Carrier Exits, Confirmed: What the 2027 Data Actually Shows.

The map is published. CMS released its 2027 Medicare Open Enrollment materials on September 28, plan data went live on Medicare.gov October 1, and the non-renewal letters are in mailboxes now. Here is the part that will not make a headline: nationally, the number of Medicare Advantage plans available in 2027 fell by about twenty. That is a rounding error on a base of five and a half thousand. The disruption in your book is real anyway — because it is not distributed nationally, and the national number is built to hide exactly that.

In August we wrote that the authoritative 2027 exit map publishes October 1 and that anyone selling you one before then was guessing. This is that follow-up: the preliminary figures from that post, checked against CMS's own data, read at the altitude your book actually lives at.

How Many Medicare Advantage Plans Are Available in 2027?

About 5,530, against 5,553 in 2026. That figure, and everything else in this section, comes from CMS's own announcement — Medicare Advantage and Medicare Prescription Drug Programs Expected to Remain Stable in 2027, published September 28, 2026. Alongside it CMS published a state-by-state fact sheet for every state, the District of Columbia and the territories, dated the same day.

What CMS reports nationally for 2027:

• Medicare Advantage enrollment projected at 34 million people, roughly 47.4% of everyone enrolled in Medicare.
• The weighted average MA premium falls from $14.37 to $12.00 — a decrease CMS puts at 16.5%.
• More than 99% of people with Medicare have access to at least one MA plan, and 97% have access to at least ten.
• The average stand-alone Part D premium rises, from $35.09 to about $36.
• Open Enrollment runs October 15 through December 7, 2026. Plan Finder opened for shopping October 1, and the 2027 Star Ratings posted October 8.

Read that list cold and the market looks placid, which is roughly what CMS's headline says. Nothing in it is wrong. It is the wrong altitude for an agent. A national average premium cannot tell you what happened in a county, and a net plan count cannot tell you what happened to a plan — a county that loses four and gains four looks identical to one where nothing moved.

Which States Lost the Most Medicare Advantage Plans for 2027?

Of the 51 jurisdictions whose CMS fact sheet carries a 2026-to-2027 plan comparison — 49 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico — 29 have fewer MA plans available in 2027, 21 have more, and one is unchanged. Counting the comparisons CMS published in each sheet, the largest declines are:

• Florida: 611 plans in 2026 to 560 in 2027 — a loss of 51, the largest in the country.
• Ohio: 212 to 180. A loss of 32.
• Illinois: 157 to 136. A loss of 21.
• Maryland: 63 to 47 and Minnesota: 68 to 53 — smaller absolute numbers, larger proportional hits, at roughly a quarter and a fifth of each state's lineup.
• Wyoming: 14 to 8. The most severe proportional contraction of any state, and a reminder that thin markets thin further.

Meanwhile the same data shows real expansion. Tennessee went from 132 plans to 155, Missouri from 157 to 174, and Alabama and Arizona each added 15. Whatever is happening in 2027, "carriers are leaving Medicare Advantage" is not a description of it. Carriers are re-sorting — and if your book sits in Tennessee the market got wider while the trade press said it got narrower.

One honest caveat about those state numbers, because it matters if you check our arithmetic: they do not add up to the national total, and they are not supposed to. A plan offered in several states appears in each of those states' fact sheets, so summing the sheets double-counts. The state figures are the right tool for direction and magnitude within a state; CMS's roughly 5,530 is the national count. Also worth knowing: Alaska's 2027 fact sheet contains no Medicare Advantage section at all — only stand-alone Part D.

Non-Renewal, Service Area Reduction, or Crosswalk?

This is the distinction that decides what you can actually do for a client, and it is the one agents most often collapse. Three different things can happen to a plan between 2026 and 2027, they generate near-identical phone calls, and they leave your client in three different legal positions.

A crosswalk is the mechanism by which members move from one plan to another inside the same carrier's contract without applying for anything. Under 42 CFR 422.530(a)(1), a crosswalk is "the movement of enrollees from one plan (or plan benefit package (PBP)) to another plan (or PBP) under a contract between the MA organization and CMS." The regulation permits a renewal crosswalk, where next year's plan links to this year's and keeps the whole service area, and a consolidated renewal, which combines two or more complete plans of the same plan type. Crosswalks between different plan types are prohibited except by exception.

