The Open Enrollment surge begins November 1 with HealthCare.gov, followed days later by Federal Benefits Open Season. These overlapping enrollment periods bring millions of people into the process of reviewing coverage, comparing options, completing enrollment actions, and seeking assistance.
The workforce problem starts well before the first spike in calls. By November, agents need to be trained, systems-ready, scheduled, and supported. A staffing plan that is still trying to build capacity once demand arrives is already behind.
For prime contractors, the question is therefore not how many seasonal agents can be hired. It is how much productive capacity will actually be available when Open Enrollment reaches its peak.
Why November Creates a Federal Contact Center Capacity Problem
HealthCare.gov and Federal Benefits Open Season serve different populations, but their enrollment calendars overlap.
HealthCare.gov’s Open Enrollment Period for 2027 coverage begins November 1, 2026. The standard Marketplace window runs through January 15.¹
Federal Benefits Open Season operates on a shorter schedule. OPM sets the annual period from the Monday of the second full workweek in November through the Monday of the second full workweek in December. In 2026, that places the window from November 9 through December 14.²
For contact center operations, those dates matter because the demand is concentrated.
Marketplace consumers may be starting applications, comparing plans, updating household information, checking financial assistance, submitting documents, or trying to resolve an enrollment issue before an effective-date deadline.
Federal employees and eligible participants may simultaneously be reviewing FEHB options and making benefits decisions during their own annual enrollment window.
The programs do not share one contact center or one operating model, but they do create overlapping demand for similar workforce capabilities: healthcare customer service experience, process accuracy, strong communication, familiarity with sensitive information, and the ability to work through complex questions without creating additional confusion.
That can tighten the labor market precisely when contractors need the largest number of trained people available.
How Many Agents Does HealthCare.gov Use During Open Enrollment?
There is no current public CMS figure showing the exact number of agents supporting the Marketplace Call Center for the 2027 enrollment season.
There is, however, useful historical context.
CMS reported that Marketplace Call Center staffing peaked at approximately 10,000 people during the Open Enrollment period preceding the 2019 plan year and that it intended to maintain that staffing level for the following enrollment season.³
The figure should be treated as historical rather than as today’s staffing level, but it shows the scale federal enrollment support has required before.
The customer population remains substantial. During the 2026 Marketplace Open Enrollment Period, nearly 23 million consumers selected or were automatically re-enrolled in coverage through the federal and state Marketplaces. Approximately 15.8 million of those plan selections were through HealthCare.gov.⁴
CMS has also previously described its call center as a front line for consumers applying for coverage and comparing plans, and has documented the use of extensive pre-Open Enrollment training and refresher training during the enrollment period.³
That is the part workforce planners should pay attention to.
Ten thousand names on a staffing roster would mean very little if the operation could not turn them into productive capacity.
The same principle applies at any scale.
A surge plan has to account for every step between identifying a candidate and having an agent independently handling live contacts. Recruiting, screening, onboarding, systems access, training, nesting, and early QA all consume time and capacity before the workforce can absorb volume.
Read More: What Federal Contact Centers Get Wrong About Surge Staffing
How Far in Advance Should Open Enrollment Contact Center Hiring Begin?
There is no federal rule that says Open Enrollment recruiting must begin a specific number of weeks before November.
The more useful calculation works backward from the date agents need to be productive.
If a program requires several weeks of training, system access, background screening, nesting, or healthcare-specific learning, those steps need to be completed before peak demand arrives. Recruiting has to begin early enough to absorb those lead times as well as the candidates who accept an offer but never reach production.
That makes the final four weeks before Open Enrollment a poor time to begin building the primary workforce.
By then, program leaders should be validating readiness.
- How many agents have accepted?
- How many have actually started?
- How many are through training?
- How many are in nesting?
- How many can independently take contacts?
- Where are the remaining gaps?
- What does the replacement pipeline look like?
The difference between hired headcount and productive headcount becomes critical during a fixed enrollment window.
Read More: The Post-Award Transition Playbook for Federal Contact Centers
Bilingual Open Enrollment Staffing Needs Its Own Capacity Plan
Language support adds another layer to Open Enrollment workforce planning.
