Only 80 of 918 Part B Drug Prices Held Still
Medicare's October drug payment limits posted on a Tuesday with no announcement and no transmittal. We diffed them against July: 799 codes repriced, 38 new, 10 retired, two antivenoms back on the books, and a Notes column that names which codes are priced off AMP instead of ASP.
Three editions of this letter recorded the same negative: the October 2026 Part B drug payment limit file was not posted yet. It went up quietly on Tuesday, September 8, at 14:32 GMT. No transmittal, no MLN Connects item, no press release.
"What actually changed between the quarter you are billing and the quarter that starts in eighteen days?"
We pulled both files this morning and diffed them. The October file carries 918 HCPCS codes against July's 890.
38 codes are new, 10 are gone, and of the 879 priced in both quarters, exactly 80 carry the same number they carried in July.
Everything else moved. 366 up, 433 down, mean +1.006%, median zero.
The October limits are built on 2Q26 ASP data where July's were built on 1Q26,
and the file name says preliminary, so a final version will supersede it before
the quarter is out. Worth remembering that the July file in that same folder is
stamped updated 082026: CMS revised it on August 20, seven weeks into the
quarter it priced.
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