How Many Medicare Advantage Plans Are There in 2027? And How Many You Can Actually Join

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.

It’s a simple question with an annoyingly slippery answer. Search it and you’ll be told there are a little over 3,000 Medicare Advantage plans. Search it somewhere else and you’ll be told 5,500. Neither site is lying to you, and neither number is the one you actually need.

We count 5,522 in the CMS plan file for 2027 — the plans on sale in the enrollment window that opened on October 15. But the figure that matters isn’t the national total at all — it’s how many of those plans are open to you, in your county, without qualifying for anything first. And that turns out to be a much smaller number than either headline suggests, because 1,969 of the 5,522 have an eligibility gate on the door, up from 1,800 a year ago.

Here’s the full count, why the published totals disagree, and what the gated third of the market actually looks like — because it’s built very differently from the rest, in ways that would surprise most people who assume a restricted plan means a worse one.

The Short Answer

• 5,522 Medicare Advantage plans are on sale somewhere in the United States for 2027. For 2026 it was 5,553.
• 3,553 of those are ordinary plans anyone with Medicare in that area can join, down from 3,753.
• 1,969 — 35.7% — are special needs plans, which you can only join if you meet a specific condition. A year ago it was 1,800.
• The median county has 42 plans on offer and 18 gated ones, and the median count of ungated plans is 23. So a typical shopper is really choosing between about twenty-three — three fewer than last year.

Twenty-three is a very different problem from 5,522. It’s still more than anyone wants to read through, but it’s a list you could genuinely get to the bottom of in an evening.

That list also got shorter this year: the median county had 26 ungated plans in 2026. What else moved between the two years is in our count of the 2027 plans against the 2026 ones.

Why You’ll See Two Very Different Totals Quoted for the Same Year

This one has an exact answer rather than a fudge, and it comes down to two deliberate choices about what to count.

The lower figure — for 2026, KFF counted 3,373 — excludes special needs plans, on the reasonable grounds that most people can’t join one, and counts a plan as one plan even when it’s sold in several versions with different prices in different places. Our count, 5,553 for that same year, includes the special needs plans, because a large part of this site is about who qualifies for one, and counts those separate versions separately, because two versions with different premiums and different spending caps are two different offers to two different readers.

The two reconcile to the plan. Take the 2026 file, drop the special needs plans, ignore the versions, and you get 3,373 — KFF’s number exactly. Keep both and you get 5,553. Do the same to the 2027 file and the pair becomes 3,195 and 5,522. KFF had not published its own 2027 count when we wrote this, so 3,195 is what its method produces on the new file rather than a figure it has printed. We’ve set the whole thing out with the arithmetic on our editorial methodology page, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

What neither figure tells you is how many plans are open to you. That’s the question the rest of this article is about.

What the Gate Actually Is

A special needs plan, or SNP, is a Medicare Advantage plan restricted to people in one particular situation. There are exactly three kinds, and the split between them is lopsided.

Type	Plans, 2027	Plans, 2026	Who it’s for
Dual-eligible (D-SNP)	1,052	1,082	People who have both Medicare and Medicaid
Chronic condition (C-SNP)	754	562	People with a qualifying long-term illness
Institutional (I-SNP)	163	156	People living in a nursing home or needing that level of care

More than half of the gated market is one category: plans for people who have Medicaid as well as Medicare. Our guide to how Medicare and Medicaid fit together covers who ends up with both, and it’s a larger group than most people assume — roughly one Medicare beneficiary in five. All of this year’s growth, though, is in the middle row: chronic condition plans went from 562 to 754 in a single year, while the dual-eligible count slipped.

Which is the point worth making before we go any further: “gated” doesn’t mean “closed to you”. If you have a qualifying chronic condition, hundreds of those plans are open to you and they may well be better than the ungated ones. Our guide to what a special needs plan is and who qualifies goes through the eligibility rules properly. What the gate does mean is that the national plan count is not your plan count, and nobody tells you that when they quote it.

In Your County, More Than Four Plans in Ten Are Gated

National averages hide a lot, so we counted it county by county across all 3,131 of them.

