SelfPayRates — hospital cash prices, from the source

About SelfPayRates

An independent catalog of what US hospitals charge people who pay without insurance. Not affiliated with any hospital, insurer or broker.

Where the prices come from

Since 2021 every US hospital must publish a machine-readable file with its standard charges, including the discounted cash price — the price for a patient who pays directly (45 CFR 180.50). Each hospital points to its file from a cms-hpt.txt file at the root of its website. We read those files directly, on a schedule, with a crawler that identifies itself and respects robots.txt.

What we keep exactly as published

Every price is the number from the hospital's file, to the cent. Every row links to the file it came from and shows two dates: when the hospital last updated its file, and when we downloaded it. Old prices are kept when a hospital overwrites its file, so the catalog also records how prices change over time.

What we separate, because averaging it would mislead

• One side or both. Hospitals often list a knee MRI for one knee and for both under the same code. They are shown apart, never averaged.
• Outpatient or inpatient. The same code billed during a hospital admission can cost several times more. A self-pay patient normally buys the outpatient service, so that is the default page; inpatient prices have their own.
• Parts of a charge. A professional (physician) component or a technical component alone is not the price of the procedure. Lines marked with those modifiers are left out of the comparison.
• Lines that cannot be the procedure price. A line priced below $1, or below a tenth of the national median for its code, is almost always a separately billed physician fee, an assistant's share or a placeholder. It is held back from the comparison and listed separately under it on each page.

What a price here is not

It is not a quote. The final bill can include a separate physician or anesthesia fee, and hospitals update their files. Call the hospital, quote the code and ask for the self-pay price before you book. If a published price turns out to be wrong, tell us and tell the hospital — the file is its legal obligation.

Contact

Corrections, data questions and partnership requests: [email protected].