Do Higher-Rated Medicare Advantage Plans Cost More? We Counted All 5,522 for 2027

This article is for general educational purposes only and is not insurance or medical advice. We are not affiliated with the U.S. government, Medicare, or any insurer. For official information, visit Medicare.gov or call 1-800-MEDICARE. See our Medical & Financial Disclaimer for details.

Almost everyone shopping for Medicare Advantage starts from the same assumption: the good plans are the expensive ones, and if a plan is cheap there’s a reason. It’s a sensible instinct. It’s how nearly every other market you’ve ever bought in actually works.

In this market it barely holds, and we can show you by how much. We took all 5,522 Medicare Advantage plans on sale for 2027 from the CMS plan file, matched each one to the 2027 star ratings CMS published on October 8, 2026, and put each plan’s rating next to what it charges. A whole extra star works out to about $3.26 a month — and it buys you something worth far more than that.

We ran the same count on the 2026 plans a year ago. Where the answer changed, we say so.

Before any of the figures below: none of them matter if a plan’s network doesn’t include your doctors. Check that first, plan by plan. Everything on this page is about choosing among the plans that pass that test.

A Whole Star Costs About $3 a Month

Of the 5,522 plans, 4,992 carry a star rating — the rest are too new to have been measured. Here’s what each rating level charges, and what it caps your spending at. The last column is the share of plans sitting at $9,850, the highest in-network limit any 2027 plan carries.

2027 star rating	Plans	Mean monthly premium	Plans with no premium	Median out-of-pocket limit	Plans at the $9,850 ceiling
2.0	4	$0.00	100.0%	$1,949	0.0%
2.5	86	$12.22	72.2%	$6,725	25.6%
3.0	638	$16.24	66.1%	$7,500	37.0%
3.5	1,210	$13.96	70.3%	$7,150	33.1%
4.0	1,802	$21.43	68.1%	$6,750	20.9%
4.5	1,144	$19.86	71.8%	$6,225	20.7%
5.0	108	$9.75	62.7%	$6,750	40.7%

Fit a straight line through the 4,640 plans that publish both a rating and a premium and it rises by $3.26 a month for each whole star — about $1.60 for the half-star steps CMS actually awards. The statistical correlation between rating and price is 0.04, which is a polite way of saying there isn’t one. For 2026 the same line rose by $1.40, so the slope has moved, but from almost nothing to still very little.

And the five-star row is once again among the cheapest groups on the table: $9.75 a month, against $21.43 for a four-star plan. Whatever the premium column is measuring, it is not quality.

The premium is only ever part of the price anyway. Every one of these plans sits on top of the Part B premium, which you pay regardless of which plan you choose. CMS has not announced the 2027 figure yet; for 2026 it is $202.90 a month.

What the Rating Does Buy You

Split the rated plans in two and the out-of-pocket limit — the cap on what a genuinely bad year can cost you — separates them far more than the premium does.

Rated plans, 2027	Plans	Mean monthly premium	Plans with no premium	Median out-of-pocket limit	Plans at the $9,850 ceiling
Four stars or better	3,054	$20.40	69.3%	$6,700	21.5%
Below four stars	1,938	$14.60	69.0%	$7,150	34.0%

The premium gap between the two groups is $5.80 a month — about $70 a year — and the share of plans charging nothing at all is identical. The out-of-pocket gap is $450 at the median, and a plan rated below four stars is more than half again as likely to leave you exposed all the way up to the ceiling. Across the file as a whole, each star is worth about $603 off that limit.

So the trade-off people expect barely exists, and to the extent it does, it is lopsided. You pay a few dollars a month more on average for the better-rated plan, and you are protected by several hundred dollars more in a bad year.

Read It Backwards and It’s Even Clearer

Now sort the plans by out-of-pocket limit instead of by stars, and ask what ratings each group turns out to carry.

