Medicare Cost Calculator
Monthly premiums
Your result will appear here
Fill in the fields on the left and this updates as you type.
Know what this estimate is based on
- Jurisdiction
- United States — state-regulated insurance
- Scope and limitations
- Educational estimate only. Insurance in the U.S. is regulated state by state, so rates, required coverages and available discounts differ by where you live. Your premium is set by an insurer's own underwriting — driving record, claims history, credit-based insurance score where permitted, the property itself — and only a quote is binding. What a policy pays depends on its exclusions and limits, not on this estimate.
- Source links checked
- Jul 30, 2026
Built and regression-tested by Smart Tools Lab. It has not been individually reviewed by a licensed financial, tax, or legal professional.
How to use
- 01
Enter your monthly Part B premium — the standard amount most enrollees pay for medical coverage.
- 02
Add your Part D drug-plan premium and your Medigap supplement premium if you carry one.
- 03
Read the monthly total and the annual figure beside it, and check the donut to see which part costs you the most.
- 04
Open Advanced options to add an IRMAA surcharge if you're a higher earner or separate dental, vision and hearing premiums for a complete picture.
Formula
The calculator simply totals the monthly premiums you actually pay for the parts of Medicare you carry: monthly = Part B + Part D + Supplement + IRMAA + Other. It then multiplies that monthly figure by 12 to show your annual cost. Three of the inputs are visible by default — your Part B premium, your Part D drug-plan premium, and a Medigap supplement premium — and with the two advanced fields left at zero the headline is just those three added together, which is why the default inputs reproduce the base case of Part B + Part D + Supplement. The donut chart splits that monthly total into its slices, showing Part B, Part D and Supplement, and it adds an IRMAA slice and an Other slice only when those advanced fields are above zero. The first advanced field, IRMAA, is the income-related surcharge that higher earners pay on top of their standard Part B and Part D premiums; entering it raises both the monthly and annual totals and adds its own slice to the chart. The second advanced field, Other, captures spending Medicare itself doesn't cover — standalone dental, vision or hearing premiums — so you can budget your whole healthcare outlay in one place. There is no compounding, no projection and no rate: the result is a straight sum, so every figure you type maps directly to a slice of what leaves your account each month.
Example
Take the default profile of someone newly enrolled. They pay 6,000 a month for Part B, 1,500 for a Part D drug plan and 5,000 for a Medigap supplement, with no IRMAA surcharge and no separate dental or vision premium, so both advanced fields stay at 0. The monthly cost is the straight sum: 6,000 + 1,500 + 5,000 + 0 + 0 = 12,500. Multiplying by twelve gives an annual cost of 12,500 × 12 = 150,000. The calculator also breaks the total down: Part B and Part D together come to 6,000 + 1,500 = 7,500 a month, while the supplement is the single largest line at 5,000. The donut shows three slices in these proportions — the supplement is the biggest at 40% of the total, Part B is 48%, and Part D the smallest at 12% — because the IRMAA and Other fields are zero and produce no slices. If this person later crossed an income threshold and started paying, say, a 700-a-month IRMAA surcharge, the monthly total would rise to 13,200 and the annual figure to 158,400, with a fourth slice appearing on the chart for the surcharge alone.
Definitions
- Part B premium
- Your monthly premium for Medicare Part B, the medical-insurance part that covers doctor visits, outpatient care and many preventive services (0 to 100,000).
- Part D premium
- Your monthly premium for a standalone Part D prescription-drug plan, which pays toward the medications you collect from a pharmacy (0 to 100,000).
- Supplement (Medigap)
- Your monthly premium for a Medigap policy that covers the deductibles, copays and coinsurance Original Medicare leaves you to pay yourself (0 to 100,000).
- IRMAA surcharge
- An advanced field for the Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount, an extra charge added to Part B and Part D premiums for higher earners; left at the default it adds nothing (0 to 100,000, default 0).
- Dental / vision / other
- An advanced field for premiums on coverage Original Medicare excludes — standalone dental, vision or hearing plans — so the total reflects your full healthcare spend (0 to 100,000, default 0).
- Monthly Medicare cost
- The headline result: the sum of every premium field you entered, representing what leaves your account each month for Medicare coverage before deductibles and copays.
