Utah · Plan availability

How Many Medicare Advantage Plans Are in Salt Lake City?

24 for 2026, from 7 carriers — the largest shelf in Utah. Which is good news right up until you have to pick one, because the number that actually separates them is not the one printed largest.

Medicare On Main Data Desk

Published September 7, 2026 · 8 min read · Reviewed by Brian Penner

The honest version of this question has two halves. The first half is a number, and it is easy: 24. The second half is the one that matters, and nobody types it into a search box — of those 24, how many are actually candidates for your household? That answer is almost never more than three, and getting to it takes about an hour.

The 24 plans, and who sells them

For 2026, the official CMS Medicare Advantage and Part D landscape file lists 24 Medicare Advantage prescription-drug plans available in Salt Lake County, offered by 7 organizations: Aetna Medicare, Devoted Health, HealthSpring, Humana, Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Utah, Select Health, UnitedHealthcare. That is every carrier selling this kind of plan anywhere in Utah — Salt Lake shares that distinction only with Davis and Morgan counties.

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 reason the list matters is structural: 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," and "may also offer more than one plan in an area, with different benefits and costs." Which is exactly what produces 24 plans from 7 companies — and why comparing companies instead of plans gets you nowhere.

Why another site will tell you thirty-one

You will find different numbers for this 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 thirty or more.

We publish the narrower figure and say what it excludes. And it is worth remembering that 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 24.

Salt Lake against the rest of Utah

Utah is not one Medicare market. Across all 28 counties, CMS counted 280 Medicare Advantage prescription-drug offerings for 2026, 178 of them at a $0 premium. Here is how the biggest shelf compares with the smallest:

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).

Wayne County has one. Salt Lake has 24. Same state, same year, same rules — and it is the reason a Medicare article written for "Utah" without naming a county is usually describing somewhere you do not live. If you moved to the Wasatch Front from a rural county, or the other direction, your shelf changed completely even though nothing about your Medicare did.

The number nobody advertises

Here is the finding that makes Salt Lake County different from a place like Washington County, where the ceilings sit in a narrow band. In Salt Lake, the published 2026 in-network out-of-pocket maximums run from $3,500 to $9,250. That is a $5,750 gap — the widest in Utah — 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 (which may include different limits for in-network and out-of-network 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 is the number that does nothing at all in a healthy year and decides everything in a bad one — a hip, a cardiac admission, a cancer diagnosis.

For context on 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), Medicaid, employer, retiree, or union coverage." That is a genuinely different structure, not a worse version of the same one, and it belongs in the comparison alongside the 24.

Why $0 and 4.5 stars cannot decide this for you

17 of the 24 plans here carry a $0 monthly plan premium — 70.8%, running ahead of the 63.6% statewide share. A filter that eliminates seven plans out of twenty-four 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. The deductible, the copays, the drug tiers and that out-of-pocket ceiling do not appear on the premium line either. Calling a $0-premium plan "free coverage" is one of the few things in this business I will argue about.

Star ratings run into the same wall in Utah. In the CY2026 file, the highest overall rating available is 4.5 in Salt Lake County — 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 Front, there is usually no tie left for it to break.

The order that actually narrows 24 plans

Run the comparison in roughly the reverse of the order the plans are advertised in.

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

The network step is first because it is the one with the harshest failure mode. 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. Along the Wasatch Front, where a household's care may be split between two large hospital systems and an independent specialist or two, that is not an abstract rule. It is a question with a different answer for each of the 24 plans, and it has to be asked 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 in Salt Lake County

1. Write the two lists before opening any website. Every doctor and facility you actually use, and every prescription with its exact strength, read off the bottles.
2. 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.
3. Sort the survivors by out-of-pocket maximum, not by premium. With $3,500 to $9,250 on the shelf, this is the step that separates two otherwise identical-looking plans.
4. Verify the network with the provider's billing office, by plan name, not by carrier. "Do you take Medicare Advantage" is not a question that produces a usable answer.
5. Put Original Medicare with a supplement on the table too. No network and no annual ceiling to worry about, at a monthly cost instead — a structurally different trade, and worth pricing once even if you decide against it.
6. Do it between October 15 and December 7. Coverage from Annual Enrollment starts January 1, and the plans you compared in September are last year's plans until the new data publishes.

How we know all this: the Medicare On Main Data Desk frames every article with public data. The 24 plan count, the 7 carriers, the 17 $0-premium plans, the $3,500–$9,250 out-of-pocket range and the 4.5 top star rating for Salt Lake County — 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 county-level availability rule and the "each year, insurance companies can decide to join or leave Medicare" language are from Medicare.gov's "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. 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.