They declared!
Who? The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
What did they declare? The IRMAA surcharge amounts for 2026.
Congress created IRMAA in 2003 as part of the Medicare Modernization Act. It was created to increase the values in the trust fund that supports Medicare by having higher-income Americans pay additional surcharges above and beyond their Medicare Part B and D premiums.
Congress also gave the CMS authority to adjust the brackets annually based on CPI movement. But here’s the real kicker…CMS also has the authority to adjust the surcharge itself, which is the actual amount Americans pay. And that authority is what makes the trust fund that supports Medicare Part B and D programs one of the most financially sustainable and funded programs around. Because they can, without passing a new law, declare higher surcharges.
Historically, based on the IRMAA charts on CMS.gov from previous years, the declared surcharge increases for the new year have been 4-8% higher than the previous year. Since 2019, the surcharges have risen at an annual compounded rate of 7.1%. Last year, the increase was 5.9%.
So that leads me to 2026.
Preliminary projections suggested that this year’s IRMAA surcharge increase would be a modest 1% for Part B and 6% for Part D.
But boy did those projections miss the mark.
I pulled the official CMS tables for both 2025 and 2026 to compare the tables. I combined the Part B IRMAA surcharge + the Part D IRMAA amount for each income tier. I then calculated the dollar and percent change from 2025 to 2026. The results blew me away. And not in a good way.
The average combined surcharge will rise by 9.1% in 2026! That’s right. A historic increase.
The dollar amount increases range from just under $8/month for the lowest surcharge tier to over $48/month for the highest tier. Per month. Per person.
To be fair, the MAGI thresholds will also change slightly. For example, the lower threshold moved from $106k to $109k for single filers. So, it does take slightly more income to qualify for the surcharge. But if you qualify, it’s for a historically higher amount.
Here is what the table looks like with a year-by-year analysis of each tier.
Combined IRMAA — Part B + Part D (2025 to 2026)
All numbers are monthly amounts (dollars).
(Part B and Part D surcharge lines taken from CMS fact sheets for 2025 and 2026.)
In summary, we knew that the surcharges were on the rise. And many of us were budgeting on the high end of the 4-8% historical range.
But 2026 is proving to be different. The surcharge increase is a historic 9.1%.
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