Good to know
Medicare is several bills, not one
People often picture Medicare as a single program that quietly takes care of healthcare at 65, but in practice it arrives as a stack of separate premiums, each tied to a different slice of coverage. Original Medicare splits into Part A for hospital stays and Part B for doctors and outpatient care. Part A is usually free if you have a long-enough work history, but Part B carries a monthly premium that most enrollees pay for life. On top of that, prescription drugs are not part of Original Medicare at all — you buy a separate Part D plan to cover them, with its own premium. And because Original Medicare leaves you exposed to deductibles and a percentage of every bill with no annual cap, many people add a Medigap supplement, which is a third premium to a private insurer. The result is that a single person can be writing three or four cheques a month for what they think of as one program. This calculator exists precisely because that fragmentation makes the true cost hard to see. By entering each premium on its own line and summing them, you turn a confusing pile of separate bills into a single monthly and annual number you can actually plan around. Understanding that Medicare is modular is also the first step to controlling the cost: you choose which parts and plans to carry, and each choice has a price tag. Seeing them side by side is what lets you weigh a cheaper drug plan against a richer one, or decide whether a comprehensive supplement is worth its premium, rather than discovering the total only after the deductions have already started.
Why Part A rarely shows up here
Part A is the hospital-insurance piece of Medicare, paying toward inpatient stays, skilled-nursing care and some home-health services. The reason it almost never appears as a premium on this calculator is that the overwhelming majority of enrollees qualify for it premium-free. Throughout your working life, a Medicare payroll tax is deducted from your wages, and once you or your spouse have accumulated forty work credits — roughly ten years of taxable employment — you have effectively pre-paid your Part A coverage. The premium you would otherwise owe is waived. That is why the headline total here is built from Part B, Part D and the supplement rather than from Part A. There are exceptions worth knowing. If you spent most of your career outside the system and didn't earn enough credits, you can still enrol in Part A but you'll owe a monthly premium that scales with how few credits you have, and it can be substantial. People in that situation, or anyone whose spouse's record doesn't bridge the gap, should add that figure under the Other field so the total stays accurate. It's also important not to confuse premium-free with cost-free: even when Part A costs nothing each month, using it triggers a sizeable per-admission deductible and daily coinsurance for long stays. Those are out-of-pocket charges that land only when you're hospitalised, not recurring premiums, which is why they sit outside this premium-focused tool and belong in the separate cushion you keep for deductibles and copays.
Part B, IRMAA and the income test
Part B is the premium nearly everyone pays, and for most people it is set at a standard amount each year. What surprises new enrollees is that the figure is not the same for everyone: higher earners pay a surcharge called the Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount, or IRMAA. The Social Security Administration looks at your tax return from two years prior, and if your income sits above a series of thresholds, it adds a tiered surcharge to both your Part B and your Part D premiums. The further above the first threshold you fall, the larger the surcharge, climbing through several brackets. Two features of IRMAA catch people out. First, it is a cliff rather than a slope — earning one dollar over a threshold can move you into a higher bracket and add a fixed monthly amount, so income near a boundary deserves careful attention. Second, because it uses a two-year-old return, a temporary spike — selling a property, a large capital gain, a Roth conversion — can trigger a surcharge years later, even after your income has fallen back. If a life-changing event such as retirement or the death of a spouse caused that income, you can ask Social Security to recalculate using current figures. In this calculator IRMAA is an advanced field set to zero by default, because most enrollees never pay it. If you do, entering your combined Part B and Part D surcharge there adds it to your monthly total and gives it its own slice on the chart, so you can see plainly how much your income bracket is adding to the cost of staying covered.
What a Medigap supplement buys you
Original Medicare is generous about what it covers but unforgiving about how much you pay when you use it. Part A carries a per-admission hospital deductible, Part B has its own annual deductible, and after that Part B typically leaves you paying a flat percentage of the approved cost of every service with no ceiling on the total. For someone who has a serious illness, that open-ended exposure can run into very large sums. A Medigap supplement — sold by private insurers in standardised lettered plans — is designed to close those gaps. Depending on the plan you pick, it can cover the Part A deductible, the Part B coinsurance, excess charges and more, effectively converting unpredictable bills into a single known monthly premium. That predictability is the whole point, and it explains why the supplement is often the largest line on this calculator: you are paying a steady premium to a private insurer so that a bad health year doesn't become a financial catastrophe. The trade-off is straightforward. A richer plan that covers nearly everything costs more each month but exposes you to almost nothing at the point of care, while a leaner plan or no supplement at all lowers your premium but leaves more risk on your own balance sheet. Because the calculator takes your supplement premium as a single figure, it's worth pricing a few lettered plans before you enter one, since identical coverage can be sold at very different premiums by different insurers. Whatever you choose, the supplement is best understood not as an extra luxury but as the part that puts a cap on what Medicare can otherwise cost you in a single year.
