A Turning-65 Outreach Calendar for Medicare Agents
The Medicare Initial Enrollment Period opens three months before a client's 65th birthday, not on it. Here's a month-by-month outreach calendar built around that window.
A turning-65 outreach calendar for Medicare agents A turning-65 outreach calendar works backward from one fixed date: a client's 65th birthday month. Medicare's Initial Enrollment Period (IEP) is a 7-month window that opens three months before that birthday month, includes the birthday month itself, and closes three months after — so an agency that waits for the birthday to reach out has already burned half the window. The calendar below breaks that window, and the months before it, into what to do and when. The dates that actually drive the calendar Two federal enrollment windows govern almost everything on a turning-65 calendar, and they don't run on the same clock. Initial Enrollment Period (IEP): 7 months — 3 months before the birthday month, the birthday month, and 3 months after. Confirmed on Medicare.gov and CMS.gov . Medigap Open Enrollment Period: A separate 6-month window that starts the first month someone is 65+ and enrolled in Part B — not the birthday, the Part B effective date. During this window a Medigap carrier can't deny coverage or charge more for health status. Confirmed on Medicare.gov . Because the Medigap clock starts at Part B enrollment rather than the birthday, a client who signs up for Part B early — say, four months before turning 65 — opens their Medigap window early too. A client who waits until the birthday month starts their Medigap window then. The outreach calendar has to track both. Missing the IEP matters beyond a missed sale: someone who doesn't sign up during the IEP and doesn't qualify for a Special Enrollment Period has to wait for the General Enrollment Period (January 1 – March 31 each year) and can owe a Part B late enrollment penalty for as long as they carry Part B — Medicare.gov confirms the General Enrollment Period dates and penalty exposure, and KFF puts the penalty at 10% of the standard Part B premium for each full 12-month period of delay. That's the stakes behind "we'll get to them before the birthday." The calendar, month by month Timing relative to 65th birthday What's true for the client What the agency should do 9 months out Not yet in any enrollment window. Most people haven't started researching. Add to the turning-65 list. Send one educational touch (what Medicare is, what the IEP will look like) — no plan pitch yet. 6 months out Still outside the IEP, but close enough that people start asking questions. Second educational touch. Confirm current coverage (employer plan, marketplace, none) since that changes the conversation. 3 months out IEP opens today. This is the earliest a Medicare Advantage, Part D, or Medigap application can be submitted for a clean effective date. Primary outreach push: call, schedule an appointment, document a Scope of Appointment before any plan-specific conversation. Birthday month Midpoint of the IEP. Part A/B eligibility begins (if they signed up during the first 3 months, coverage starts this month). Confirm enrollment status. If they haven't acted, this is the last full month before the window narrows to "after." 1–3 months after IEP is closing. After month 3, they're into General Enrollment Period rules and possible penalties. Final, direct outreach. If they've enrolled in Part B, open the separate 6-month Medigap conversation on its own clock. Ongoing (Medigap window) 6 months from Part B effective date, independent of the birthday. Track this as its own reminder, not a copy of the IEP dates — it can end later than the IEP for anyone who delayed Part B. This is a template, not a script: an agency running Medicare Advantage will front-load the 3-months-out push harder than one selling mostly Medigap, where the real deadline is the Part B effective date rather than the birthday. Turning 65 is not the same calendar as AEP It's easy to fold turning-65 outreach into the same mental bucket as the Annual Enrollment Period (AEP, October 15 – December 7 ), since both involve Medicare plan conversations in the fall. They're not the same list. AEP is a plan-change window open to everyone already on Medicare; the IEP is a one-time, birthday-anchored window for someone becoming eligible for the first time. A client turning 65 in March has an IEP that opens in December and closes in June — entirely outside AEP. Running turning-65 outreach only during AEP season means missing everyone whose birthday falls in the other ten months of the year. Building the list: what the calendar needs from the CRM Every row in the table above depends on one field being populated and accurate: date of birth. A turning-65 calendar built on a CRM where DOB is optional, inconsistently formatted, or only captured at the point of sale will always undercount — the people missing a DOB simply don't appear on any of the milestone lists, and nobody gets an alert that they're missing. Before running the calendar for the first time, it's worth pulling a count of contacts with no DOB on file and treating that as its own cleanup task, separate from the outreach itself. The same applies to contact type. A "lead" who was worked five years ago and never converted, and a household member listed under a client's record but never made their own contact, both need to show up on a turning-65 list if they're going to turn 65 — which means the calendar has to run against the whole book, not just active clients. Where the calendar breaks without a system behind it The reason this calendar is hard to run by hand isn't the math — it's that "who turns 65 in nine months" isn't a question most systems can answer, and by the time someone notices during the birthday month, three of the seven IEP months are already gone. Example: a four-agent Medicare agency tracking turning-65 clients in a spreadsheet updated whenever someone remembers to check found that roughly a third of their list had already entered the IEP before anyone reached out, because the spreadsheet was sorted by name, not by birthday proximity. Nothing forced a monthly look at who had crossed the 9-month or 3-month mark. That's the gap a calendar has to close: someone (or something) has to surface the list on a schedule, not wait to be asked. How AgencyView handles the calendar AgencyView's contact directory has built-in Smart Lists for exactly these three milestones — Turning 65 within the next 6 months, within the next 3 months, and this month — filtered live off each contact's date of birth ( src/pages/ContactsPage.tsx ). An agency can open the Contacts page, switch to the "Turning 65 · Next 3 Months" list, and see the IEP-opening group without building a report. Underneath that, AgencyView runs two scheduled processes so the calendar doesn't depend on someone remembering to check: A monthly Turning 65 report , emailed to each connected account on the last day of the month, listing every contact who turns 65 the following month — sent even when the list is empty, since a report that only shows up when there's something on it is indistinguishable from a broken report ( supabase/functions/turning-65-report/index.ts ). An automatic Medicare eligibility sweep that flags a contact for HealthSherpa for Medicare once they're within 9 months of turning 65, so the quoting side is ready before the agent even makes the first call ( supabase/functions/healthsherpa-medicare-sync/index.ts ). None of that replaces the judgment calls in the table above — when to push harder, when a client has already acted, when the Medigap clock diverges from the IEP clock. It just makes sure the list itself, and the timing on it, isn't the thing that goes wrong. FAQ When does the Medicare Initial Enrollment Period start? Three months before the month someone turns 65. It's a 7-month window total: the 3 months before, the birthday month, and the 3 months after ( Medicare.gov ). Is the Medigap Open Enrollment Period the same as the Medicare IEP? No. Medigap Open Enrollment…
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