A non-renewal or a service area reduction is the other outcome. Under section 60.2.7 of CMS's Medicare Advantage and Part D Enrollment and Disenrollment Guidance, plans are required to disenroll an individual when the contract is terminated or discontinued, or when the service area is reduced and the member's address is no longer inside it. The plan must give the affected enrollee the effective date and "a description of alternatives for obtaining benefits under the Medicare program."

Why this matters on a live call: a consolidated client has no Special Enrollment Period and may not have received a non-renewal letter, while a non-renewed client has both. Both of them call you in October saying their plan changed. The consolidated client is describing an ANOC — different benefits, possibly a different network, same enrollment, and no extra time. The non-renewed client is describing a disenrollment, and has a window that runs well past AEP. Ask which letter they are holding before you plan around it.

Why Are the Non-Renewal Letters Arriving Right Now?

Because the regulation sets the clock. 42 CFR 422.506(a)(2) requires an MA organization that is not renewing to notify CMS in writing "by the first Monday in June of the year in which the contract would end," and to notify "each Medicare enrollee by mail at least 90 calendar days before the date on which the nonrenewal is effective."

For a non-renewal effective January 1, 2027, ninety days back lands in the first days of October. That is the whole explanation for why these letters, the ANOCs and Plan Finder all land on top of each other, and it is why the first two weeks of October are structurally the most information-dense stretch of your year. It also means the carriers' side of this was settled in June. Nothing about the 2027 map has been in flux since early summer; only your visibility into it was.

What Special Enrollment Period Do Affected Clients Get?

For a plan non-renewed effective January 1, the SEP begins December 8 and ends the last day of the following February. That is section 30.6.10(A) of the CMS enrollment and disenrollment guidance cited above, which keys to 42 CFR 422.62(b)(1), 422.74(e)(2)(ii) and 423.38(c)(6). The effective dates run on a schedule worth memorizing, because it is the part that changes how you sequence calls:

• Request received December 8 through December 31 → effective January 1.
• Request received in January → effective February 1.
• Request received in February → effective March 1.

A separate SEP covers termination by the carrier mid-year rather than non-renewal at year end: under section 30.6.10(B), it begins two months before the termination effective date and ends one month after the month of termination. And there is an exception inside section 60.2.7 worth knowing — when a carrier discontinues a plan in only part of its service area, it may offer affected members the option to continue enrollment in one of its local plans, provided no other MA plan is available in the affected area. In that situation the member may be asked to agree to receive basic benefits exclusively through designated facilities.

Two cautions. First, CMS states in the guidance's own preamble that the document "does not have the force and effect of law" and is intended to clarify existing requirements; it is also versioned, and CMS updates it. Confirm the current-year language before you rely on a window in a sales conversation. Second, eligibility for any specific client is CMS's call and the plan's, not yours — 1-800-MEDICARE is the authority on whether a given person has a given SEP.

Most of the market stops selling on December 7. For a non-renewed client, the clock has eleven more weeks on it.

Working the Disruption List: Now Through December 7

You now have what you did not have in August — a real list. The work is turning it into calls in the right order.

First — if it is not already done — pull your book by carrier, plan ID and county and run it against Plan Finder, live since October 1. You are sorting into three buckets, not one: non-renewed or outside the new service area, crosswalked into a different plan, and genuinely unchanged. The first keeps a December 8 flag. The second gets an ANOC review. The third gets a short courtesy call, which is the cheapest retention you will buy all season.

Layer in the Star Ratings, live on Plan Finder since October 8. Carriers have been candid that the plans they cut are the weakest ones, so ratings tell you which of your remaining lineup may be next year's problem.

Check your appointments against the replacements now — AEP is already running. If the surviving plans in a client's county are with carriers you are not appointed with, the disruption is not the problem — your lineup is, and appointment and certification lead times do not compress because you found the gap late.

