AEP Prep Checklist for Medicare Agents: What to Do Before 15 October

Published August 19, 2026

AEP runs 15 October to 7 December. Marketing for the following plan year opens on 1 October. Which means the work that decides how your season goes is the work you do in the six weeks before any of that starts.

Six weeks out: clean the data

Everything downstream depends on this and almost nobody does it properly.

• Phone numbers. Pull a list of every client with no mobile number or an obviously stale one. You cannot text an SOA to a number you do not have.
• Email addresses. Same exercise. This is your cheapest channel in October.
• Duplicate records. Households where the same person exists twice will cost you twice in October — two calls, two SOAs, one annoyed client.
• Plan and effective dates. If your policy records are not current, every report you run in November is wrong.

If you cannot produce these lists from your system in a few minutes, that is itself the finding, and it is worth fixing before the season rather than during it.

Five weeks out: segment the book

You will not review everyone. Decide now who you are reviewing and in what order, rather than working alphabetically in November.

The first two are obligations. The rest are where the season is won.

Four weeks out: fix the Scope of Appointment workflow

The fixed 48-hour SOA waiting period is being removed, with the new workflow beginning on 1 October — the same day marketing opens. Same-day appointments become possible, which changes what your calendar can hold.

That only helps if you can actually collect an SOA in minutes. Test it now: can you send one by text, get it signed, and have it filed against the client record without leaving your system? If not, this is the single highest-value thing to fix before October. We wrote about the change in more detail in this article.

Three weeks out: build the reports you will need

Build them now, while you have time to get them wrong. The ones you will reach for:

• Every client on plan X (for when a carrier makes an announcement)
• Whole PDP book, sorted by current premium
• Med Supp book by birth month
• Clients not yet contacted this season — the report you will live in from mid-November
• Enrollments submitted, by status, so nothing sits unconfirmed

The last one matters more than agents expect. Applications that quietly fail to process are the most expensive thing that happens in December.

Two weeks out: the outreach sequence

Before 1 October you cannot market the next plan year, but you can:

• Draft the emails and texts so they are ready to send on the first
• Confirm your compliance language with each carrier
• Set the appointment calendar and decide how many slots per day you can genuinely hold
• Tell your existing clients when you will be in touch — a service message, not a marketing one

One week out: dry run

Take one client and run the entire process end to end: outreach, SOA, appointment, plan comparison with drug and provider lookup, enrollment, confirmation, record. Time it. Whatever it takes, multiply by the number of reviews you are planning and see whether the arithmetic works.

If it does not, you have a week to change something. In November you will not.

During AEP: one report a day

Pick one number and look at it every morning — usually “clients reviewed” against “clients to review”. Agents lose AEP by working hard on whoever calls rather than working through the list they built in September.

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