IRMAA is an income-related surcharge added to Medicare Part B and Part D premiums for people above certain income thresholds. It can add a few hundred to over a thousand dollars per year depending on your income.
IRMAA stands for Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount. It is not a penalty for doing anything wrong. It simply means that Medicare charges higher-income beneficiaries more for their Part B and Part D coverage than the standard premium.Social Security determines whether you owe IRMAA by looking at your tax return from two years prior. So if you are enrolling in Medicare in 2025, they are looking at your 2023 income. The surcharge kicks in above a certain income threshold, which adjusts slightly each year, and then increases in steps as income rises. At the highest income tier, the added amount for Part B alone can be several hundred dollars per month on top of the standard premium.Part D plans also carry an IRMAA surcharge at those same income levels, billed separately from whatever your plan's premium is.If your income has dropped significantly since that two-year-old tax return, because of retirement, the death of a spouse, or another life-changing event, you can appeal IRMAA using Form SSA-44. This allows Social Security to use a more recent income figure instead.The specific dollar amounts change annually, so rather than cite figures here that may be outdated, it is worth checking the current IRMAA brackets at medicare.gov or talking with an advisor who tracks those numbers.
For you, this means if your income is above the threshold, budget for IRMAA as part of your Medicare costs, and if your income has dropped recently, know that you can ask Social Security to recalculate using your current situation.
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: