Your Medicare mail is starting to show up, and this year it comes with an unusually good headline. The average Medicare Advantage premium is projected to fall from $14.37 a month in 2026 to $12 in 2027, a drop of 16.5%.
That’s the kind of number that shows up in headlines everywhere this time of year, and for good reason. It’s also not the number that will land on your own statement, because it isn’t describing any one plan. It’s an average across every Medicare Advantage plan in the country, weighted by how many people are expected to sign up for each one.
Open enrollment for Medicare runs from October 15 through December 7 this year, and the premium number is the easiest thing to compare and the one most likely to mislead you if you stop there. Here’s what it actually measures, where your own costs could move in a different direction, and what’s worth checking instead before you pick a plan.
How that $12 average premium is calculated
The weighted average covers every Medicare Advantage plan in the country, including plans that bundle in prescription drug coverage and Special Needs Plans built for people with specific chronic conditions. Each plan’s premium gets weighted by how many people are expected to enroll in it, so a popular plan with a $0 premium pulls the national number down a lot further than a small, expensive plan pulls it up.
That makes the average a decent way to describe Medicare Advantage as a whole. It says plans are staying competitive on price across the country. It says nothing about the plan sitting in your mailbox right now, because your plan is one line in a spreadsheet with thousands of other lines, not the average of all of them.
The projection also includes rebates insurers use to buy down prescription drug costs within a plan, which can shrink a plan’s advertised premium without changing what you actually pay for care. Two plans with the same $12 sticker price can still charge very different amounts once you add up deductibles, copays, and the drugs you actually take.
Why your own premium could move in the opposite direction
About 8 in 10 Medicare Advantage beneficiaries will be able to keep their current plan at the same premium or lower in 2027. Flip that statistic around and roughly two in 10 won’t, and the difference shows up clearly once you look state by state instead of nationally.
In Wyoming, the average Medicare Advantage premium is set to climb from $45.91 to $69.23 a month. Idaho’s average is rising from $27.81 to $37.93, and Connecticut’s is going from $16.89 to $25.31. On the other side, some of the steepest drops are expected in Minnesota, where the average is falling from $69.11 to $59.40, in the District of Columbia, where it’s dropping from $26.28 to $16.91, and in Mississippi, where it’s falling from $11.18 to $4.08. A national average smooths all of that into a single headline number. Your own premium depends on your state, your county, and the specific plan you choose, not the country as a whole.
The bigger drop is in prescription drug coverage, not the plan premium
The number with real money behind it this year belongs to prescription drug coverage bundled into Medicare Advantage plans. For plans that include drug benefits, the average monthly drug premium after rebates is projected to fall from $11.32 to $7, a 38% decrease. That’s the change doing most of the work behind this year’s good headlines, and it matters more to most people’s wallets than the plan premium itself.
Stand-alone Part D plans, the kind people on Original Medicare buy separately, are moving the other way, rising less than a dollar, from $35.09 to $36. A bigger number sits past the premium altogether. The standard Part D deductible is climbing from $615 to $700, and the annual cap on what you pay out of pocket for covered drugs is rising from $2,100 to $2,400, the largest increase either figure has seen since Part D began. A lower premium doesn’t do much for you if you’re someone who reaches that deductible by February.
Plan access remains wide, but hundreds of thousands are losing their current plan
On paper, choice looks steady. More than 99% of Medicare beneficiaries will have at least one Medicare Advantage plan available to them, and 97% will have 10 or more to pick from. The total number of plans offered nationally is barely moving, from 5,553 down to around 5,532.
Underneath that, Humana is exiting plans that cover around 600,000 of its own members for 2027, mostly plans rated 3.5 stars or lower, and other large insurers are trimming their Medicare Advantage lineups too. Nearly 3 million seniors had to find a new Medicare Advantage plan last year even while premiums stayed low. A plan getting cheaper and a plan getting discontinued are different problems, and this fall both are landing in mailboxes at the same time. If your plan is one of the ones leaving your area, you’ll get a non-renewal notice directly from your insurer, and you’ll need to pick new coverage before the window closes on December 7.
What actually matters beyond the premium this open enrollment
The premium is the number plans lead with because it’s the easiest one to compare at a glance, and it’s also one of the smallest pieces of what most people spend on health care in a year. Before renewing anything or switching anything, pull out your plan’s Annual Notice of Change letter and check four things specifically: your out-of-pocket maximum, whether your actual prescriptions are still covered at the tier you’re used to, whether your doctors and hospital are still in network, and whether supplemental benefits like dental, vision, and hearing have changed.
Medicare’s Plan Finder tool lets you compare those details for your own ZIP code instead of the national average, and 1-800-MEDICARE has people who will walk through the comparison with you for free. A plan with a smaller premium attached to a dropped doctor or a higher drug bill isn’t actually the better deal. It just moves the cost to a part of the year you’ll notice less right away.
