Methodology

Every number on this site comes from a hospital's own federally mandated machine-readable file (45 CFR §180) or from CMS published data. Nothing is estimated or crowdsourced.

Pipeline

1. Roster

The CMS hospital roster (5,419 facilities) is our universe. Nothing is excluded; collection is priority-ordered.

2. File identity verification

Published price-file links are wrong for roughly 30% of hospitals (they point to another facility's file). Before using any file we verify the identity it declares (name, address, NPI) against CMS registries. Only tier A (the file's NPI resolves to this hospital alone) and tier B (the file's hospital name matches, any address it declares is in the same state, and no other verified hospital claims the same file) are shown. Since October 2026 a name match alone is not enough — a file whose declared address is in another state is held back until its NPI settles it.

3. Selective parsing

We parse a controlled dictionary of shoppable procedures (based on the CMS shoppable-services list) across CSV/JSON file layouts, preserving each value's type: a confirmed dollar rate, an estimate, a percentage, or an algorithm description. Only confirmed dollar rates enter comparisons.

4. Screens

Source rows are never deleted; rows that fail a rule are labelled and left out of comparisons: a rate below half the hospital's own stated minimum, placeholder values (999999…), a rate below 0.1× or above 50× the Medicare rate (usually per-unit or professional-only fees), a rate more than 5× the hospital's own list price, and — for services with no Medicare outpatient rate, such as lab tests — a rate more than 50× the national median for that service. Facility and physician (professional) fees are separated; tables show facility fees only.

5. Medicare baseline

The CMS OPPS Addendum B national payment rate for the same procedure family, shown as a government reference point ("× Medicare").

What the numbers mean

A cell is the median of that hospital's disclosed rates for the procedure's code family under a plan-type grouping (e.g. "PPO" collects that hospital's PPO plan contracts across insurers). It is a contract reference — not a quote, and not your out-of-pocket cost.

A national or state median is the median of hospital-level medians: each hospital counts once, however many contracts it lists, so a handful of hospitals with hundreds of plan lines cannot pull the figure. The "middle half" is the 25th to 75th percentile of those hospital medians. For brain MRI, head CT and diagnostic colonoscopy you can recompute every national figure from our open sample dataset (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23199844).

Data currency

Each table row shows the hospital's own file date. Hospitals whose disclosures are older than one year are flagged and deprioritized.