Clear Money Guide
What this guide covers
A quick view of the questions and evidence developed below.
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Updated July 28, 2026. Quick answer: It does not. The qualifying event is the loss of income-producing property — and 20 C.F.R. §418.1205(e) expressly excludes losses taken at your own direction by sale. A voluntary sale is precisely what the exclusion is written to keep out. The surcharge arrives two years later, and a sale is not a ground for asking SSA to use a more recent tax year, so the request would be treated as a non-qualifying event.
Related reading on this site: Form SSA-44 and IRMAA relief.
Why the distinction is about volition, not size
The relief exists for people whose income fell through something outside their control. A sale you chose to make is inside your control — and the fact that it produced a very large one-off gain, and that your ongoing income is far lower, does not change the analysis.
| What happened to the property | Qualifies? |
|---|---|
| Destroyed by disaster | Potentially |
| Lost through circumstances outside your control | Potentially |
| Sold at your own direction | Expressly excluded |
So a liquidity event carries an IRMAA cost that must be priced in advance. Someone selling a business at 63 will see the surcharge at 65, on income they no longer have, for a full year — and both spouses will pay it if both are enrolled. It is a real and foreseeable cost of the transaction, and it is almost never in the model.
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Whether a sale can ever support relief where the seller simultaneously stops working — work stoppage being a genuine qualifying event — is not something I could settle from the regulation and SSA guidance available to me. If you are selling a business and retiring in the same year, that combination is worth raising with SSA directly, because the work-stoppage event may stand on its own footing regardless of the sale. Do not assume either answer.
No dollar thresholds appear here. Most IRMAA bracket boundaries are CPI-indexed and change annually, and the top boundary is on a different schedule from the rest. Take the current year’s thresholds from CMS or the Social Security Administration directly.
Figures verified against 20 C.F.R. §418.1205 and §418.1210, 42 U.S.C. §1395r and SSA POMS HI 01120.005 and HI 01140.005 on September 30, 2026.
Sources
42 U.S.C. §1395r(i) (Social Security Act §1839(i)), including §1395r(i)(4) (the year used and the modified adjusted gross income definition) and §1395r(i)(5) (inflation adjustment and its exclusions); 20 C.F.R. §418.1205 and §418.1210 (life-changing events and the exclusivity of that list); SSA Program Operations Manual System HI 01120.005 and HI 01140.005. All read July 2026.
This states what the cited authority says. It is not tax advice, and retirement-plan design turns on facts about your business and your other entities that no page can see. Every dollar limit referenced here is indexed and changes annually.