• In the median county, 43% of the plans on sale are special needs plans — 18 out of 42. A year ago it was 39%.
• In 567 counties, more than half of everything on offer is gated. For 2026 that was true of 221.
• In 58 counties, there are no special needs plans at all. If you’d qualify for one, you can’t use it there.

That last line is the one people get caught by. Qualifying for a special needs plan is a matter of your circumstances; having one available is a matter of your address, and the two have nothing to do with each other. Our state-by-state analysis gives a sense of how thick or thin your local market is likely to be before you go looking.

The Gated Third Is Built Completely Differently

Here’s where the count stops being trivia and starts being useful. We put the two halves of the 2027 market side by side, with last year’s limit next to this year’s, and the two halves are barely recognizable as the same product.

2027, counted from the CMS plan file	Plans	Plans with no premium	Median out-of-pocket limit	Same limit in 2026	Plans at the $9,850 ceiling
Ordinary plans (no gate)	3,553	66.1%	$6,600	$5,900	10.8%
Special needs plans	1,969	75.6%	$9,850	$9,250	59.5%
All 5,522 plans	5,522	69.7%	$7,100	$6,500	28.2%

Start with quality, which has changed. On the 2026 star ratings, special needs plans and ordinary plans were rated almost identically — 3.94 stars against 3.92, and 59.7% of the rated ones at four stars against 60.9%. On the 2027 ratings, which CMS published on October 8, 2026, a gap has opened: special needs plans average 3.81 against 3.88, and 50.9% reach four stars against 66.2% of ordinary plans. As the type-by-type table below shows, almost all of that gap is in the dual-eligible plans; the institutional plans are still the best-rated group in the file. So a restricted plan is not a lower-grade product as such — but for 2027 the dual-eligible ones, as a group, are rated below the rest of the market.

Now look at the last column, because it’s extraordinary. The median ordinary plan caps your in-network spending at $6,600, and about one in ten sits at the $9,850 legal maximum. Among special needs plans the median is the legal maximum, and 59.5% of them sit right at it.

That is a more than five-fold difference in how many plans offer you the least protection the law permits, between two halves of the same market that CMS rates within a few tenths of a star of each other. The premium column, meanwhile, has flipped. In 2026 special needs plans were much less likely than ordinary ones to be free, 39.8% against 65.4%. For 2027 they are more likely: 75.6% against 66.1%.

Why That Ceiling Figure Isn’t as Alarming as It Looks

We’re not going to leave that hanging, because for most of the plans concerned there’s a good explanation and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise.

Split the gated plans by type and the pattern sorts itself out immediately.

Special needs plans by type, 2027	Plans	Mean premium	No premium	Median out-of-pocket limit	At the ceiling	Mean star rating, 2027
Dual-eligible (D-SNP)	1,052	$4.72	68.6%	$9,850	82.9%	3.73
Chronic condition (C-SNP)	754	$1.16	92.4%	$6,750	24.4%	3.86
Institutional (I-SNP)	163	$11.66	42.3%	$9,850	71.2%	4.25

The ceiling problem is concentrated almost entirely in the dual-eligible plans — 82.9% of them — and those are the plans whose members also have Medicaid. For someone with full Medicaid, Medicare cost-sharing is largely picked up by Medicaid rather than paid out of pocket, so a high nominal ceiling is much less meaningful than it would be on an ordinary plan. It’s a number on a document that most of those members will never reach into their own savings to pay. Institutional plans are a similar story for similar reasons.

That said, “largely” is doing real work in that sentence, and the extent of the protection depends on which Medicaid category you’re in. If you have Medicaid and you’re looking at a plan with a $9,850 ceiling, that’s a question to put to 1-800-MEDICARE or your state Medicaid office rather than something to assume.

The Chronic Condition Plans Are the Cheapest in the File, and No Longer the Best Protected

Now read the middle row of that table again, because it’s the most useful finding in this whole article, and it is the one that changed most between 2026 and 2027.

The 754 chronic condition plans are the cheapest group we have measured anywhere. 92.4% of them charge no monthly premium at all, against 66.1% of ordinary plans, and where they do charge, they charge very little: their mean premium is $1.16 a month, against $25.14 on an ordinary plan. On the 2026 ratings, 69.0% of the rated ones scored four stars or better, comfortably above the 60.5% market figure; on the 2027 ratings it is 59.1%, just under the market’s 61.2%.

