waiting period applies if you were abroad for 18 or more consecutive months and did not pay health insurance contributions for at least 12 months, or if you stopped being a resident. It is one month for each year of absence — a year of absence being any 12 months in which you spent at least 182 days abroad, not necessarily in a row — with a minimum of two months and a maximum of six. A waiting month is counted as 25 consecutive days in Israel.
Exempt from the waiting period are, among others, children under 18, immigrants under the Law of Return and others recognised by the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, and discharged soldiers within 24 months of their discharge (Bituach Leumi).
You can redeem the waiting period with a special payment: 16,860 ₪ from 1 January 2026, in one sum or up to six equal monthly instalments. Services start only once the payment is complete (treatment abroad and fertility treatment excepted), and only after Bituach Leumi recognises that your centre of life has returned to Israel. You can pay before you arrive, so that you are covered on arrival (Bituach Leumi). The amount is updated every year, and the conditions depend on your status and contribution history, so confirm your case with Bituach Leumi.
Keeping track from abroad
Your contributions, any debts and your status are in your Bituach Leumi personal area, which opened from abroad in our check on 23 October 2026. It has not always been so: on 8 December 2021, after a cyberattack, Bituach Leumi took its site offline for two hours and then kept it closed to visitors from abroad only (Kipa). The login code goes to the Israeli mobile or email registered with Bituach Leumi, so update those details while you still have the number. How to log in and what to do if the code doesn't arrive is in Bituach Leumi from abroad.
While you are insured, your health fund's personal area — test results, prescriptions, appointments — stays useful from abroad too. In the same check the Maccabi and Meuhedet logins opened from abroad, while Leumit's personal area and Clalit Online did not. And what opens today can close, as already happened with Bituach Leumi. So it is calmer to set up an Israeli IP in advance than on the day you urgently need a prescription or test results; then you just press "Connect".
