How we built the hospital cash price library

Where the prices come from

Under the federal Hospital Price Transparency rule (45 CFR part 180), each hospital must post a file with its "discounted cash price". The rule defines it as the charge for a person who pays cash or the same as cash. Most hospitals list their file in a small text file called cms-hpt.txt on their website.

We started from the federal government's list of hospitals in each state. We left out federal hospitals, such as VA and military hospitals, because the rule treats them as already meeting its terms. Then we looked for each hospital's file. When a health system posts a separate file for each campus, each campus counts as its own hospital.

How we pick one price per hospital

• We keep only lines for the hospital's own charge. We drop lines for the doctor's part of the bill, which is called a professional fee. We also drop separate "technical component" lines and lines with billing codes that change the service.
• We drop lines that name a different procedure from the standard one, such as a special-purpose CT. We also drop promotional and employee prices, such as health fair prices.
• We prefer the outpatient price, since these services are usually done without a hospital stay.
• Sometimes a hospital posts prices that are more than 5 times apart. Then we use the higher group. In our checks, the lower group was always a doctor fee, part of a service or an add-on.
• Then we take the middle of the remaining prices. When there is an even number, we take the lower of the two middle prices, so the price we show is always one the hospital posted.
• The notes column shows when a hospital posted more than one price for the service, and when the posted cash price is the same as the hospital's full list price.

How we summarize

• We show a middle price only when at least 5 hospitals posted a usable cash price. We show the middle half only when at least 10 did.
• Some prices are more than 10 times the state's middle price, or less than one tenth of it. We leave these out of the summary and mark them in the table, because they are often errors in the file.
• We always say how many of the state's hospitals posted a usable price, because the hospitals that post cash prices may not be typical.

How we checked our work

We tested the rules on 10 Kansas hospitals of different sizes before we ran them on every hospital. Then a separate reviewer wrote its own code from our written rules and recomputed a random sample of hospitals from the raw files. We fixed every difference it found and wrote down each rule change below. Another reviewer checked every unusual value by hand.

What this data cannot tell you

• It does not tell you what you will actually pay. Studies have found that the price a hospital posts online and the price it gives over the phone often differ.
• It covers the hospital's charge only, not the doctors' bills.
• It does not include financial assistance, which can lower your bill a lot.
• Files can be out of date. We show each file's date.

Disclosures

One Kansas hospital is not included in this version because a Foundation director works there. The Foundation does not sell anything to hospitals, and this price data is never used in any sales or partnership talks with a hospital.

Rule changes

• Versions 1.0 to 1.6, October 11, 2026, before publication. We made the rules more exact after the independent recompute and the hand check of unusual values. The changes covered which billing lines count as doctor fees, employee or promotional prices, and how we choose one price when a hospital posts several.

See the data

See the Kansas hospital cash prices or go back to the hospital cash price library.

Corrections

If you work at a hospital and believe a price is wrong, or you see any mistake, please tell us through our contact page. We will check it against the hospital's file and fix it.