Where these numbers come from
Last verified: July 24, 2026.
Every price on PriceCheck traces to a file a hospital published itself. We don't estimate, survey, or extrapolate. If a hospital didn't publish a number, we don't show one. This page explains the whole pipeline — the rule that makes the data exist, how we collect and parse it, what we compute, and what we deliberately leave out.
The rule that makes this possible
Since January 2021, federal regulation — the Hospital Price Transparency rule,
45 CFR Part 180 —
has required every U.S. hospital to publish a machine-readable file (MRF) listing its standard charges: the gross
charge, the discounted cash price, and the rates it has negotiated with each insurance plan, for every item and
service it provides. Hospitals must also make the file findable from their website's robots.txt
(45 CFR § 180.50). CMS standardized the file format, and enforcement of the current v3.0 format began in April 2026 —
though plenty of hospitals still publish on older v2.x templates, which we also read.
How we collect the files
We locate each hospital's MRF through the required robots.txt listing where hospitals comply, and
through their price-transparency pages where they don't (a common gap). We download the files directly from the
hospital — no intermediaries, no scraped third-party data. The sources table below links every file we use.
How we read them
Hospital price files are big — often hundreds of megabytes — and messy. Our parser handles both CMS layouts ("tall" files with one row per payer, and "wide" files with payers embedded in column headers), both the v3.0 and v2.x templates, and validates against the official CMS example files. Some things we clean up along the way:
Legacy placeholder values (like the infamous string of nines some systems use for "no rate") and stray text in money fields are treated as no data, never as prices. Procedures are matched by their billing codes (CPT, HCPCS, MS-DRG). When a hospital lists the same procedure many times across chargemaster lines, we take the median and prefer the outpatient setting for outpatient-type procedures.
What we compute — and label
Where you see a single number per hospital for "commercial insurance," it's the median of that hospital's listed commercial plan rates, labeled with the plan count. Plan variants that share an identical rate are collapsed into one row. Payers are classified as commercial, Medicare, or Medicaid by name, using the same rules as our comparison app, so pages and app never disagree. Where a hospital publishes only a v3.0 "estimated allowed amount" instead of a dollar rate, we show that and label it a median allowed amount.
What we refuse to show
Undated data: if we can't establish a file's date, we drop the hospital from price pages rather than show a number of unknown age. Percentage-of-charges and algorithm-only rates without a usable dollar figure: stored, but not displayed as prices. Comparison pages with fewer than three hospitals' worth of data: not published at all. And nothing on this site is ever a quote — see below.
What these numbers are not
They are facility rates: what the hospital itself lists for the facility's part of the service. Physician, anesthesia, radiology, and pathology services usually bill separately. Your cost depends on your plan's network, your deductible and coinsurance, and how the visit is actually coded. Treat every number here as strong price information for comparison and negotiation — not as a guarantee of what you'll pay. PriceCheck shows pricing and billing-navigation information only; it does not provide medical advice.