Methodology

Where the prices come from

Under the federal hospital price-transparency rule, every U.S. hospital must publish a machine-readable file of its standard charges: gross charges, cash prices, and the rates it negotiated with each insurer. We download those files directly from hospital websites, parse the 476 procedure codes patients search for most, and load the hospital's own numbers unchanged into our database.

How we check the data

Every file goes through validation before it appears on this site: we reject files with impossible values, flag duplicate entries, and quarantine anything that looks corrupt. Each hospital page shows the date of the price file it came from, so you can see how fresh the numbers are.

Honest limitations

Coverage is partial. We have clean data for 1,062 hospitals. Hundreds more publish files our parsers can't read yet, block automated downloads, or publish nothing at all. If your hospital is missing, that's why.

Some prices are thin. Kaiser hospitals, for example, publish cash and gross prices but not insurer-negotiated rates — so you'll see dashes where those numbers would be. A dash means the hospital didn't publish it, not that it's zero.

Some files cover many hospitals. Large systems sometimes publish one file for dozens of facilities. We attribute those prices to the listed hospital, but confirm with the hospital for your specific location.

Prices change. Hospitals update files at their own pace. Always confirm the price with the hospital before your visit — treat our numbers as the starting point for the conversation, not the final word.

We never estimate. If a number isn't in the hospital's file, we show “—”. We'd rather show a gap than a guess.