About Hospital Price Book

Hospital Price Book exists because hospital prices in the United States are public by law and unreadable in practice. Under the federal Hospital Price Transparency rule (45 CFR Part 180), every hospital must publish a machine-readable file of its standard charges: the gross charge, the discounted cash price, and the rates it negotiates with each insurance plan. Those files are large, technical and different in layout from hospital to hospital.

We collect the files directly from each hospital's website, using the index file (cms-hpt.txt) each hospital is required to maintain, and republish a tracked set of common procedures in a form people can compare: cash price, typical insurance rate, list price and negotiated range, hospital by hospital.

What the prices mean

• Cash price - the discounted cash price the hospital publishes for patients paying out of pocket.
• Typical insurance price - the median of the negotiated rates in the hospital's file across the plans it lists.
• List price - the gross charge, before insurance or cash discounts. Almost nobody pays this, and it shows why bills look the way they do.
• Negotiated range - the lowest and highest negotiated rates in the file for that procedure.

Directory information (address, type, ownership, CMS star rating) comes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. See Methodology for how files are collected and where the numbers can mislead.

A published price is not a quote and this site is not medical or financial advice. Your cost depends on your plan, deductible and the care you actually receive. In an emergency, call 911.