HealthCare.gov provides Spanish-language services and makes language assistance available through the Marketplace Call Center. Consumers who need help in languages other than English can also request interpreter assistance at no cost.
For staffing purposes, bilingual capacity should not disappear inside the overall headcount number.
A program can reach its total staffing target and still enter Open Enrollment short of the language capability required by its customer population.
Spanish-language demand can place particular pressure on a smaller pool of bilingual employees. If that pool is too thin, those agents have less room for schedule changes, coaching, absence coverage, or unexpected increases in contact volume.
Recruiting bilingual agents also requires more than confirming that someone speaks Spanish conversationally.
Healthcare support requires agents to communicate accurately while discussing coverage, applications, eligibility information, documentation, and next steps. Language proficiency needs to hold up inside the actual context of the role.
That makes bilingual staffing part of the initial workforce forecast.
It should have its own sourcing targets, readiness numbers, schedule coverage, replacement pipeline, and quality monitoring.
Read More: The Bilingual Staffing Gap in Federal Programs (And What It’s Costing You)
Four Surge Staffing Models for Open Enrollment Contact Centers
Open Enrollment programs do not all need the same workforce structure.
The right model depends on the size and length of the volume increase, training complexity, existing workforce capacity, bilingual requirements, and what happens to additional employees when demand falls.
Four models are particularly useful for federal contact center planning.
1. Core Workforce With a Seasonal Overlay
A permanent workforce continues to manage baseline demand while additional agents are hired for the enrollment period.
This gives the program an experienced operational core while allowing headcount to expand around a predictable peak.
The pressure point is support capacity.
A large seasonal class creates additional work for trainers, supervisors, QA teams, schedulers, and escalation resources. Programs that expand frontline headcount without expanding those functions can create a bottleneck behind the agents.
2. Staged Training and Deployment
Instead of trying to recruit and train the entire surge population at once, the workforce enters in planned cohorts.
One group may be nesting while the next is in training and another is completing onboarding.
This gives the program more control over throughput and allows early lessons to improve later classes. It also spreads demand across trainers and supervisors rather than placing the entire ramp on one start date.
For a long enrollment window, staged deployment can also position additional capacity closer to later deadlines rather than requiring every surge agent to be production-ready on November 1.
3. Cross-Trained Workforce Redeployment
Some contractors may have employees elsewhere in the organization who can temporarily support enrollment work, provided the contract, training requirements, systems access, and employee qualifications allow it.
The advantage is access to workers who already understand the contractor’s operating environment.
The limitation is readiness.
Moving an experienced contact center agent from another program does not automatically make that person ready for federal healthcare enrollment work. Program knowledge, systems training, security requirements, and customer-specific processes still need to be addressed.
Redeployment works best when it has been planned in advance rather than used as an emergency response to missed staffing targets.
4. Core, Seasonal, and Backfill Capacity
This model builds three layers into the workforce plan.
The core team provides stability. A planned seasonal cohort expands capacity for expected demand. A separate backfill pipeline remains active to replace early attrition, failed starts, unexpected absences, or higher-than-forecast volume.
That third layer matters because surge recruiting rarely ends when the target headcount is reached.
If the entire pipeline closes once training begins, every early loss reduces the program’s available capacity.
A backfill strategy keeps the workforce plan moving while the surge is already underway.
What Separates Open Enrollment Programs That Hold Service Levels?
The programs that enter November in the strongest position have usually solved more than recruiting.
They know their productive headcount, rather than relying on offers accepted.
They have enough training capacity to move candidates through the program without creating a queue before the real queue even begins.
Supervisor ratios account for the fact that a large proportion of the workforce may be newly trained.
QA capacity expands alongside frontline staffing so that speed does not come at the expense of accuracy.
Bilingual coverage has been forecast independently.
The recruiting pipeline remains active after the first classes start.
Most importantly, the workforce plan has been tested against something other than the expected forecast.
- What happens if volume arrives earlier?
- What happens if the first training class loses more people than expected?
- What happens if absenteeism increases during the busiest week?
- What happens if Spanish-language demand exceeds the original model?
- What happens if additional capacity is needed seven days from now?
