98% of Medicare Advantage plans offer dental, usually under an annual cap: KFF's 2025 first look at premiums and benefits

What it says#

KFF's Medicare Advantage 2025 Spotlight, published November 15, 2024 and updated November 25 to reflect the October version of the 2025 CMS landscape file, is the annual first look at the premiums and benefits of the plans on offer for the coming year. Its frame: Medicare Advantage plans enrolled nearly 33 million beneficiaries, 54% of the eligible Medicare population, in 2024, because they typically offer extra benefits such as dental, vision and hearing, often for no additional premium, and lower cost sharing than traditional Medicare without supplemental insurance, with the trade-off of more restrictive provider networks and more cost management tools such as prior authorization. The analysis covers plans available for general enrollment, reports Special Needs Plans separately and excludes employer plans.

The dental finding is short. In 2025, 97% or more of individual plans offer some vision, dental or hearing benefits, similar to 2024. The data behind KFF's Figure 2 put the dental share at 98% of individual plans for 2025, after 89% in 2020, 93% in 2021, 95% in 2022, 97% in 2023 and 97% in 2024; vision is at 99% and hearing at 97%. KFF's definition counts every plan that provides dental benefits, including those with preventive benefits only, such as cleanings. Then the caveat: the scope of coverage varies; a dental benefit may include cleanings and preventive care or more comprehensive coverage, and often is subject to an annual dollar cap on the amount the plan covers. From year to year plans may change the parameters of this coverage, such as increasing or decreasing annual maximums or adjusting cost sharing for services, and there is not yet data available about utilization of these benefits or associated costs, so it is not clear how much enrollees use them. Virtually all beneficiaries live in a county with at least one plan carrying extra benefits, and over 99% have access to one or more plans with dental, fitness, vision and hearing benefits for 2025, the same as in 2024.

Other benefits are shrinking while dental holds. The share of plans offering an over-the-counter allowance fell from 85% in 2024 to 73% in 2025, remote access technologies from 74% to 53%, meal benefits from 72% to 65% and transportation for medical needs from 36% to 30%; acupuncture (34% to 32%), bathroom safety devices (22% to 24%) and caregiver support (5%) held about steady, and in-home support services fell from 9% to 6%. Among Special Needs Plans, KFF's Figure 3 data put dental at 94% for 2025, with transportation down from 88% to 81%, bathroom safety devices up from 34% to 54% and the Part B rebate up from 7% to 29%. Special Supplemental Benefits for the Chronically Ill remain rare in individual plans (food and produce 15%, general supports for living 11%, non-medical transportation 8%, pest control 3%) and common in SNPs (84%, 67%, 46% and 23%).

Premiums: 88% of individual plans include drug coverage (MA-PDs), and 67% of those charge no premium other than the Part B premium of $185 a month in 2025, similar to 66% in 2024; 99% of beneficiaries have access to a no-premium MA-PD. In 2024, 75% of MA-PD enrollees paid no premium beyond Part B, 10% paid at least $50 a month and 3% $100 or more; CMS estimates the average monthly premium across all enrollees at $17.00 for 2025. The share of plans offering a reduction in the Part B premium rose from 19% in 2024 to 32% in 2025; among those plans, 28% cut it by $100 a month or more, 25% by $50.01 to $100, 17% by $10.01 to $50 and 30% by $10 or less. KFF notes that enrollment lags plan counts: 19% of plans offered the rebate for 2024 but only 12% of enrollees were in one.

KFF's 2026 spotlight, published December 9, 2025 by Freed, Ochieng, Fuglesten Biniek, Damico and Neuman, carries the same structure forward: more than 34 million enrolled, 54% of the eligible population, in 2025; 98% or more of individual plans offering vision (99%), dental (98%) or hearing (98%) for 2026, with the identical caveat about scope and annual caps; 67% of MA-PDs with no premium; and further declines in OTC (73% to 66%), meals (65% to 57%), remote access (53% to 48%) and transportation (30% to 24%).

Who it applies to#

The brief describes the plans on the shelf during Medicare open enrollment, not the patients in your chair. For a practice, it explains what a Medicare Advantage card means when a patient over 65 presents it: almost certainly some dental benefit, of unknown scope, usually capped, possibly preventive-only, possibly changed since last year, and administered through the plan's own network and rules. The front desk is the audience for the caveat; the owner is the audience for the enrollment numbers, because 54% of eligible beneficiaries in these plans in 2024 (and again in 2025) is the share of your Medicare-age patients who will arrive with one. The brief does not address traditional Medicare; the NADP enrollment entry in this directory gives the population split by source of dental coverage.

What changed#

Against the 2024 plan year, as the brief reports it: vision, dental and hearing stayed at 97% or more of individual plans (dental 97% to 98% in the chart data), while over-the-counter allowances, remote access, meals and transportation all fell; Part B premium reductions nearly doubled from 19% to 32% of plans; the no-premium share of MA-PDs held at 67%; and enrollment grew to nearly 33 million. The 2026 edition, a year later, shows dental unchanged at 98% and the other supplemental benefits shrinking again, so the direction is stable: dental is now a near-universal marketing feature whose value is set by the annual cap and the covered-services list rather than by whether it exists.

Where the source is#

The brief is on kff.org under Medicare, free and unrestricted, with interactive figures whose underlying data are published with each chart; the 2026 edition and the companion analysis of plan offerings are linked from the same topic page. KFF's methods section names the CMS files used: Medicare Advantage landscape files released each fall, crosswalk files, monthly contract, plan, state and county enrollment files, quarterly benefit package files and the Medicare Enrollment Dashboard. KFF asks to be cited by author and title; the authors are Meredith Freed, Jeannie Fuglesten Biniek and Tricia Neuman of KFF and Anthony Damico, an independent consultant.