2027 Medicare Advantage Star Ratings: Results by Carrier and What They Mean

Reviewed by Russell Noga, Licensed Medicare Insurance Broker (all 50 states) — Last updated October 27, 2026

Every Medicare Advantage plan carries a star rating from one to five, and that number sits next to the plan everywhere you shop. It is the closest thing Medicare has to a quality score, it is calculated by the federal government rather than the carrier, and most people glance at it for two seconds and move on to the premium.

This guide covers what the 2027 ratings show, where the major carriers stood going into this year, what changed in how the scores are calculated, and how to use the rating without over-trusting it while Annual Enrollment is open, from October 15 through December 7, 2026.

Here is how the major carriers came out of the October 8 release. The biggest story is Humana, which went from the bottom of the large carriers to the top in a single year.

Source: CMS 2027 Star Ratings data and carrier announcements, October 2026. Ratings apply by contract, so the plan sold in your county may differ.

The 15 contracts that earned 5 stars for 2027:

Source: CMS 2027 Star Ratings. Five-star plans are not sold in every county.

CMS published the 2027 Star Ratings on October 8, 2026, the same day they went live in Medicare Plan Finder. These are the ratings that apply while you shop for 2027 coverage, and they also set the quality bonus payments plans receive for 2028.

Source: CMS 2027 Medicare Advantage and Part D Star Ratings fact sheet, October 8, 2026.

The headline is a split result. Fewer contracts reached 4 stars, and the number of 5-star contracts fell by about a third. But the contracts that did reach 4 stars or higher tend to be the large ones, so a bigger share of members, about 71%, are enrolled in a 4-star-plus plan. In plain terms: the odds that a random plan is highly rated went down, while the odds that the plan most people are in is highly rated went up.

CMS adjusted the measure set for 2027. Plans with drug coverage are now rated on up to 43 measures. The changes that matter most:

Because the measures and their weights shifted, a plan’s 2027 rating is not a perfect like-for-like comparison with its 2026 rating. Compare plans against each other within 2027 instead.

The table below is the 2026 baseline by carrier, the starting line the 2027 ratings above moved from. These are enrollment-weighted averages, meaning each carrier’s number reflects where its members actually are rather than the simple average of its contracts.

Read the middle column rather than the average. Going into 2027, Kaiser and SCAN put 100 percent of their members in 4-plus star plans, while Humana and Wellcare put about a fifth or less. Humana then jumped to about 95% for 2027. That gap is far more useful than the third of a star separating two carriers’ averages, because it tells you the odds that the specific plan in front of you is one of the good ones.

The biggest movers into 2026 were Elevance, which lifted the share of members in 4-star-or-better plans from about 40% to 53% (see Elevance Medicare Advantage plans 2027), and Wellcare, which went from about 1% to more than 18% (see Wellcare Medicare Advantage plans 2027).

National carriers are only part of the picture. Some regional carriers rate as well as anyone in the table: UPMC for Life earned 4.5 stars for both its HMO and PPO plans for 2026, every Geisinger Medicare Advantage Gold plan carried 4.5 stars, and HAP Medicare Advantage in Michigan rated 4 stars for both HMO and PPO. For 2027, UPMC for Life again earned 4.5 stars on both of its main contracts, Geisinger Gold is rated 4 stars on both contracts, and HAP Health Plan of Michigan holds 4 stars. If a strong regional carrier sells in your county, weigh it alongside the national names.

If it seems like star ratings have been sliding for several years, that is because they have, and it is mostly not because plans got worse. CMS tightened how the scoring works. The thresholds a plan has to clear for each star level are recalculated every year against how everyone else performed, so as the industry improved, the bar rose with it. A plan can post identical numbers two years running and lose half a star. The 2027 drop in 5-star contracts, from 22 to 15, is the latest example.

CMS also changed how it handles statistical outliers when setting those thresholds, and restored the full weighting of the member survey measures after temporarily reducing them during the pandemic years. Both changes pushed ratings down across the board. The practical effect is that a 4-star plan today cleared a higher bar than a 4-star plan did five years ago.

There is a second consequence that matters more to carriers than to you, though it eventually reaches you. Because the bonus payment threshold sits at 4 stars, a plan slipping from 4.0 to 3.5 loses a substantial revenue stream in one step. That is why you sometimes see a plan’s benefits shrink sharply in a single year rather than gradually.

People search for Medicare Advantage ratings and Medicare Advantage star ratings interchangeably, and they mean the same measure: the one-to-five score CMS assigns to every plan each year. There is no separate rating system. What varies is what people are looking for — some want the carrier-level picture, others want the score on one specific plan in one specific county. Both are on this page.

CMS builds the score from dozens of individual measures, up to 43 for plans with drug coverage in 2027, grouped into five broad areas. Most of them describe how the plan runs its business rather than how good your doctor is, which is the single most common misunderstanding about star ratings.

That last category is the one worth paying attention to. How a plan handles appeals and authorizations is a genuine day to day experience issue that appears nowhere in a benefits summary, and it is one of the few places the star rating tells you something you could not otherwise find out.

Star ratings are not just informational. Contracts rated 4 stars or higher earn a quality bonus payment from CMS, and plans generally push that money back into benefits to stay competitive. The 2027 ratings set those bonus payments for 2028, so this year’s results shape what plans can afford to offer a year from now.

It runs the other way too. When a carrier’s ratings fall, the bonus revenue falls with them, and the response is usually trimmed supplemental benefits or withdrawal from unprofitable counties. Our breakdown of Medicare Advantage plan changes for 2027 covers where that is happening.

Some plans show no rating, or a note saying the plan is too new to be measured. This confuses people every year, and the instinct is usually to assume the worst. That instinct is wrong more often than it is right.

A plan is unrated for one of two reasons. Either it is genuinely new, meaning there is no measurement-year data to score, or it has too few members for the results to be statistically meaningful. Neither says anything about quality. A new plan from an established carrier operating in the next county over is not an unknown quantity in any real sense.

An unrated plan is a plan you have to evaluate on its own terms rather than on a shortcut. That is more work, not a warning.

A five star plan whose network excludes your cardiologist is worse for you than a three star plan that includes them. The rating measures the plan’s performance across its whole membership, and you are not its whole membership. That gap matters most with Medicare Advantage HMO plans, where care outside the network generally is not covered at all, however well the plan is rated.

It also says nothing about whether your specific prescriptions sit on a favorable tier, what the plan’s maximum out of pocket is, whether the supplemental benefits it advertises are generous or token, or whether the plan intends to keep selling in your county next year. Treat the star rating as one input among several, weighted about as heavily as it deserves: meaningful, independently calculated, and nowhere near the whole picture.

With fewer contracts reaching 4 and 5 stars for 2027, many members will see a lower number next to their plan this year. A falling rating is worth attention, but it is not automatically a reason to switch. What matters is why it fell and whether the reason touches you.

The one drop that should always prompt a fresh look is crossing below 4 stars, because that is where the money changes. Everything else is a signal to read the Annual Notice of Change carefully rather than to start over. Annual Enrollment is open now and runs through December 7, 2026.