CMS-855R Is Discontinued: How Medicare Reassignment of Benefits Works Now

The clearest evidence is printed on the replacement form. The current CMS-855I, verified live on 11 August 2026, states: "NOTE: All reassignment actions should now be reported via the CMS-855I. The CMS-855R (Reassignment of Medicare Benefits) form has been discontinued." That is CMS's own language, on CMS's own current form — not a vendor blog's interpretation.

The dates come from CMS's Provider Enrollment & Oversight Group, in its 2024 Provider Enrollment Compliance Conference keynote: the consolidated CMS-855I was "Released on September 1, 2023," and the "855R was discontinued effective October 31, 2023." The same deck states the operational consequence in one sentence: "Practitioners and groups can establish, terminate or change reassignments using only the 855I."

CMS then rewrote its own manual to match. Transmittal 12639 to the Program Integrity Manual (Pub. 100-08, Chapter 10), dated May 16, 2024, retitles section 10.3.1.4 "Reassignment of Medicare Benefits Via the Form CMS-855I" and deletes the former subsections that walked contractors through the 855R — including "Sections 1 through 5 of the Form CMS-855R" and its certification-statement section. The Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs) that process these applications are now instructed by a manual that no longer contains an 855R procedure.

So the answer-first version for anyone skimming: the CMS-855R is discontinued, has been since October 31, 2023, and nothing replaced it as a standalone form. The reassignment function moved inside the CMS-855I and PECOS. If a website is walking you through "filling out the 855R" as a current task — and as of August 2026, pages that do still rank for this form's name — it is describing a filing the MACs' own manual no longer covers. If you would rather hand the whole thing off, our Medicare provider enrollment service runs reassignments through PECOS under the current rules, with your Authorized Official keeping control of the account throughout.

The CMS-855I defines it precisely: "Reassignment of Medicare Benefits: Authorization by an individual practitioner to allow an eligible organization/group to submit claims and receive payment for Medicare Part B services that the practitioner has provided as a member of the organization/group. Such an eligible organization/group may be an individual, a clinic/group practice or other health care organization."

Strip the definition to its billing consequence and it is this: Medicare pays the party the practitioner authorizes. Without a reassignment on file, a group cannot bill Medicare for a physician's services and collect the payment — even if the physician is fully enrolled as an individual and the group is fully enrolled as an organization. The two enrollments exist independently; the reassignment is the link that lets the group's billing operation collect for the individual's work. Every multi-provider practice billing Medicare Part B runs on this mechanism, and so does the common solo arrangement where a physician has formed a professional corporation or PC/LLC and bills through it.

Two boundaries keep this concept clean:

• Reassignment is not enrollment. A practitioner enrolls in Medicare using CMS-855I; an organization enrolls in Medicare through PECOS using CMS-855B. The reassignment is a relationship between two enrollments, not a substitute for either one. The CMS-855I states the prerequisite bluntly: "Both the individual practitioner and the eligible organization/group must be currently enrolled (or concurrently enrolling via submission of the CMS-855B for the eligible organization/group and the CMS-855I for the individual practitioner) in the Medicare program before the reassignment can take effect."
• Reassignment is provider-side only. Nothing here touches a patient's Medicare coverage. The word "benefits" in the form title refers to the Part B payment for services, not to a beneficiary's benefits package.

Operationally, the reassignment is also what connects the practitioner to the group's billing identifiers. Per CMS's MLN glossary for Medicare billing, "A PTAN is a Medicare-only number issued to health care professionals or suppliers by Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs) upon enrollment in Medicare," and a professional with relationships to one or more medical groups usually has separate PTANs assigned for those relationships — the glossary pairs each NPI with one or more PTANs in PECOS. Our PTAN guide covers that identifier in depth.

The current CMS-855I lays out both routes in one sentence: "Physicians and non-physician practitioners can apply for enrollment in the Medicare program or make a change to their enrollment information (including adding or terminating a reassignment of benefits) using either: • The Internet-based Provider Enrollment, Chain and Ownership System (PECOS), or • The paper CMS-855I enrollment application." CMS lists no other route, and there is no standalone reassignment form anymore.

Here is the before-and-after in one table:

On the paper form, the CMS-855I's own filing matrix tells you exactly which sections a reassignment-only submission touches: "Reassignment of Benefits Information | 1, 2A, 4F, 12, 13 (optional) and 15." Section 4F carries the reassignment data; Section 15 carries the signatures. For a new reassignment, the form instructs: "When establishing a new reassignment, Section 15B must be signed by the individual practitioner and Section 15C must be signed by a delegated/authorized official of the organization/group. If the reassignment is to an individual, that person must sign Section 15C."

Between the two routes, CMS's own recommendation is not subtle. Its PECOS enrollment page states: "Because PECOS is paperless, you no longer need to submit anything by mail. Additionally, PECOS applications tend to process faster than paper applications." The MAC-published processing goals in the next section put numbers behind that preference. For the mechanics of navigating the system itself, see our PECOS enrollment guide; for the full form beyond its reassignment section, the CMS-855I guide walks it section by section.

