How to find a hospital's self-pay price before you go

Step one

Get the billing code before you ask about money

A hospital cannot quote a price for "a scan". It can quote a price for CPT 71046, a two-view chest X-ray. Ask the ordering doctor's office for the CPT code (for a test or scan) or the MS-DRG (for an inpatient stay) on the order. They deal with this question constantly, and it takes them seconds.

With a code in hand, every later answer becomes checkable. Without one, you and the billing office may be talking about two different things and neither of you will know.

Step two

Look the price up before you ring anyone

Since 2021, federal rules (45 CFR 180) have required every hospital to publish a machine-readable file of its standard charges, including the discounted cash price. That file is public. It is also enormous and close to unreadable by hand, which is the gap this site exists to close: we have read 447,806,227 rows of those files across 409 hospitals in 25 metros and pulled out the procedures people actually shop for.

Start with your city's page here, open the procedure, and you will see what each hospital publishes for that code, with a link to the exact file the number came from. If your hospital is not covered here, its file lives at a fixed address on its own website (/cms-hpt.txt at the domain root lists where), and our guide to the files themselves explains how to read one.

Step three

Call the billing office, not the front desk

Ask for the discounted cash price for your code, at the specific location you will visit. Then ask three follow-ups, because each one routinely changes the number:

"Does that include the doctor's fee?" It usually does not. Hospital price files cover the facility's own charge. The radiologist who reads your scan or the surgeon who operates bills separately, and that fee is in nobody's published file.

"Is there a prompt-pay or pay-in-full discount?" Many hospitals take a further cut for payment on the day. This discount is often unpublished, which means the file's number can be a ceiling, not a floor.

"Do I qualify for financial assistance?" Nonprofit hospitals are required to have a financial assistance policy, and the income thresholds are higher than most people assume. An assistance write-down can beat the cash price by a wide margin, and you can ask about both in the same call.

What the number is

A published price is a starting point, not a quote

What you are finally billed depends on what is actually done. A straightforward scan can stay straightforward, or the visit can grow extra billable lines while you are in the building. A published self-pay price tells you what the hospital says the named procedure costs at its facility. That is genuinely useful, and it is also all it is.

Some hospitals also publish the required column and leave it empty. We found hospitals whose files carry millions of rows and not one self-pay price; the measurements are on what we found reading these files. When a hospital's own pricing page says its charges are the same for every patient, the phone call and the estimate tool are the only routes to a number, so step three is not optional there.