Medicare Part D drug plans for 2027, state by state

Stand-alone plan or drug coverage inside an Advantage plan

You cannot buy a stand-alone drug plan on top of most Medicare Advantage plans: if your Advantage plan includes drugs, joining a PDP ends the Advantage enrollment. A PDP makes sense with Original Medicare (with or without Medigap), with a Medicare Advantage plan that has no drug coverage of the PFFS or MSA type, or with a cost plan. People who keep Original Medicare because they travel or want any doctor who accepts Medicare need a PDP to avoid the late penalty described in the penalty guide.

2027: the year the premium subsidy ends

From 2025 to 2026, CMS ran a premium stabilization demonstration that paid stand-alone plans a monthly amount to hold premiums down. In its memo of July 28, 2026, CMS announced that the demonstration ends with 2026. The same memo set the national average monthly bid at $296.05 and the base beneficiary premium, used for late penalties, at $41.33 ($38.99 in 2026). In its release of September 28, 2026, CMS projected the average total stand-alone premium to move from $35.09 to $36, and the drug premium of Advantage plans to fall from $11.32 to $7 after rebates. Averages hide wide spreads: in Alabama the cheapest stand-alone plan costs $5.30 a month, and in New York the median plan costs $169.30.

How to read a drug plan line

The premium is what you pay each month whether or not you fill a prescription. The deductible is what you pay in full before the plan shares costs; 213 of the 323 stand-alone plan versions use the full $700 standard deductible in 2027, the others set a lower one, sometimes on certain tiers only. "Basic" plans give the standard benefit or its actuarial equivalent; "enhanced" plans add coverage and usually cost more. A plan marked as a benchmark plan has a premium at or below the regional Extra Help amount: people with full Extra Help pay no premium there.

What the CMS file cannot tell you is the most important part: whether your drugs are on the plan's formulary, on which tier, with what restrictions (prior authorization, step therapy, quantity limits), and which pharmacies are preferred. Before choosing, look up your exact drugs in the plan's formulary or on Medicare.gov. Two plans with the same premium can produce very different bills for the same prescriptions.

The $2,400 cap and the payment plan

Every Part D plan, stand-alone or inside an Advantage plan, must stop charging you once your covered drug costs reach $2,400 in 2027 ($2,100 in 2026). The premium does not count toward that cap. If a large share of the cap falls due in January, the Medicare Prescription Payment Plan lets you pay it in monthly installments over the rest of the year, at no interest (42 CFR 423.137); the deductible and cap guide has the calculator.

Extra Help and the $0 drug plan

Extra Help, the low-income subsidy of Part D, pays all or part of the premium up to a regional amount and replaces the deductible and coinsurance with small copays: in 2027, at most $5.80 for a generic and $14.40 for a brand-name drug for most enrollees, less for people with full Medicaid and income at or below the poverty line. In each region, the basic plans priced at or below that amount are flagged in the CMS file as benchmark plans; people who have both Medicare and full Medicaid and no drug plan are assigned to one of them by CMS, as note 5 of the landscape file explains. The state pages show these plans, and the premium a full Extra Help enrollee would pay, from the same file. Resources count as well as income: the Rate Announcement gives a 2026 limit of $18,090 for a single person and $36,100 for a couple, burial funds included; the 2027 limits follow a later CMS memo.

If your plan's line shows a premium above zero but you have Extra Help, the subsidy may still bring it to $0 or close: the column "low-income premium" of the landscape file, used on the state pages, is the amount you would actually pay. Switching to a non-benchmark plan is allowed, but you pay the difference.

Every state at a glance