A surge plan becomes useful when it can answer those questions before the program needs the answers.
What Primes Should Ask a Workforce Partner Four Weeks Before Open Enrollment
Four weeks before Open Enrollment, a staffing partner should be able to talk about readiness in operational terms.
A prime should know:
How many production-ready agents will we have by the required date?
Candidate pipeline numbers are useful, but they should be separated into sourced, interviewed, offered, accepted, started, training, nesting, and production-ready populations.
Where are we losing people before production?
Fallout should be visible early enough to trigger additional recruiting rather than becoming a surprise at the end of training.
What does bilingual readiness look like?
Total agent capacity and Spanish-language capacity should be reported separately where bilingual support is required.
How quickly can we replace a lost agent?
The answer reveals whether the staffing provider still has pipeline depth after the initial ramp.
What happens if the forecast is wrong?
The staffing model should identify how additional capacity can be sourced, trained, and deployed if demand exceeds expectations.
What workforce support does the surge require?
More agents can mean more trainers, supervisors, quality analysts, schedulers, and escalation support. The prime needs visibility into the operating model around the new hires, not only the hiring number.
What is the ramp-down plan?
The surge does not end operationally the moment volume falls. Workforce decisions after the peak can affect retention, morale, final service levels, and the contractor’s ability to respond to late enrollment activity.
These are the questions that reveal whether a workforce partner is supplying seasonal labor or managing surge capacity.
How Open Enrollment Surge Performance Can Affect CPARS
Open Enrollment may be seasonal, but the contractor’s performance during the surge still becomes part of the wider contract record.
FAR 42.1501 identifies past performance information as including a contractor’s record of conforming to requirements, controlling costs, adhering to schedules, behaving reasonably and cooperatively, and demonstrating concern for the customer’s interests.5
FAR 42.1503 requires evaluations to address factors including technical or service quality, schedule or timeliness, management or business relations, and other applicable performance areas. Evaluations should reflect objective facts supported by contract and program performance data.6
For a contact center contractor, the Open Enrollment period can generate plenty of that data.
Staffing shortages may show up in service levels.
A rushed ramp may affect quality.
High early attrition may create schedule or coverage problems.
Weak workforce forecasting may require repeated recovery actions.
A well-managed surge can demonstrate the opposite: the contractor forecasted demand, brought capacity online when required, responded to workforce changes, and protected service during the program’s most demanding period.
That is why Open Enrollment staffing belongs in the performance strategy for the contract.
The hiring plan is only one part of it.
How Salem Solutions Supports Open Enrollment Contact Center Staffing
Salem Solutions approaches Open Enrollment as a workforce capacity challenge that starts before seasonal hiring begins.
That means building pipeline depth around the required production date, sourcing for healthcare contact center and bilingual needs, planning staged deployment, maintaining backfill capacity, and helping federal contractors respond when actual workforce requirements move beyond the original forecast.
For primes supporting federal healthcare programs, the objective is straightforward: enter November with enough trained capacity to absorb the peak without sacrificing the people, supervision, and service quality needed to perform through the full enrollment window.
Preparing for the Open Enrollment surge? Talk to us about building the workforce capacity behind your federal healthcare contact center.
References
- HealthCare.gov, “Get or Change Coverage Outside of Open Enrollment,” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, accessed September 2026, https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage-outside-open-enrollment/.
- U.S. Office of Personnel Management, “What Is Open Season?” accessed September 2026, https://www.opm.gov/frequently-asked-questions/insure-faq/health/what-is-open-season/.
- Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, “Federal Health Insurance Exchange 2019 Open Enrollment,” October 11, 2018, https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/federal-health-insurance-exchange-2019-open-enrollment.
- Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, “Marketplace 2026 Open Enrollment Period Report: National Snapshot,” January 28, 2026, https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/marketplace-2026-open-enrollment-period-report-national-snapshot-2.
- Federal Acquisition Regulation, “42.1501 General,” Acquisition.gov, effective March 13, 2026, https://www.acquisition.gov/far/42.1501.
- Federal Acquisition Regulation, “42.1503 Procedures,” Acquisition.gov, effective March 13, 2026, https://www.acquisition.gov/far/42.1503.
