Utah · Plan availability

How Many Medicare Advantage Plans Are in Park City, Utah?

16 for 2026, from 6 carriers — if your address is in Summit County. Park City sits on a county line, and the Wasatch County side gets 13. Here is the split, what the numbers hide, and the rule about second homes.

Medicare On Main Data Desk

Published September 9, 2026 · 8 min read · Reviewed by Brian Penner

Park City is the one Utah Medicare market where the first question is not "how many plans" but "which county." Most of the retirees I talk with on the Wasatch Back moved here from somewhere else, bought on the strength of a view, and have only a vague idea which side of the Summit–Wasatch line the deed is on. Medicare has a very precise idea, and it changes the answer.

The 16 plans, and who sells them

For 2026, the official CMS Medicare Advantage and Part D landscape file lists 16 Medicare Advantage prescription-drug plans available in Summit County, offered by 6 organizations: Aetna Medicare, Devoted Health, Humana, Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Utah, Select Health, UnitedHealthcare. Salt Lake County, by comparison, has 24 from 7 — every carrier selling this kind of plan in Utah. Summit has all but one of them.

Listing them is availability, not a recommendation. We do not rank or rate carriers on this page, and Medicare On Main does not offer every plan available in your area. The list matters because of how plans are approved: Medicare.gov explains that "insurance companies can decide if a plan will be available to everyone with Medicare in a state, or only in certain counties." County by county — which is what makes the next section the whole story here.

Which county is Park City in?

Mostly Summit. Park City proper, Kimball Junction, the Snyderville Basin, and Kamas up the valley are Summit County, and that is where Intermountain Park City Hospital sits. But the resort area has been growing east for twenty years, and the eastern edge — the Jordanelle side of Deer Valley and the newer developments along the reservoir — is Wasatch County, along with Heber City, Midway and Heber Valley Hospital.

For Medicare that line is load-bearing. Medicare.gov's rule for joining any Medicare Advantage or drug plan: you must "live in the service area of the plan you want to join." Plans are approved by county, so the shelf on the Wasatch side is a different shelf:

Source: CMS CY2026 Medicare Advantage / Part D Landscape — CY2026 landscape file, category MA-PD (excludes MA-only, Special Needs Plans and stand-alone Part D rows).

Three fewer plans is the smaller difference. The larger one is the carrier list: Devoted Health, Humana, Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Utah, UnitedHealthcare sell in both counties, while Aetna Medicare and Select Health sell in Summit and not in Wasatch. A couple who compared plans from a Park City address and then closed on a house in Midway did not just lose three options — they may have lost the carrier they had settled on. The direction of the move matters too: Wasatch to Summit widens the shelf; Summit to Wasatch narrows it.

The second-home rule

A large share of the Park City area's Medicare population lives here part of the year, and the question I get most from them is whether the Park City address can be the Medicare address. The answer is that Medicare does not ask which address you prefer; it asks where you live. The joining rule above is the first half. The second is how Medicare.gov frames the Special Enrollment Period for a move — "I moved to a new address that isn't in my plan's service area" — which is a change of residence, not a change of season.

So a condo at the base of the mountain used six weeks a winter does not put you on the Summit County shelf; your plan follows the address on your record with Social Security, and that is the county whose 16 or 13 or 24 plans you choose from. If you genuinely relocate, the move opens a Special Enrollment Period and you pick from the new county's list. And if you truly split the year between two states, the more useful question is whether a network-based plan is the right shape for your life at all — a structure question for Annual Enrollment, October 15 to December 7, not a workaround for the address.

Why another site will tell you twenty-nine

You will find larger numbers for Summit County, and most of them are defensible. Ours counts one category: Medicare Advantage plans that include prescription drug coverage, which is what people mean when they ask. Add Special Needs Plans, Medicare Advantage plans sold without drug coverage, and the stand-alone Part D drug plans that pair with Original Medicare, and the same county gets described as having twenty-nine or more. We publish the narrower figure and say what it excludes. The only count that decides anything is the one left after you filter for your own doctors and your own prescriptions — which in my experience is two or three, in a county with 16.

The number nobody advertises

The published 2026 in-network out-of-pocket maximums in Summit County run from $4,900 to $9,250, and Wasatch County shows the same range. That is a $4,350 gap between plans that may both show a $0 premium and both show 4.5 stars. Medicare.gov describes this limit as "a yearly limit on what you pay for covered Medicare services," and then the part that explains its weight: "Once you reach your plan's limit, you'll pay nothing for covered services for the rest of the year." It does nothing in a healthy year and decides everything in a bad one — a ski injury that becomes a joint replacement, a cardiac admission at altitude, a cancer diagnosis.