From December 8, work whatever is left of bucket one. Every non-renewed client you could not reach during AEP is still workable into the last day of February, against a market that has mostly gone quiet.

Replacement Analysis: What Actually Has to Match

A replacement plan is not a comparable plan because the premium is similar. For a disrupted client, four things decide whether the switch holds:

• Plan type. This is the quiet one. A client moving from a PPO to an HMO is moving from out-of-network coverage to, generally, none outside emergencies — and is unlikely to register that from a benefits summary. UnitedHealthcare's 2027 service-area reductions have been reported to fall about two-thirds on PPO policies, which makes plan type the first thing to check rather than the last.
• Providers. Verify each physician the client actually uses against the 2027 directory, not the 2026 one, and not from memory.
• The drug list. Formulary and tier placement for the specific medications the client takes. A tier change on one maintenance drug can outweigh the entire premium difference.
• Maximum out-of-pocket. The number that decides what a bad year costs, and the one least likely to come up unprompted.

For some of these clients the better answer is not another MA plan at all. A member losing coverage in a thinning county may be served better by a Medicare Supplement — but that move is not symmetrical. Whether they face medical underwriting, or hold a guaranteed-issue right, turns on state law and individual circumstance and has to be confirmed with the carrier and against the client's own documents. It is not a rule of thumb, and the door does not always reopen. If Med Supp is not a line you write, you are referring away business that walked into your lap.

What the Carriers Have Said, and What We Are Leaving Out

Two carrier-specific figures from the August post can be updated, and both remain carrier statements reported in the trade press rather than CMS data — label them that way when you repeat them.

Humana confirmed on its July 29, 2026 earnings call that its 2027 exits would affect approximately 600,000 members. Reporting since puts that at about 8% of its roughly 7.2 million MA members, concentrated in plans rated 3.5 stars or lower for the 2027 bonus year, with CFO Celeste Mellet describing the approach as cutting off the lower tail of profitability rather than thinning benefits across the portfolio. UnitedHealthcare's 2027 service-area reduction has been reported at 34 counties across 12 states, roughly two-thirds of it PPO business, with non-renewal notices dated the first days of October.

What we are deliberately not publishing: the industry-wide totals now circulating in agent groups and aggregator posts — a count of counties left with no MA plan at all, and a multi-million figure for enrollees "forced to shop." We tried to source both and could not. The county figure appears in two incompatible forms in the same week, one describing counties with zero plans and one describing a single carrier's county exits, using the same number for both. That is the conflation that made us exclude the Aetna and Elevance county counts in August. A number we cannot stand behind is worth less to you than the admission that we could not confirm it.

Where Carrier Breadth Actually Pays

The 2027 data makes the argument better than we could. Twenty-nine jurisdictions lost plans and twenty-one gained them, which means the agent whose practice runs on three carriers is holding a bet on geography nobody placed deliberately. When a county re-sorts, the agent who can only offer what left loses the client; the agent with alternatives keeps them, and usually picks up the neighbors who got the same letter.

Benefits Life contracts across 280+ carriers in 5 lines of business — Medicare Advantage, Medicare Supplement and the ancillary lines that matter most precisely when a rich MA benefits package disappears. One relationship, and a lineup wide enough that a carrier's retreat from your county is a conversation rather than a crisis.

The Bottom Line

The 2027 exits are confirmed, and they are smaller nationally than the coverage suggests and more severe locally than the national figures can show. CMS has the plan count down about twenty nationwide while 29 of 51 jurisdictions lost plans, Florida lost 51, Wyoming went from 14 to 8, and 14 places lost plans and saw premiums rise in the same year. "Premiums are down 16.5%" is true, and it is not your client's experience.

The operational content is narrower than the market analysis, and worth more. Find out which of your clients were non-renewed rather than crosswalked, because only one of those groups has a Special Enrollment Period — and it runs to the last day of February while the rest of the market stops on December 7. Check your appointments against what survived in your counties today, not in November. And if the honest answer is that your lineup cannot cover what is left in a county you work, that is what this data is telling you to fix. The fixing takes longer than the weeks of AEP you have left.