This is the transaction most people searching "855R" actually need to complete: a group practice has hired a physician and wants Medicare payments for that physician's services to flow to the group. Here is the current workflow.

Step 0 — confirm both enrollments exist or are in flight. The CMS-855I's prerequisite quoted earlier is the gate: both the individual practitioner and the eligible organization/group must be currently enrolled, or concurrently enrolling — the group via CMS-855B, the practitioner via CMS-855I — before the reassignment can take effect. In practice that yields three scenarios:

For the third scenario — building the group from scratch — the CMS-855B guide covers the organization side, and our provider enrollment checklist sequences the documents before anything is filed.

The PECOS route. The group's Authorized Official (AO) — or a credentialing partner working through an approved surrogate connection — logs into PECOS and submits the reassignment as an enrollment action on the practitioner's record, associating the practitioner with the group's practice location. Two access rules matter here. First, CMS's Identity & Access (I&A) Management System is the login layer for PECOS, and its Quick Reference Guide defines the surrogate model: a third-party organization such as a billing agency or credentialing consultant "that has business relationships with Individual Providers or Organizational Providers to work on their behalf," with connections requested and approved inside I&A. Second, credential sharing is not a gray area — the I&A login terms state: "Sharing of login information is strictly prohibited!" A vendor that asks for your PECOS password instead of a surrogate connection is asking you to violate CMS's own terms. (This is why MedPrecision never asks for CMS or PECOS usernames or passwords; a surrogate works on the provider's behalf through the Identity & Access (I&A) Management System, and the AO keeps control.)

The paper route. Complete the CMS-855I sections from the filing matrix above, collect both signatures — the practitioner in Section 15B, the group's delegated/authorized official in Section 15C — and mail the package to the MAC for your jurisdiction. The form also tells you who typically runs this play: "Generally, a new reassignment is established by the organization/group, signed by the Delegated/Authorized Official of the organization/group and the individual practitioner, and submitted by the organization/group." The group's credentialing staff, not the physician, usually owns the submission.

Cost. Nothing, on the CMS side. Per CMS's MLN Medicare Provider Enrollment page: "Physicians, non-physician practitioners (NPPs), physician organizations, non-physician organizations, and Medicare Diabetes Prevention Program (MDPP) suppliers don't pay a Medicare enrollment application fee." The 2026 application fee of $750 exists, but it applies to categories like DMEPOS suppliers and opioid treatment programs — not to a physician group adding a physician.

How long the MAC takes. The MAC processes the application and issues the PTAN where a new enrollment is involved; how fast is published as goals, not guarantees. National Government Services states on its enrollment hot-topics page (reviewed by NGS on September 2, 2025) that "All MACs, including National Governments Services, have a goal to finalize an Internet-based PECOS application within 15 days and a CMS-855 paper application within 30 days, if all required information is available." Novitas Solutions publishes CMS-defined timeframes on its processing-times page: for internet-based PECOS initial enrollments requiring no site visit, development, or fingerprinting, 95% completed within 15 calendar days of receipt and 100% within 50; for paper applications without those triggers, 95% within 30 calendar days and 100% within 65. Both MACs frame these as goals or CMS timeliness standards conditioned on a complete application — a development request for a missing item stops the clock, which is why the fastest reassignments are the ones filed complete the first time.

One adjacent form. If the group is newly enrolling and setting up its payment banking at the same time, CMS-588 authorizes electronic funds transfer — a separate submission with its own signer rule, covered in our CMS-588 EFT guide. A reassignment by itself does not require a new CMS-588; the form's stated triggers are a new EFT enrollment or a change to banking information.

Departures are administratively easier than arrivals, and the CMS-855I says so explicitly: "When terminating a reassignment or making changes to reassignment information, either the organization/group must sign Section 15C or the individual practitioner must sign Section 15B." One signature — either party's — is enough. A new reassignment needs both signatures; ending or amending one does not.

That asymmetry has a practical consequence worth knowing before a contentious exit: either side can terminate unilaterally. A group does not need a departed physician's cooperation to file the termination, and a physician does not need the group's cooperation to sever a reassignment after leaving. The submission is a change of information — through PECOS or a paper CMS-855I touching the reassignment sections — not a new enrollment.

Why file it promptly rather than let it lapse quietly:

• Payment routing. The reassignment is the authorization for the group to submit claims and receive payment for the practitioner's Part B services. A stale reassignment leaves an authorization on file that no longer reflects reality.
• Enrollment-record hygiene. The reassignment lives in PECOS on the practitioner's enrollment record. When the practitioner later joins another group, revalidates, or a provider revalidates enrollment on the MAC's cycle, an obsolete group association is the kind of discrepancy that generates a development request and stalls the action that actually matters.
• Both directions of the move. A physician moving between groups typically needs two actions: terminating the reassignment to the old group and establishing a new reassignment with the new one. The termination takes one signature; the new reassignment takes both parties' signatures (15B and 15C) or the PECOS equivalent. They are separate transactions, and filing only the second one leaves the first association dangling.