What they are not, anymore, is better protected. In 2026 their median out-of-pocket limit was $5,200, well below the $5,900 of the ordinary market, and we called them a bargain on all three counts. For 2027 that median is $6,750, a shade above the ordinary market’s $6,600. That is a rise of $1,550 in one year, more than twice the rise on ordinary plans. So the honest summary has changed: cheaper, about as well rated and about as well protected as an ordinary plan — not better. The catch is still the gate itself, and it’s a gate a great many people over sixty-five can walk straight through.

How straight through depends entirely on which condition you have, and the file is blunt about it. Of the 754 chronic condition plans, 662 target the same three conditions bundled together: cardiovascular disorders, chronic heart failure and diabetes. Another 40 are for chronic kidney disease and 32 for chronic lung disorders. Everything else — mental health conditions, HIV, transplant patients — comes to fewer than a dozen plans in the entire country.

So if you have heart disease or diabetes, this is a real market with hundreds of plans in it. If you have something rarer, the category technically exists and practically doesn’t.

Which means the practical advice here is uncomfortably simple. If you have a long-term condition and you have never checked whether a C-SNP is sold in your county, you may be shopping in the more expensive half of your local market for no reason at all. Just read the out-of-pocket limit on the one you find before you sign, because for 2027 a low one is no longer something you can assume.

Who Sells the Gated Plans

One more angle, because it explains something about the companies themselves. Of the large insurers, the share of the catalog given over to special needs plans varies enormously.

Insurer (100+ plans), 2027	Total plans	Special needs plans	Share of its catalog
Centene (WellCare)	210	100	47.6%
Elevance Health (Anthem)	308	144	46.8%
Devoted Health	740	333	45.0%
UnitedHealth Group	852	362	42.5%
CVS Health (Aetna)	654	190	29.1%
Humana	861	240	27.9%
Kaiser Permanente	117	30	25.6%
Health Care Service Corporation	200	51	25.5%
Highmark Health	108	7	6.5%

Nearly half of the WellCare and Anthem catalogs is gated, and barely a fifteenth of Highmark’s is. UnitedHealth sells more special needs plans than anyone in absolute terms — 362 of them — with Devoted Health close behind on 333.

This matters for a reason that has nothing to do with judging the companies. If you’re looking at a company-level figure anywhere — an average premium, an average spending cap, a star rating — the mix behind it is different for every insurer, and a company that is half special needs plans will look very different on paper from one that is a fifteenth. It’s one more reason the company average is close to useless once you have a shortlist, as our count of which insurers actually score best sets out at length.

What to Do With This

Ignore the national plan count entirely. Whether it’s 3,195 or 5,522 makes no difference to you. Pull up the plans sold at your own address and count those, and expect roughly four in ten of them to be plans with a gate.

Check whether you’re through one of the gates before you shop. If you have Medicaid as well as Medicare, or a long-term condition, or you’re in a nursing home, the gated plans are your market too — and in the case of the chronic condition plans, they’re the cheaper half of it. Our guide to who is eligible for Medicare Advantage covers the basic requirements, and the special needs plan guide covers the extra ones.

If a plan has a $9,850 ceiling, find out why before you dismiss it — or accept it. On an ordinary plan that ceiling is a genuine weakness. On a dual-eligible plan it’s usually a formality. Same number, completely different meaning, and only one of them should worry you.

Frequently Asked Questions

So how many Medicare Advantage plans are there in 2027? 5,522 by our count of the CMS file, of which 3,553 are open to anyone with Medicare in the relevant area and 1,969 are special needs plans. For 2026 the same count gave 5,553. If you see a figure a little over 3,000 quoted, that’s the same market counted without the special needs plans and without splitting plans into their regional versions.

How many can I choose from? In the median county 42 plans are on sale, and the median number with no eligibility gate is 23. Some counties have far more and some have a handful, so the only count that’s really yours is the one on the Medicare Plan Finder for your own ZIP code.

