How We’re Paid

Most of the insurance industry treats compensation as a subject to be mumbled through. We’d rather put it in a table. Three roles, three payment models, three legal standards — and what each one means for you.

Role	Who pays us	The standard we owe you	What that means in practice
Consultant (individuals & employers)	You do — a scoped engagement, priced at the onset	Contractual duty to you alone	No carrier in the room. Comprehensive and objective analysis; recommendations can include “buy nothing new.”
Broker (individual & family, group)	The insurance carrier — contracts label it commission, agent fee, service fee, or broker fee; the substance is identical	State licensing standards	Your premium is filed with regulators and identical with or without us. We offer carriers that are practical to contract with and that pay for the work — we’re open about that filter.
Agent (Medicare plans)	The carrier only — at whatever rate that carrier files for the year, from $0 up to the federally capped maximum	Suitability	Federal rules set compensation and effectively prohibit charging you fees — so the law makes us the carrier’s representative, required to help you find a suitable plan.

The Medicare specifics

CMS caps what carriers may pay for Medicare Advantage and Part D enrollments, and those rules — combined with state agent law — effectively prohibit us from charging Medicare-eligible clients for enrollment help. We cannot take a fee from you, and we cannot owe you a formal fiduciary duty while being paid solely by carriers under a government-set schedule. Compensation is broadly similar across carriers within a market, which blunts — but does not erase — the steering incentive. We’ve been open about preferring rules that let us owe clients an undivided duty; until then, we follow the law as written and tell you plainly how it works. One more thing worth knowing: within the federal cap, each carrier decides what it will pay — anywhere from zero on up — can change those rates with sometimes as little as a day’s notice, and makes no long-term commitments to the people doing the work. When a carrier files $0, helping you enroll in that plan is unpaid work, which is why some plans are hard to find help with — from us or from anyone. We tell you this because it shapes the market you’re shopping in; if you think these rules should work differently, the section below tells you exactly who can change them.

The actual numbers: CMS compensation caps

These are the current CMS caps for Minnesota (the “national” tier — a few states run higher). Each carrier files what it will actually pay, anywhere from $0 up to the cap, and renewal compensation is set by federal rule at exactly half of first-year. Per-enrollment, per year:

Year	Medicare Advantage / MAPD / Cost — first year	MA / MAPD / Cost — renewal	Part D (PDP) — first year	PDP — renewal
2026	$694	$347	$114	$57
2025	$626	$313	$109	$54.50
2024	$611	$305.50	$100	$50

Source: CMS agent-broker compensation memos, updated each fall. Medicare Supplement, marketplace, group, dental, and vision compensation are set by carriers, not CMS, and are not shown here.

If something’s wrong

A problem with us, a plan, or an enrollment

Tell us first

Every complaint is read personally by a licensed principal. If we can’t resolve it — or you’d rather go straight to a regulator — these are the right doors:

Minnesota Department of Commerce — regulates insurance agents and carriers in Minnesota.
Medicare — your rights & protections — for Medicare plan and marketing issues (or call 1-800-MEDICARE).
MNsure appeals — for marketplace eligibility and enrollment disputes.
NAIC consumer resources — find your state’s insurance regulator if you’re outside Minnesota.

A problem with the law itself

Some of what frustrates people about this system isn’t anyone’s misconduct — it’s federal law and rulemaking: the compensation caps, the fee prohibition, the standards we described above. The people who can change those are elected. If you think the rules should be different, say so where it counts:

Find your U.S. Representative (ZIP-code lookup)
Contact your U.S. Senators
Write the White House

If you decide to write

Personal letters get read; identical form letters get counted. So rather than hand you a script, here’s the structure congressional staff actually engage with — in your own words, whichever side of these rules you come down on:

Who you are: your name, your city, and that you’re a constituent (and a Medicare beneficiary or marketplace enrollee, if you are).
Your experience: one or two sentences about what actually happened to you — a premium change, a plan you couldn’t get help with, a rule that confused you.
One fact: borrow any fact from this page — for example, that federal rules cap how agents are paid and let carriers file rates as low as $0, or that Medicare-eligible consumers can’t hire a fee-based fiduciary adviser for enrollment help even if they want one.
Your ask: what you want them to support or oppose, in one sentence.

Full disclosure, in the spirit of this page: these rules affect how our agency is paid, and we’ve said above which way we lean. Your letter should say what you think — including if you think the rules are right exactly as they are.