Yes. If your income has dropped due to a life-changing event, you can appeal your IRMAA surcharge using IRS Form SSA-44. Medicare uses tax data from two years ago, so an appeal lets the Social Security Administration use more recent income instead.
IRMAA stands for Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount. It is the extra amount higher-income Medicare beneficiaries pay on top of the standard Part B and Part D premiums. The problem is that Social Security calculates your IRMAA using your tax return from two years prior. If your income has dropped significantly since then, that older number may no longer reflect your situation. The good news is there is a formal appeal process for exactly this reason. You file IRS Form SSA-44, called Medicare Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount, Life-Changing Event, with the Social Security Administration. You will need to show that a qualifying life-changing event caused your income to drop. These events include retirement, the death of a spouse, divorce or annulment, work reduction, loss of income-producing property, and a few others. Simply having lower income on its own, without a specific triggering event, generally does not qualify. You will also need to provide documentation supporting your new income estimate, such as a letter from your employer, a benefits statement, or tax records. If approved, Social Security will recalculate your premium using your more recent income. Verify current rules and timelines directly with Social Security.
For you, this means if you recently retired or experienced another major income change, you do not have to wait two years to see your Medicare premiums reflect that reality.
Our Commitment to Reliable Medicare Information
At Resting Sycamore Advisors, we work to provide accurate, current, and trustworthy information about Medicare Advantage, Medicare Part D, and Special Needs Plans.
To do that, we use data published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which is the official source for Medicare plan and enrollment information.
Our Medicare plan pages and comparison tools are powered by CMS datasets, including:
When possible, we link to the original CMS resources so you can review the source material directly.
We follow the CMS release schedule and update our website as new data becomes available.
We load new plan year Landscape and PBP files before the Medicare Annual Enrollment Period (October 15 through December 7). We also monitor CMS.gov for updates or revisions and refresh our content when needed.
We update enrollment and performance data as CMS publishes revised files, which are typically released monthly or quarterly.
We routinely monitor CMS announcements for corrections, reissued files, or other changes and update our pages accordingly.
Each plan page includes a Last Accessed date so visitors can see when the source information was most recently reviewed.
CMS data can be difficult to read in raw form. To make it easier to use, we format and organize the data for clarity.
This includes:
All data values come from CMS. We do not change the underlying values beyond formatting, organization, and presentation.
We keep internal records of the CMS dataset versions used on our site.
If CMS issues corrected or revised files, we update our website to reflect the latest available version.
Please keep the following in mind:
For personalized Medicare assistance, please use these official resources: