IUHC packages one slice of the S&P 500 — its health care sector — as a standalone UCITS ETF. The honest take: at 0.15% TER it's cheap for a sector fund, it accumulates dividends, and it holds the 60 health care names in the index, from Eli Lilly and UnitedHealth to the biotech, device, and life-science firms alongside them. Owning it is a deliberate bet that health care beats the broad market from here — a satellite you add on purpose, not a core.
What's inside
| Ticker | Name | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| LLY | Eli Lilly & Co. | 13.75% |
| JNJ | Johnson & Johnson | 11.11% |
| ABBV | AbbVie, Inc. | 7.25% |
| MRK | Merck & Co., Inc. | 5.63% |
| UNH | UnitedHealth Group | 4.62% |
The fund holds 60 stocks, but the top of the table does most of the work. As of the Q1 snapshot, Eli Lilly is 13.75% of the fund and Johnson & Johnson 11.11% — two names worth nearly a quarter of the ETF between them — with AbbVie, Merck, and UnitedHealth rounding out a top five of about 42%. Underneath the pharma headline the sector is more varied than it looks: branded drugmakers (Lilly, J&J, Merck, AbbVie), biotech (Amgen, Gilead), managed care (UnitedHealth), life-science tools (Thermo Fisher), and medical devices (Abbott, Intuitive Surgical). Health care is also the textbook defensive sector — demand for drugs and hospital care doesn't swing with the economic cycle the way discretionary or industrials do — which is exactly why some investors want it at a heavier weight than it carries inside the S&P 500 itself.
Costs and structure
At 0.15% the ongoing charge is genuinely low for a sector fund — €75 a year on a €50k position, only a touch above a broad S&P 500 tracker like VUAA at 0.07%. You're not paying a thematic premium here the way you would for a niche theme; iShares runs this as plain, cheap, sector-sliced beta. Replication is full physical — iShares holds all 60 constituents directly rather than tracking them through a swap. The fund is Irish-domiciled (ISIN IE00B43HR379) and accumulates dividends inside the wrapper, so there's nothing to reinvest by hand and no tax event until you sell. It launched on 20 November 2015, giving it a decade-long record across the drug-pricing scares and the COVID whipsaw that test a health care fund. Base currency is USD, and at about €2.7 billion it's a mid-sized, liquid fund. The benchmark is the S&P 500 Capped 35/20 Health Care index — the health care members of the S&P 500, with cap rules that stop any single name from dominating (not binding today, with Lilly at 13.75%). The full methodology is on iShares' product page.
Performance in context
Live data temporarily unavailable for this comparison.
IUHC against VUAA — the whole S&P 500 — is the comparison that frames the decision, because health care already sits inside VUAA at market weight. Holding IUHC on top is a statement that you want more of the sector than the index gives you by default. When health care leads — a defensive rotation out of cyclicals, or a strong stretch for big pharma and biotech — IUHC pulls ahead of the broad index; when the market is driven by megacap tech, as it has been for much of the past decade, a health-care-only fund lags the S&P 500 it's carved from. Read the chart as a test of whether the sector has actually earned its overweight, not a forecast that it will. The tech-versus-broad-market version of this same tilt question is laid out in CNDX vs VUAA.
Who buys it and why
IUHC is a satellite for an investor who already owns a broad core — an S&P 500 fund like VUAA or an all-world fund — and wants to deliberately overweight health care on top of it. The case is usually one of two: you want the sector's defensive ballast for a portfolio that's heavy in tech and cyclicals, or you hold a specific conviction — ageing demographics, drug innovation — that health care compounds faster than the market from here. Either way it's a considered tilt, not a starter holding. If you don't hold that view, your broad fund already owns Lilly, J&J, and UnitedHealth at market weight, and you skip both the extra line to manage and the single-sector risk.
Alternatives worth knowing
- VUAA — the S&P 500, where these same health care names already sit inside a diversified US index with nothing extra to manage.
- IUFS — the S&P 500 financials sector in the same iShares wrapper, if you're tilting by sector rather than betting on health care specifically.
- IUES — the S&P 500 energy sector, the most cyclical of the sector slices and the opposite end of the defensive-versus- cyclical spectrum from IUHC.