MEDICARE BENEFICIARY IDENTIFIER (MBI)

A new Medicare Beneficiary Identifier (MBI) will replace the SSN-based Health Insurance Claim Number (HICN) on the new Medicare cards for Medicare claim status, billing, Buy-In or social security benefits.

Unlike HICN, MBI is made up of randomly generated characters. The MBI has 11 characters long including numbers 0-9 and letters from A to Z, except for S, L, O, I, B, and Z. It must not contain lower case letters or special characters.

(Example: 1EG4-TE5-MK73)

The characters 1, 4, 7, 10, and 11 will always be a number.

The characters 2, 5, 8 and 9 will always be a letter.

The characters 3 and 6 will be a letter or a number.