Are special needs plans worse than ordinary plans? A little, on the 2027 ratings: they average 3.81 stars against 3.88, and 50.9% reach four stars against 66.2%. Almost all of that gap is in the dual-eligible plans; institutional plans are the best-rated group in the file. For 2026 the two halves were rated almost identically. Their out-of-pocket limits are much higher, but that’s mostly concentrated in the dual-eligible plans, where Medicaid generally covers the cost-sharing anyway.

I have diabetes. Does that get me into a special needs plan? It’s one of the qualifying conditions for a chronic condition SNP, but the plan has to be sold in your county and you have to be able to document the diagnosis. Worth checking, because those plans are the cheapest on the market — nine in ten charge no premium at all — although for 2027 their out-of-pocket limits are about the same as an ordinary plan’s rather than lower. Start with the eligibility rules in our special needs plan guide, then check availability on Medicare.gov.

Why do different websites give different numbers for the same year? Because they’re answering slightly different questions and rarely saying which. The two main choices are whether to include special needs plans and whether to count a plan’s regional versions separately. Both are defensible. Not saying which you used isn’t.

Bottom Line

There are 5,522 Medicare Advantage plans for 2027 and the number is nearly useless to you. More than a third of them have a gate on the door, the median county offers 42 plans and about 23 without a gate, and the gated third is a completely different animal — rated a little lower for 2027, far more likely to leave your spending uncapped in name, and in the case of the chronic condition plans, the cheapest plans on sale anywhere.

If you take one thing from this: find out which side of the gate you’re on before you start comparing anything. It changes which half of your local market you should be reading, and for a lot of people it changes it in their favor.

Check what’s actually sold at your address through the official Medicare Plan Finder, or call 1-800-MEDICARE or your local State Health Insurance Assistance Program (SHIP) for free help working out which plans you qualify for.

How We Counted This

Every 2027 figure here is our own count from the CY2027 Landscape file that CMS released on September 22, 2026, and revised on September 30. The 2026 comparisons come from the CY2026 file, in its September 2026 version, processed by the same code. The 2027 star ratings come from the 2027 Star Ratings data tables CMS published on October 8, 2026, matched to each plan through its contract. We keep the MA, MA-PD and SNP categories and exclude stand-alone Part D plans, Cost plans and employer group plans, then reduce the file to one entry per distinct plan nationally rather than one per county. That gives 5,522 plans across 3,131 counties for 2027. Gated and ungated are taken from the file’s own special needs plan indicator, and the three types from its SNP type field.

Star figures are given for both years and labeled; plans too new to be rated are left out of them rather than counted as zero. “No premium” means no monthly premium for medical and drug coverage together, and plans the file gives no premium figure for are excluded from those shares rather than counted as zero. Percentages are shares of plans, not of enrollment. One detail on the county figures: the three medians are each worked out separately across all 3,131 counties, so they are not meant to subtract from one another — the median county has 42 plans, the median number of gated plans is 18, and the median number of ungated plans is 23. The full method, including the exact reconciliation with KFF’s 3,373 for 2026, is on our editorial methodology page.

Sources

• CY2027 Medicare Advantage and Part D Landscape file — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, released September 22, 2026, and revised September 30, 2026. Source for every 2027 figure in this article: the 5,522 plans, the 1,969 special needs plans and their three types, the per-county counts and shares, the premiums, the out-of-pocket limits and the insurer-by-insurer shares. All calculations are our own, by the method above.
• CY2026 Medicare Advantage and Part D Landscape file — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, September 2026 version. Source for every 2026 comparison figure, including the 2026 star ratings, counted by the same method.
• Special Needs Plans (SNP) — Medicare.gov. Source for the three categories of special needs plan and the eligibility principle behind each.
• Medicare Advantage 2026 Spotlight: A First Look at Plan Offerings — KFF. Source for the 3,373 plan count for 2026 and for the counting choices behind it.
• 2027 Star Ratings Data Tables — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, published October 8, 2026. Source for every 2027 star figure, matched contract by contract, and for ratings being assigned to contracts rather than to plans.

All plan figures on this page were counted from the two CMS files on October 4, 2026, and the 2027 star ratings on October 12, 2026. Plan availability changes; confirm what is sold at your own address on Medicare.gov before enrolling.

Disclaimer: Plan figures and star ratings reflect 2027 data, with 2026 comparisons, 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.