2027 Medicare Advantage Star Ratings: When They Publish and What They Mean

Reviewed by Russell Noga, Licensed Medicare Insurance Broker (all 50 states) — Last updated September 20, 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 when the 2027 ratings are published, where the major carriers stood going into this year, what the number actually measures, and how to use it without over-trusting it.

CMS releases the new star ratings in early October, a few days before the Annual Enrollment Period opens on October 15. Until that file drops, every star rating you see anywhere, including in the Medicare Plan Finder, is the 2026 rating.

That matters more than it sounds. If you start shopping on October 1, when 2027 plan details first become viewable, the plan information is new but the ratings alongside it may not be. Check which rating year is shown before you lean on it, and check again a week later.

The table below is the 2026 baseline, which is the starting line the 2027 ratings move 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. That distinction matters: a carrier can hold a handful of excellent contracts while most of its members sit in mediocre ones.

The national enrollment-weighted average for 2026 was 3.98. Twenty-one contracts earned the full five stars, and roughly 64 percent of all Medicare Advantage members were enrolled in a plan rated 4 stars or better.

Read the middle column rather than the average. Kaiser and SCAN both put 100 percent of their members in 4-plus star plans. Humana and Wellcare put 20 percent. 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.

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.

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.

CMS builds the score from dozens of individual measures across five categories. 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.

• Staying healthy — the screenings, vaccines and preventive visits members actually completed during the measurement year.
• Managing chronic conditions — whether members with diabetes, heart disease and similar conditions received the follow-up care the guidelines call for.
• Member experience — survey results on getting appointments, getting care quickly, and overall satisfaction with the plan.
• Member complaints and plan performance — complaint rates, how many members leave, and problems CMS identified with the plan directly.
• Customer service — call center performance, and how the plan handles appeals and prior authorization requests.

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. A higher rated plan in your county often carries a richer benefit package than a lower rated plan from the same carrier, which means the rating shows up in what you get, not only in what you are told.

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.

• Look at the carrier’s other contracts in your state or a neighboring one. The same organisation is administering the plan, with largely the same processes and often the same network.
• Weight the things you can verify more heavily. Network, formulary and out of pocket maximum are all knowable today regardless of whether a rating exists.
• Understand the trade-off. New plans are often priced or benefit-loaded aggressively to attract members. That can be genuine value, and it can also be an introductory offer that tightens in year two.

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.

It also says nothing about whether your specific prescriptions sit on a favourable 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.

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.