IRMAA brackets by year

How has the IRMAA income threshold changed year by year?

The table below follows the first bracket line, the MAGI level above which the lowest surcharge tier begins, together with each year's standard Part B premium and deductible. Those three figures appear in the same Federal Register notice each fall, so they move as a set. The Part B premium guide explains how the premium amount itself gets set.

Source: the Federal Register notice for each year, cited per row in the complete tier table below.

The first threshold has risen from $80,000 to $109,000 over the life of the program, an increase of about 36 percent, while the standard premium went from $93.50 to $202.90. The biggest single-year threshold moves came in 2023 and 2024, $6,000 each, the delayed echo of 2021 and 2022 inflation working through the indexing formula.

The premium is not a one-way ratchet. It fell to $99.90 in 2012 from $115.40 the year before, and fell again in 2023 to $164.90 from $170.10. The joint threshold is exactly double the single figure at the first tier in every year of the dataset.

What were the full IRMAA brackets for each year?

This is the complete tier structure since the surcharge began. Each break is the MAGI level where a tier starts; the surcharges are monthly, per person, and sit on top of that year's standard premium. Years through 2018 had four surcharge tiers. A fifth, top tier was added in 2019 and its breaks appear as the final figure in the 2019 and later rows.

Each link opens the full text of that year's notice, "Medicare Program; Medicare Part B Monthly Actuarial Rates, Premium Rates, and Annual Deductible," at govinfo.gov.

The 2018 row is the one secondary tables most often get wrong. MACRA compressed the upper brackets that year: the fourth tier began at $133,500 instead of $160,000, and the top tier dropped to $160,000 from $214,000 ($267,000 and $320,000 for joint filers). The surcharge dollar amounts did not move at all, which is exactly why the error spreads: a table that copies the 2017 boundaries into 2018 still shows the right prices, just attached to the wrong incomes.

2009 holds a smaller trap. The top tier that year began at $213,000 single and $426,000 joint, one notch below the $214,000 and $428,000 used from 2010 through 2017. The upper tiers were still inflation-indexed in the early years, so 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 each have their own boundaries; templating 2009 off any neighboring year produces a wrong row.

The top of the schedule tells the growth story in one line: a top-tier enrollee paid $161.40 a month for Part B in 2007 and pays $689.90 in 2026. Since 2019 the joint break for that tier has been $750,000, set at 1.5 times the $500,000 single amount where every other tier doubles.

When are new IRMAA brackets announced?

CMS publishes each year's premiums and brackets the preceding fall. The recent record:

Dates are the CMS fact sheet publication dates for the two most recent years and Federal Register publication dates before that.

Five of those seven announcements landed in November. The exceptions are real and worth knowing: the 2023 figures arrived early, on September 29, 2022, and the 2024 figures on October 17, 2023. For years before 2020, the primary record of the date is the Federal Register notice itself; the publication date is part of each citation in the full bracket table above, going back to the 2007 figures published in September 2006.

So when will the 2027 brackets be announced? Expect fall 2026, most likely mid-November if CMS follows its two most recent announcements (November 8, 2024 and November 14, 2025), though September and October have both happened within the last four cycles. Until then, the projected 2027 brackets carry our computed estimates, and the projected 2028 brackets extend the same method one year further out.

How has the IRMAA law changed since 2007?

The surcharge was created by the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 and took effect in 2007, phased in over three years: beneficiaries paid 33 percent of the full adjustment in 2007, 67 percent in 2008, and the whole amount from 2009 on. That phase-in explains the small first-year surcharges in the table. The top surcharge jumped from $67.90 in 2007 to $211.90 in 2009 mainly because the discount expired, not because Part B costs tripled.

The Affordable Care Act made two changes starting in 2011. It extended IRMAA to Part D drug coverage, and it froze the income thresholds at their 2010 levels through 2019. The statutory freeze ran nine years, 2011 through 2019, and the $85,000 line it held had already been in place since 2009, so the first threshold sat still for eleven years in all while incomes rose, drawing more filers into the surcharge without a single bracket moving.

MACRA then compressed the upper brackets beginning in 2018, detailed above. The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 added the fifth tier beginning in 2019, starting at $500,000 single and $750,000 joint; those two figures were set by statute and stayed frozen through 2027; the same statute starts inflation-indexing them in 2028. Annual inflation indexing of the other thresholds resumed in 2020 and continues today.

Are published IRMAA history tables accurate?

Often not, and the errors are old enough to be widely copied. A history table is only as good as its worst row. Two documented problems circulate in secondary sources: the 2018 row rendered with 2017 boundaries, described above, and a subtler 2007 problem. The original notice of September 18, 2006 computed the surcharges at 33 1/3 percent of the adjustment. A correction notice four days later recomputed them at the 33 percent the statute actually specified, and a second correction that October fixed one leftover figure. The corrected amounts, $12.30 through $67.90 a month, are what beneficiaries were billed and what this page shows. Any source that scraped only the first notice publishes 2007 surcharges that were never charged to anyone.

Every row here was read from the full text of its year's Federal Register notice, and the citation on the row links to that text at govinfo.gov. Announcement dates before 2024 are Federal Register publication dates, since CMS press-release dates for those years cannot be confirmed from primary sources. The tables cover single and joint filers; married-filing-separately structures for past years are not included here, and the current rules for that status live in the married filing separately guide. When CMS announces the 2027 figures, every table on this page gains a row the same week.

Which year do you need?

For the years currently in force, the 2025 IRMAA brackets and 2026 IRMAA brackets pages carry the full Part B and Part D tables with tier-by-tier premiums. The 2027 page and 2028 page hold labeled projections until CMS publishes. The IRMAA calculator checks any MAGI against the current lines.