As with every reassignment action since October 31, 2023, there is no separate termination form: the CMS-855I's instruction that practitioners can make "a change to their enrollment information (including adding or terminating a reassignment of benefits)" through PECOS or the paper 855I is the full set of routes CMS lists.

Blank and fillable CMS-855R PDFs still circulate — third-party form-filler and document sites continue to host the discontinued form and, as of August 2026, some still present it as a current Medicare filing without mentioning the discontinuation. So a group that downloaded and mailed an 855R in good faith is not a rare case.

Being straight about what CMS does and does not publish here: the discontinuation itself is unambiguous — printed on the current 855I and dated October 31, 2023 in CMS's conference keynote — but we found no CMS page, in our source review on 11 August 2026, that states a uniform national procedure for how a MAC handles an 855R received today. We will not invent one. What can be said with confidence rests on two verifiable facts: CMS instructs that "All reassignment actions should now be reported via the CMS-855I," and Program Integrity Manual Transmittal 12639 deleted the 855R processing sections from the manual MACs work from. An 855R you mail now is a filing the contractor's current instructions no longer describe.

The practical playbook if an 855R went out the door:

1. Do not wait on it. Treat the 855R submission as a dead letter until proven otherwise. The failure mode that costs real money is assuming the reassignment is in process while nothing is pending.
2. Resubmit through a current route. File the reassignment in PECOS, or on the current CMS-855I (Sections 1, 2A, 4F, 12, 13 optional, and 15, with the 15B and 15C signatures for a new reassignment). This is the action CMS's own form directs, and it does not depend on how the MAC dispositions the old paper.
3. Call your MAC's provider enrollment line before duplicating anything else. If the 855R submission somehow generated a pending application or a development request, you want to know before a second filing creates a duplicate-application tangle. Log who you spoke to and when.
4. Fix the source. If the 855R came off an internal checklist or a template packet, replace it now — the same stale packet usually also predates other current-form revisions.

On downloading: we are deliberately not linking any 855R file. CMS's current 855I is the operative form, and pointing anyone at a discontinued application — even for reference — is how the zombie keeps shambling. If a consultant or billing vendor hands you an 855R to sign in 2026, that is a useful signal about how current the rest of their Medicare enrollment process is; our Medicare enrollment service exists for practices that would rather not audit their vendor's forms.

The question underneath every reassignment filing is when the group can start billing for the new physician's services — and what happens to visits furnished while the paperwork was pending.

The sequencing rule comes first. Per the CMS-855I, the reassignment cannot take effect until both the practitioner and the organization/group are enrolled (or their concurrent enrollments — CMS-855B for the group, CMS-855I for the practitioner — are approved). The reassignment's operative date is therefore bounded by the enrollments it connects: a reassignment filed alongside a brand-new enrollment waits on that enrollment's effective date.

Federal regulation then provides a limited reach-back. 42 CFR 424.521 permits specified provider types to "retrospectively bill for services when the provider or supplier has met all program requirements (including State licensure requirements), and services were provided at the enrolled practice location for up to — (i) Thirty days prior to their effective date if circumstances precluded enrollment in advance of providing services to Medicare beneficiaries; or (ii) Ninety days prior to their effective date if a Presidentially-declared disaster" under the Stafford Act precluded enrolling in advance. The regulation's list of who qualifies, at paragraph (a)(2), begins: "(i) Physicians. (ii) Non-physician practitioners. (iii) Physician organizations. (iv) Non-physician practitioner organizations." — which covers the physician-joins-group scenario on both sides.

Read the conditions as narrowly as the regulation writes them:

• 30 days is the ordinary ceiling, and it runs backward from the effective date. It is not a grace period that attaches automatically; the regulation conditions it on circumstances having precluded enrolling in advance.
• All program requirements must have been met during the reach-back window, state licensure included. A physician who saw patients before licensure was active has a problem no reassignment filing fixes.
• Services must have been provided at the enrolled practice location. The reach-back does not cover a location that never made it onto the enrollment.
• The 90-day window is disaster-specific — a Presidentially-declared Stafford Act disaster — not a general extension anyone can elect.

The planning consequence is unglamorous but reliable: a new physician's start date should be set against the enrollment-and-reassignment timeline, not the other way around. With MAC processing goals of 15 days for a complete PECOS filing (the NGS-published goal quoted above) and a 30-day retrospective ceiling behind the effective date, a group that files a complete reassignment before or at the physician's start date has overlapping coverage in the normal case. A group that starts the physician first and files a month later is betting the entire gap on a clean, development-free approval — with revenue on services already furnished as the stake. Where the timeline has already slipped, our Medicare provider enrollment team prioritizes getting a complete, development-proof filing in fast, because under 42 CFR 424.521 the effective date — not effort, not intent — is what the 30-day window hangs from.