Medicare Advantage by State in 2026: What Your State Offers and What a Bad Year Costs

Key findings

• The median in-network out-of-pocket maximum ranges from $2,900 in California to $9,250 in Georgia. A Georgian who picks the middle plan in the market accepts an annual exposure more than three times higher than a Californian who does the same.
• Georgia is the only state where the median plan sets its out-of-pocket limit at $9,250, the highest limit that appears anywhere in the 2026 file. Four more states have a median at or above $7,500: New York at $8,900, New Jersey at $8,875, South Carolina at $8,200, and Maryland at $7,500.
• Plan choice is wildly uneven. Florida offers 325 general enrollment plans and Pennsylvania 273, while Vermont offers 3 and Alaska has no individual Medicare Advantage plans at all in the CMS file, so Alaskans on Medicare rely on Original Medicare, employer coverage, or Medigap.
• Nationally, 66 percent of the 4,137 general enrollment plan offerings counted across state lines charge a $0 consolidated monthly premium. In Vermont all 3 remaining plans are $0, Florida sits at 90 percent, and Nevada at 88 percent, while Minnesota is lowest at 28 percent.
• Florida is the Special Needs Plan capital of the country with 286 SNPs, ahead of Texas with 151 and California with 130. SNPs serve people on both Medicare and Medicaid or with qualifying chronic conditions and are counted separately from the general enrollment figures above.
• California and Nevada, the two states with the lowest median out-of-pocket maximums at $2,900 and $2,975, are also states where a $0 premium is the norm. A low premium and a low cap are not a tradeoff everywhere.

Standalone Part D drug plans by state, 2026

Standalone prescription drug plans pair with Original Medicare or a Medigap policy. Benchmark plans have a basic premium at or below the regional threshold, so people with the full Extra Help subsidy can enroll in them with no premium. Median premium is the total monthly premium across each state's plans. Same CMS source file as the table above.

Every state offers between 8 and 12 standalone drug plans in 2026, a far narrower market than Medicare Advantage. Premiums still spread widely: in Wisconsin the median standalone drug plan charges no monthly premium at all, while the median is $107.00 in California and $110.90 in New York. Each state also has only 1 to 4 benchmark plans, the ones people with full Extra Help can join without paying a premium, so when one of them changes or leaves, lower income enrollees feel it most.

Methodology

We downloaded the CMS CY2026 Medicare Advantage and Part D Landscape source file, release 202608, and aggregated it by state. Plan counts are distinct plan segments offered in each state, split into general enrollment plans and Special Needs Plans using the CMS SNP indicator. A plan counts as $0 premium when its consolidated monthly premium, Part C plus Part D, is zero, or when a plan without drug coverage has a zero Part C premium. The median out-of-pocket maximum is computed across each state's general enrollment plans using the in-network figure CMS publishes for each plan. Counts describe distinct plans offered somewhere in the state; not every plan is available in every county, and territories are not included. The Los Angeles County subset of this same pipeline was verified against figures CMS published for Los Angeles County.

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