The back of the receipt: who issues these numbers, where they come from, how fresh they are, and who pays for this (nobody but the readers who buy extracts).
ArtiLabs — a small independent data studio in Suwon, South Korea (artilabs.kr). HospitalPriceGrid is built and tended day to day by HANI, an AI agent, under a human operator who signs off on what gets published. We are not a hospital, an insurer, a provider or a marketing partner of any of them.
US hospitals have been required since 2021 to publish the prices they negotiate with each insurer (45 CFR §180). The files exist — thousands of them, in dozens of formats, many pointing to the wrong hospital — and almost nobody can read them. We read them, verify which hospital each file really belongs to, and show the numbers as they are: no estimates, no averages of averages.
1. Hospital machine-readable price files — each hospital's own standard-charges file, the legal source of every negotiated rate, cash price and list price on this site.
2. CMS Provider Data Catalog — the federal hospital roster (CCN, ownership, quality star rating) that anchors hospital identity.
3. NPPES NPI Registry — the National Provider Identifier registry we check each file against before publishing (the "NPI VERIFIED" mark).
4. CMS OPPS Addendum B — the national Medicare outpatient rate used as the baseline in every "× Medicare" figure.
Full pipeline, screens and known limits: Methodology.
Hospital file dates in the current tables range from 2024-01-01 to 2026-09-02; every row shows its own file date.
Data extracted 2026-10-31 · page updated 2026-10-31. We re-check the CMS hospital roster weekly. Individual hospital files are re-collected on a rolling cycle — at our current rate roughly once a quarter per hospital, which we are working to shorten. Comparison tables are rebuilt from dated extracts, and the date is printed on each page rather than silently refreshed.
Scope, stated plainly: of 5,419 hospitals in the CMS roster we have identity-verified 1,789 and hold parsed prices for 1,483 of them (27.4%), totalling 3,501,330 rates (as of 2026-10-30). The rest are queued, blocked by a dead or non-machine-readable file link, or not yet attempted. A hospital missing here has not been judged non-compliant — it means we do not have its file.
Files older than 12 months at extraction are flagged file >12 mo old — 8 of the 150 hospitals currently shown. Hospitals are required to update yearly; we show the age instead of hiding it.
No advertising, no affiliate links, no sponsored placements, and no money from hospitals or insurers. The only revenue is paid data extracts for professionals. Health-related inputs are never sent to advertising or analytics systems (see Disclaimer).
The price statistics on our pages are licensed CC BY 4.0: use them for anything, including commercial work, as long as you credit "HospitalPriceGrid (ArtiLabs)". Our free sample dataset carries the same licence (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23199844). Site text, design, and the paid per-insurer extracts on /data are not covered.
If a figure looks wrong, the hospital's own file is the authority. Email the hospital name, procedure and what you saw to data@hospitalpricegrid.com; we re-check the source file and answer within two business days, and we say so on the page when a correction changes a number.
2026-10-07 — We removed Swedish Hospital (Chicago) from this table. The price file linked to it belonged to Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, WA — our identity check had matched the name but not the state. 45 hospitals nationwide were withdrawn for the same reason; the check now rejects a file whose declared address is in another state. Pages: /costs/mri-brain/chicago-il/, /costs/colonoscopy-diagnostic/chicago-il/
2026-10-31 — We removed Essentia Health Northern Pines Medical Center (Aurora, Minnesota) and Mercy Hospital Aurora (Aurora, Missouri) from this table. They were included because our Chicago-area list matched the city name Aurora without checking the state. Every metro is now defined by state as well as city or county. Pages: /costs/mri-brain/chicago-il/, /costs/colonoscopy-diagnostic/chicago-il/
2026-10-31 — We removed Huntington Hospital (Pasadena, California) from this table. It was included because our Houston-area list matched the city name Pasadena without checking the state. Every metro is now defined by state as well as city or county. Pages: /costs/mri-brain/houston-tx/, /costs/colonoscopy-diagnostic/houston-tx/
data@hospitalpricegrid.com
Coverage requests (a metro or procedure you need) go to the same address and set our priority queue.