About This Project

Yes. Starting January 1, 2021, the CMS Hospital Price Transparency final rule requires every hospital operating in the United States to publicly post a comprehensive machine-readable file containing all standard charges — including gross charges, discounted cash prices, and payer-specific negotiated rates. Hospitals that fail to comply face civil monetary penalties.

Under the CMS Hospital Price Transparency rules, hospitals must publish specific standard charges so patients can compare costs. The three key pricing categories are:

Hospitals must publish these charges in two formats: a consumer-friendly list of at least 300 “shoppable services” and a massive, comprehensive machine-readable file (MRF).

The current dataset covers Indiana hospitals. The underlying code is open source and the pipeline can be applied to any state — Indiana was chosen as a focused starting point. Expanding coverage to additional states is on the roadmap.

This site does not include every price hospitals publish. Indiana’s hospital files add up to more than 100 GB and list over 24,000 different billing codes, many of them for rare procedures or individual supplies. Indexing all of it would make the search slower and the site too costly to keep free, so we include about 4,100 procedures chosen to cover what most patients actually shop for.

Procedures that are included

• Common procedures — every procedure code listed by at least half of the Indiana hospitals that publish procedure codes (75 or more hospitals): office and ER visits, lab tests, X-rays, CT and MRI scans, ultrasounds, endoscopies, common surgeries, therapy, vaccines, and frequently used drugs.
• Implant procedures — all 738 procedures that Medicare classifies as device-intensive (joint replacements, pacemakers and defibrillators, stents, spinal implants, and similar), even when fewer hospitals list them. For these, we also show Medicare’s estimate of how much of the price is typically the implant itself.
• CMS shoppable services — the 70 services the federal price transparency rule requires every hospital to list, plus a few common inpatient stays.

What is left out

• Rare and highly specialized procedures listed by only a handful of hospitals.
• Individual implant and supply line items — hospitals list every screw, catheter, and stent model separately, which alone would more than double the database. Implant costs are normally included in the procedure price, and we show the typical implant share instead.
• Hospitals that don’t publish standard procedure codes — mostly rehabilitation, behavioral health, and long-term care hospitals, whose files can’t be matched to procedures.

Which prices are shown for each procedure

• Insurer negotiated rates and cash prices, when the hospital publishes them as a dollar amount.
• Not shown: rates published only as a percentage or formula (for example, “65% of billed charges”), because they can’t be turned into a dollar amount without the hospital’s full bill; and gross “list price” charges, which almost nobody actually pays.
• Flat-price cash services: when a hospital marks a service “cash only” or as a promotion (for example, a $49 heart scan), we show its flat price as the cash price. Some hospital files apply an extra discount to these lines that patients don’t actually get, which would otherwise make them look cheaper than they are.

Hospital files can contain mistakes. Prices come straight from each hospital’s own published file, and we don’t change them except as described above. Before you book, confirm the price with the hospital.

How current are the prices? Below every price table, “Show sources” lists each hospital’s file, the date the hospital says it is accurate as of, and a link to the original file. Hospitals must update their files at least once a year, and we flag any file dated more than a year ago. We re-download all files periodically, so a hospital’s newest prices may not be here yet.

What are “unusual” prices? Some files contain prices that can’t be right, such as a one-cent X-ray or a blood test listed at tens of thousands of dollars. When a price is more than 5 times below the lowest 5% or above the highest 5% of what Indiana hospitals list for the same procedure, we mark it with a warning sign and leave it out of the price ranges and averages. These are usually data errors or a partial fee (for example, only the doctor’s part). We still show them, so you can ask the hospital.

If a procedure you need isn’t here, the hospital’s own price estimator or billing office can give you a quote. You can also email us — requests help us decide what to add next.

For inpatient stays, hospitals group procedures into DRG (Diagnosis Related Group) codes — MS-DRG (Medicare) and APR-DRG (All-Patient). For outpatient visits, procedures are grouped into APC (Ambulatory Payment Classification) codes. Procedures that share the same DRG or APC are clinically similar and typically performed together during the same visit or hospital admission. Clicking that button queries the database for other procedures in the same clinical group so you can estimate related costs, rather than just a single line item.

Medical billing codes like CPT and HCPCS are written for clinicians, not patients. Clicking “What is this procedure?” sends the code and its description to an AI language model, which returns a plain-English explanation of what the procedure involves, why it is performed, and what to expect — helping you understand your options before asking your provider.

Yes — the full source code is available on GitHub . Hospital charge files are sourced from hospitalpricingfiles.org, which aggregates the machine-readable files published by each hospital. The raw CSVs are processed, filtered, and indexed into a SQLite database with FTS5 (Full-Text Search) to power this search. Prices shown are the hospitals’ own published standard charges and may differ from what you are ultimately billed.

This site is a free, non-commercial public resource. Keeping it running has real costs — cloud hosting, serverless database infrastructure, and bandwidth to serve thousands of searches. If you find it useful, please consider donating by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, via PayPal, or by sponsoring on GitHub:

Every contribution directly offsets hosting expenses and helps keep the data updated and the search fast. There is no advertising, no paywall, and no data selling — sponsorships are the only way to sustain the project.