A quarter of a million Australians did not renew their private health insurance in the past year, a new survey shows.

An ongoing Roy Morgan survey involving 50,000 face-to-face interviews every year found 256,000 Australians who had health insurance at some point in their lives chose not to renew it in the year to March 2018.

This won't hurt a bit: More than 250,000 Australians didn’t renew private health insurance over the past year.

This is "significantly" up from 182,000 Australians in the same period the previous year.

"This research has shown that, apart from the cost of health insurance being a major problem for customer retention, it should be related to the perceived benefits or value of paying increasingly high premiums," Roy Morgan analyst Norman Morris said.