Medicare’s annual enrollment window is approaching, and millions of households will soon start comparing plans for next year. One number they will not have in hand yet is the 2027 Part B premium, deductible or income-related monthly adjustment amounts, the figures that determine what enrollees actually pay each month starting in January. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has not published any of them, and a direct check of the agency’s own newsroom this week turns up nothing on the subject. The gap is not a rumor or a guess; it is what the agency’s own public record currently shows.
No 2027 Premium in the CMS Newsroom as of September 19
A check of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services newsroom, run against every post through September 18, 2026, turns up no fact sheet, press release or rate notice covering 2027 Medicare Part A or Part B premiums, deductibles or income-related monthly adjustment amounts. The agency’s most recent posts that week covered a Medicaid drug-payment initiative and several rural hospital funding announcements, routine business, with nothing attached to the premium enrollees will pay starting in January 2027. Searching for the specific figures returns only coverage of the current 2026 amounts, dated months earlier.
The record is public: CMS’s newsroom homepage and its September 18 release on the Medicaid drug-payment model mark the most recent entries, and neither one, nor anything filed before it, sets a 2027 figure. That gap is worth confirming directly rather than assumed, because a document dated 2027 already exists on CMS’s site for an entirely different program, described further below.
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How CMS Set the Numbers Still in Effect for 2026
When CMS released the 2026 figures on November 14, 2025, it set the standard Part B premium at $202.90 a month, up $17.90 from $185.00 in 2025, with the annual Part B deductible rising to $283 from $257. The same release set that year’s income-related monthly adjustment amounts, which push the total premium as high as $689.90 a month for the highest-income enrollees, and set the premium for beneficiaries who keep Part B solely for immunosuppressive-drug coverage at $121.60. Those remain the numbers in effect for the rest of 2026; nothing published since has changed them, and nothing has replaced them for next year.
The Income Brackets That Already Apply
The 2026 fact sheet also fixed the income thresholds that decide who pays more than the standard premium, and those brackets offer a preview of how any 2027 change will be structured even before the dollar amounts exist. Individual filers with modified adjusted gross income above $109,000, or joint filers above $218,000, move into the first surcharge tier; the highest tier begins at $500,000 for individuals and $750,000 for joint filers, where the total monthly premium reaches $689.90. Because those brackets are tied to income reported roughly two years earlier, a household’s tier for 2027 will likely be shaped by a 2025 tax return before CMS ever announces a corresponding dollar figure.
A 2027 CMS Announcement Already Exists, It Just Isn’t This One
Anyone searching CMS’s own site for a “2027 announcement” will find one: the 2027 Medicare Advantage and Part D Rate Announcement, published April 6, 2026. That document sets the capitation rates CMS pays to Medicare Advantage insurers and the payment policies for Part D plan sponsors for next year, a separate process, on a separate calendar, from the Part B premium and deductible that individual enrollees pay out of pocket. The two are easy to confuse, since both carry the same year in the title, but the Rate Announcement says nothing about what a person on Original Medicare will owe each month in 2027, and it was never intended to.
Why the 2026 Figures Landed in the Middle of November
CMS set the 2026 premium in mid-November, roughly a month after that year’s enrollment period had already opened, and prior years followed a similar calendar. The premium, deductible and IRMAA brackets are calculated together, using updated projections of Part B program spending and enrollment, which is part of why the release tends to land later in the year rather than alongside the start of open enrollment. If 2027 follows the same pattern, the announcement is likely to land after most enrollees have already compared plans and made a choice, not before. That timing has been a recurring feature of the fall Medicare calendar for years, not an exception created by this particular gap.
What the Missing Number Means for This Year’s Comparisons
The missing premium does not block plan comparisons this fall, Medicare Advantage and Part D plan costs for 2027 are published on their own schedule, separate from the Part B premium CMS sets each year, but it does leave a hole in year-ahead budgeting for anyone living on a fixed income. Because income-related monthly adjustment amounts are calculated from tax returns filed roughly two years earlier, many enrollees can already tell which income bracket will apply to them even without knowing the exact dollar figure CMS will attach to it. What they cannot calculate yet is the total monthly amount to plan around, since that requires the final premium and deductible, not just the bracket.
Until CMS issues that fact sheet, most likely in November, based on the pattern set when the 2026 numbers were released on November 14, 2025, the figure households should budget against for January remains the current $202.90 standard premium, not a 2027 number that does not yet exist.
Picking a 2027 Plan Without the Price Tag
The premium figure is missing, but plan choices made during open enrollment do not wait for it. Deductibles, drug formularies and appeal deadlines for 2027 Medicare Advantage and Part D plans are already locked in even though the Part B premium is not, and none of that paperwork arrives with the deadline printed next to the rule. Households are left comparing next year’s coverage terms against only part of the total cost picture.
The Medicare Cost & Coverage Protection Kit presents the new Part D out-of-pocket cap and the prior-authorization appeal steps side by side for the year ahead.
Read the new Part D out-of-pocket cap and what it changes in The Medicare Cost & Coverage Protection Kit.
AI-assisted research and drafting; reviewed by an editor.