Out-of-pocket limit, 2027	Rated plans	Mean star rating	Share rated four stars or better
$4,000 or less	863	3.97	70.5%
$4,001 to $7,000	1,699	3.91	66.5%
Above $7,000	2,430	3.78	54.2%
of which: at the $9,850 ceiling	1,317	3.77	50.0%

Each plan is counted once, not once per county. The first three rows add up to the 4,992 rated plans; the last row is a subset of “Above $7,000”, shown separately because the ceiling is the figure most worth avoiding.

Seven in ten of the plans with the strongest cost protection are also rated four stars or better. Exactly half the plans sitting at the ceiling are. The out-of-pocket maximum is printed on every plan’s summary of benefits and takes about four seconds to find, and it tells you more about the rest of that summary than the premium does.

Five Stars Is Cheap, but No Longer a Shortcut

Here is where 2027 differs from last year, and it matters if you were planning to filter on five stars alone.

There are 108 five-star plans for 2027, down from 227, and they belong to nine companies. They are still cheap: $9.75 a month on average, and more than six in ten charge nothing. But their cost protection is no better than the market’s. Their median out-of-pocket limit is $6,750, only a little under the market median of $7,100, and 40.7% of them sit at the $9,850 ceiling — a higher share than any other rating level on the table. For 2026 the five-star median was $4,900.

So a five-star plan is a well-run plan, by the measures CMS uses, and that is worth something. It is not automatically a plan that protects you in a bad year. Check its out-of-pocket limit exactly as you would for any other.

Five stars still opens one door no other rating does. A five-star plan can be joined once a year outside the normal windows, through the 5-Star Special Enrollment Period, which runs from December 8 to November 30. Our guide to how and when you can switch plans sets out how that works. For 2027, 24.5% of counties have a five-star plan on sale, up from 20.5%. Which companies hold those plans is in our count of which insurers actually score best.

You Don’t Have to Choose Between Them

Of the 4,640 plans that publish a rating, a premium and an out-of-pocket limit, 23.7% are rated four stars or better, charge no monthly premium, and cap your spending below the 2027 market median of $7,100. All three at once, in nearly one plan in four.

Here is the yardstick. Of those 4,640 plans, 61.0% are rated four stars or better, 69.2% charge no premium and 50.9% have a limit below the median. If the three had nothing to do with each other, you would expect 61.0% × 69.2% × 50.9% — about 21.5% — to have all three by chance. The real figure, 23.7%, is a little higher. That is a modest difference and it does not show that one quality causes another, but it does mean there is no sign of a trade-off between them. And it holds across the country, not in three lucky states. Counting every one of the 3,131 counties in the 2027 file:

• 95.1% of counties have at least one plan rated four stars or better.
• 88.4% have at least one that is rated four stars or better and charges no monthly premium.
• 24.5% have at least one five-star plan.

Nearly nine counties in ten can get a well-rated plan for nothing a month. That is a very different sentence from the one most people believe, and it is the single most useful line on this page.

The Real Spread Is Inside Your Own County

In the 2,971 counties that have five or more plans on sale for 2027, the gap between the plan with the lowest out-of-pocket limit and the plan with the highest is, in the median county, $6,050.

That is not a gap between states or between insurers. It is the gap between two plans a single person can choose from, at one address, on the same afternoon. It dwarfs every national average on this page, and unlike any of them it is entirely within your control. For scale, the median county has six parent companies and 42 plans on offer, and 56.8% of the rated ones score four stars or better. Our state-by-state analysis shows how thick or thin the market is likely to be where you live.

What to Do With This

Stop using the premium to sort the list. It carries almost no information about quality, and seven plans in ten charge nothing anyway, so it doesn’t even separate them into useful groups. We’ve written separately on what the zero in a $0 premium actually means.

Sort by the out-of-pocket maximum instead. It decides your worst year, it varies by thousands of dollars inside a single county, and as the third table shows it tracks the star rating better than the premium does.

Then read the 2027 star rating of the plan itself, not the company’s. CMS rates contracts rather than companies, and ratings moved a long way this year. Our guide to how star ratings are built sets out what the score is made of.

And check the network before you do any of it. None of the figures on this page matter if the plan doesn’t cover your doctor. Call the doctor’s office and ask whether they take that specific plan for 2027.