Premiums are only half the budget
The number this tool produces is deliberately a premium total — the recurring monthly cost of simply holding your coverage — and it's vital to read it as such. Premiums are the predictable part of Medicare spending: you know them at the start of the year and they don't move when you visit a doctor. But coverage and usage are two different things, and the moment you actually consume care, a second category of cost appears. Original Medicare's deductibles must be met before it starts paying, Part D drug plans have their own deductible and tiered copays, and even with a supplement there may be small charges your plan doesn't fully absorb. None of these show up in a premium total because they depend on your health that year, which is impossible to predict in advance and would be misleading to fold into a fixed monthly figure. This is why the calculator's own guidance reminds you to budget the annual premium on top of deductibles and copays, not instead of them. A practical approach is to treat the annual figure here as your baseline fixed cost and then hold a separate reserve sized to your plans' worst-case out-of-pocket exposure — the sum of the deductibles and the coinsurance you could face in a heavy year. People who carry a comprehensive supplement need a smaller reserve because the supplement caps much of that exposure; people who skip the supplement to save on premiums should hold a larger one. Either way, separating the steady premium from the variable usage cost keeps you from being blindsided, and it makes the genuine trade-offs between cheaper and richer coverage visible rather than hidden.
Planning Medicare cost into retirement
Medicare premiums are one of the few retirement expenses that are both unavoidable and slow to fall, which makes the annual figure from this calculator a useful fixture in any retirement-income plan. For most retirees the Part B premium is deducted directly from their monthly Social Security payment before it ever reaches their bank account, so it quietly reduces the income they think they're receiving. Seeing the full annual cost laid out helps you net that against your benefit and understand your real cash flow. Two forces tend to push the cost upward over time, so it's wise not to treat today's figure as fixed forever. First, premiums themselves are reset each year and have historically trended up faster than general inflation, because healthcare costs rise quickly. Second, IRMAA thresholds and withdrawal strategies interact in ways that can surprise you: drawing a large sum from a tax-deferred account, converting to a Roth, or realising capital gains can lift your income above an IRMAA bracket two years later and raise your premiums just as you'd planned to spend less. Coordinating the timing of those withdrawals can keep you under the thresholds and is one of the more controllable levers in retirement-cost planning. It also helps to revisit this calculation annually, updating each premium when your plans renew and adding any surcharge that has kicked in, so your budget tracks reality rather than the assumptions you made at 65. Finally, remember that the choices feeding these premiums are not locked for life — annual enrolment windows let you switch drug plans and, within limits, reconsider supplements, so a total that has crept too high is often a prompt to shop your coverage rather than simply absorb the increase.
Frequently asked questions
Why isn't Part A included in the total?
Most people get Medicare Part A, which covers hospital stays, premium-free because they or a spouse paid Medicare payroll taxes for at least ten years of work. Since there's usually nothing to pay, the calculator leaves Part A out of the monthly premium total. If you didn't earn enough work credits you may owe a Part A premium, in which case you can add it under the Other field.
What is IRMAA and would it apply to me?
IRMAA stands for Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount — a surcharge added to your Part B and Part D premiums if your income is above a set threshold. It's based on your tax return from two years earlier, so a one-off spike in income can trigger it temporarily. If your income sits below the threshold you pay nothing extra, which is why the IRMAA field defaults to zero.
Do I need both a Part D plan and a Medigap supplement?
They cover completely different things, so many people carry both. Part D pays toward prescription drugs, which Original Medicare largely doesn't cover, while a Medigap supplement pays the deductibles and coinsurance that Original Medicare leaves on your shoulders. You can enter whichever ones you actually hold and leave the others at zero.
How is the annual cost worked out?
It's simply your monthly total multiplied by twelve. The calculator assumes your premiums stay level across the year, which is normal once your plans are set for that calendar year. Remember the annual figure is premiums only — it does not include the deductibles, copays or coinsurance you pay when you actually use care.
Why is my supplement premium so much larger than Part B?
Medigap premiums vary widely by the letter plan you choose, your age, your location and how the insurer prices the policy, so a comprehensive plan can easily cost as much as or more than Part B. The calculator takes whatever figure you enter at face value and shows it as its own slice so you can see exactly how much of your budget the supplement consumes.
Does this include what I pay when I see a doctor?
No. This tool adds up recurring premiums only — the fixed amounts you pay every month to stay covered. Out-of-pocket costs like the Part B deductible, drug copays and coinsurance happen when you use services and vary with your health, so you should budget for them separately on top of the annual premium figure shown here.