What Medicare Advantage plans file for agent pay, 2018 to 2026

CMS sets a maximum agent payment per member per year, higher in four rate regions and one national figure for everywhere else. For CY2026 the national number is $694. The obvious assumption is that carriers compete somewhere underneath it, the way employers pay somewhere under a salary band.

They don't. Of the 5,056 Medicare Advantage plans filed in the national rate region for CY2026, 99.6% put the initial payment at $694 on the nose. Not $690, not $650. The same pattern holds in every year we looked at, never dropping below 94.8% except once. CMS isn't capping a market here so much as setting the price for it.

That single fact is useful before anything else. If you sell an MA policy in a national-region state this year, the compensation your carrier filed is a number you can look up, and it's almost certainly $694.

The filing has two halves. Alongside that maximum, a plan states its minimum, and 95.6% of CY2026 plans state $0. The attested range for a typical Medicare Advantage plan is therefore "somewhere between nothing and $694".

Weighted by enrollment it's starker still. 28,465,681 of the 29,849,833 enrollees we could match sit in a plan filing a $0 floor. Humana, CVS Health, Elevance and Kaiser file it on 100% of their plans. UnitedHealth files it on 99.4% of theirs, covering 7.6 million people.

The share has been climbing for the whole period, from 76.0% of plans in CY2018 to 95.6% in CY2026. Carriers have been steadily withdrawing from saying what their floor is, and the CY2025 to CY2026 jump alone was nine points.

CMS doesn't define what a $0 minimum means, and we should be careful about that. A carrier might genuinely pay nothing at the bottom of its range, or it might be entering zero where another carrier leaves the field blank. What the field can't do, either way, is tell an agent what they're going to be paid.

The one part of the picture with no ambiguity is renewal. In every year from 2018 to 2026, between 99.6% and 100% of plans set renewal compensation at exactly half of the initial payment. Zero spread, zero negotiation, zero variation between the biggest carrier and the smallest.

For CY2026 that makes the national renewal figure $347. If you're being paid a renewal on an MA policy in a national-region state and it isn't $347, something in that line is wrong, and you can establish that with a calculator rather than a phone call.

The nominal maximum has risen every year, which makes the headlines look generous. Deflated by CPI-U into constant 2026 dollars, the picture is duller. The maximum peaked in 2021 at $657.86 and then fell to $643.07 by 2025, a real-terms decline of 2.2% over four years. It lost ground to inflation outright in 2022, 2024 and 2025.

CY2024 is the clearest case. The maximum went from $601 to $611, a rise of 1.7% in a year when CPI ran ahead of it, so every MA agent in the country took a real pay cut while the trade press reported an increase.

CY2026 is the correction: $626 to $694 is 10.9% nominal and 7.9% real, the largest single-year real rise in the nine years we measured.

Put the findings together and the public record gives you two things you can verify against any statement. The initial payment for a national-region MA policy is $694 for CY2026, filed by 99.6% of plans. The renewal is half of it. Both are per member per year, both are published, and neither requires anyone's permission to look up.

What the public record can't give you is your own contracted rate. For 95.6% of plans the filed floor is $0, so the range CMS holds on your carrier spans the entire distance between nothing and the maximum. Your actual rate exists in your contract and in the statements you're paid against, and nowhere else.

That's the practical reason line-by-line reconciliation matters for Medicare agents specifically. The expected value for most of your MA book is knowable to the dollar. Checking it is arithmetic against a public table, not a judgement call, and it's the kind of check that stays boring right up until the month a renewal comes through at the wrong number.

CMS publishes the compensation filings as annual bundles going back to CY2013, though the split between initial and renewal payment only starts in CY2018, so that's where our window opens. We deduped to one row per plan, since compensation is filed per county and a plan sold in 600 counties would otherwise drown out one sold in three. Standalone drug plans are excluded because they run on a schedule closer to $100 than $700.

Each year's maximum is recovered from the filings themselves rather than copied from an industry blog, then checked against the published CMS memos for 2021, 2025 and 2026 across all four rate regions. That's twelve comparisons and twelve exact matches. The pipeline refuses to write its output if any of them drift.

The full derived dataset and the methodology are published alongside the study, including the limits: a filing is what a carrier attests, not what it paid, and CMS suppresses enrollment counts of ten or fewer, which biases the weighted totals slightly against small rural plans.