Questions Readers Ask

Does a five-star plan cost more than a three-star one? On average, no — it costs less: $9.75 a month against $16.24. But for 2027 its median out-of-pocket limit is only $750 lower, and a larger share of five-star plans sit at the ceiling. Cheap and well run, yes; automatically protective, no.

Your table has rows that break the pattern. It does, and we’ve left them in. The 2.0 row is four plans and the five-star row is 108, out of 4,992. At those sizes a handful of unusual plans moves a median by hundreds of dollars. The rows worth drawing conclusions from are the four that hold more than six hundred plans each — 3.0, 3.5, 4.0 and 4.5 — and on the out-of-pocket limit those four run in one direction.

Why are your figures different from the ones CMS quotes? CMS weights its averages by enrollment; we count each plan once. Ours describes what is on the shelf, theirs describes where members ended up.

Does a higher star rating mean my own care will be better? It’s evidence, not a guarantee. The rating measures things like preventive screening, medication management, complaints and how many members leave — averaged across a whole contract. A four-star plan whose network includes your doctors beats a five-star plan that doesn’t.

Bottom Line

There is almost no price premium on quality in Medicare Advantage. For 2027 a whole extra star costs about $3 a month and comes with roughly $600 off the limit on what a bad year can cost you. Nearly nine counties in ten have a four-star plan with no monthly premium. The one thing that changed this year is the five-star tier: still cheap, but no longer a reliable shortcut to cost protection.

Compare what’s sold at your own address through the official Medicare Plan Finder — our step-by-step guide shows how to read its results — or call 1-800-MEDICARE or your local State Health Insurance Assistance Program (SHIP) for free help with the comparison.

How We Counted This

Every figure here is our own count from the CY2027 Landscape file that CMS published in September 2026, reduced to one entry per distinct plan rather than one per county, which gives 5,522 plans across 3,131 counties. Each plan’s 2027 star rating comes from matching its contract to CMS’s 2027 Star Ratings data tables. Premiums are the combined Part C and Part D figure. The 2026 comparisons come from the same count on the CY2026 file.

Plans too new to be measured carry no rating and no premium, and are excluded from every figure that involves one rather than counted as zero. That’s why the rated total is 4,992 rather than 5,522, and why the three-way count is worked out over 4,640. Percentages are shares of plans, not of enrollment. The $3.26 and $603 figures are the slopes of straight lines fitted through the plan-level data. The full method is on our editorial methodology page.

Update history

• October 3, 2026 — First published, before CMS had released the 2027 star ratings.
• October 12, 2026 — Recounted from scratch after CMS published the 2027 star ratings on October 8, 2026. Every rating figure on the page changed; the 2026 results are kept as comparisons.
• October 18, 2026 — Labeled the last row of the out-of-pocket table as a subset of the row above it, showed how the 21.5% chance baseline is calculated, moved the network check to the top of the page and standardized spelling. No figures changed.

Sources

• CY2027 and CY2026 Medicare Advantage and Part D Landscape files — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, September 2026 versions. Source for the plan counts, premiums, out-of-pocket limits, the $9,850 ceiling, the county availability figures and the within-county spread. All calculations are our own.
• 2027 Star Ratings Data Tables — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, published October 8, 2026. Source for every 2027 star rating, matched contract by contract, and for ratings being assigned to contracts rather than plans. See also the 2027 Star Ratings fact sheet.
• Special Enrollment Periods — Medicare.gov. Source for the 5-Star Special Enrollment Period running from December 8 to November 30 and usable once a year.
• 2026 Medicare Parts A & B Premiums and Deductibles — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Source for the $202.90 standard Part B premium for 2026.

All figures on this page were counted from the CMS files on October 12, 2026 and rechecked on October 18, 2026. Plan availability changes; confirm what is sold at your own address on Medicare.gov before enrolling.

Disclaimer: Plan figures reflect 2027 data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and vary by state, county and plan. Always confirm current details directly with Medicare.gov, 1-800-MEDICARE, or a licensed agent before making a decision.