For the alternative: Original Medicare by itself has, in Medicare.gov's words, "no yearly limit on what you pay out-of-pocket, unless you have supplemental coverage – like Medicare Supplement Insurance (Medigap)." For a household that sees specialists in Salt Lake, winters somewhere else, or simply does not want a network deciding which hospital, that is a genuinely different structure — not a worse version of the same one — and it belongs on the table next to the 16.

Why $0 and 4.5 stars cannot decide this for you

10 of the 16 plans in Summit County carry a $0 monthly plan premium — 62.5%, close to the 63.6% statewide share; in Wasatch it is 8 of 13, 61.5%. A filter that removes six plans out of sixteen is not a filter that picks one. And $0 is not free. Medicare.gov: if a plan charges a premium, "you pay this in addition to the Part B premium." When the plan premium is zero, that Part B premium is still there — $202.90 a month at the standard 2026 rate, and more for the higher-income households that make up much of this market, because IRMAA is charged on top of it regardless of which plan you pick.

Star ratings run into the same wall. In the CY2026 file, the highest overall rating available is 4.5 in Summit County, 4.5 in Wasatch — and 4.5 in every other Utah county too. As a first screen it is meaningful. As a tiebreaker between two finalists on the Wasatch Back, there is usually no tie left for it to break.

The order that actually narrows 16 plans

Sources: Medicare.gov — Joining a plan · Medicare.gov — Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) plans · Medicare.gov — Compare Original Medicare & Medicare Advantage · CMS CY2026 Medicare Advantage / Part D Landscape.

The network step carries the harshest failure mode on the Wasatch Back specifically. On an HMO, Medicare.gov says you "generally must get your care and services from doctors, other health care providers, and hospitals in the plan's network," with three exceptions: emergency care, out-of-area urgent care, and temporary out-of-area dialysis. A Park City household's care is very often split between the hospital ten minutes away and a specialist forty minutes down Parleys Canyon, and whether both are in-network is a different answer for each of the 16 plans. Ask it plan by plan — never carrier by carrier — using the plan's own directory and a call to the billing office.

What I would do if I lived on the Wasatch Back

1. Confirm your county before you compare anything. Your Medicare card does not say it; your property record and your Social Security address do. Summit and Wasatch are different shelves.
2. Write the two lists. Every doctor and facility you actually use, including the Salt Lake ones, and every prescription with its exact strength, read off the bottles.
3. Run them through Medicare's Plan Compare with your ZIP code. It prices your real drug list against the plans available to you, which is a different exercise from reading a brochure.
4. Sort the survivors by out-of-pocket maximum, not by premium. With $4,900 to $9,250 on the shelf, this is the step that separates two otherwise identical-looking plans.
5. Put Original Medicare with a supplement on the table too, especially if you split the year or see Salt Lake specialists — no network and no annual ceiling to worry about, at a monthly cost instead.
6. Do it between October 15 and December 7. Coverage from Annual Enrollment starts January 1, and the plans you compare in September are this year's plans until the 2027 data publishes.

How we know all this: the Medicare On Main Data Desk frames every article with public data. The 16 and 13 plan counts, the 6 and 4 carrier lists, the $0-premium counts, the $4,900–$9,250 out-of-pocket range and the 4.5 top star rating — plus the 280 statewide offerings across 28 counties and the county comparisons — all come from the official CMS CY2026 Medicare Advantage / Part D landscape file, filtered to category MA-PD, which excludes MA-only plans, Special Needs Plans and stand-alone Part D rows; that filter is stated in the article because it is why our count differs from others. The "live in the service area" rule is quoted from Medicare.gov's "Joining a plan" page and the moving-SEP language from its Special Enrollment Periods page; the county-level availability rule from "Your health plan options"; the premium-in-addition-to-Part-B rule from "Understanding health plan costs"; the yearly-limit quotations and the absence of any limit in Original Medicare from Medicare.gov's comparison page; and the HMO network rule with its three exceptions from Medicare.gov's HMO page. The $202.90 standard 2026 Part B premium is the CMS figure published November 14, 2025. The county placement of Park City Hospital and Heber Valley Hospital is from Intermountain Health's own location pages; the description of where the Summit–Wasatch line runs is general geography and should be confirmed against your own property record. No carrier is ranked, rated, criticized or endorsed anywhere on this page, and no 2027 plan-level detail is stated, because CMS has not published it. This is education, not advice; confirm plan availability, networks and costs with the plan, a licensed agent, or Medicare.gov.