Every file behind CostGrade
Nothing on this site is estimated, modelled or bought. Every figure traces to a published federal file you can download and check yourself.
Medicare Inpatient Hospitals — by Provider and Service
What each hospital charged and was paid for each inpatient stay, grouped by MS-DRG. This is the source of every inpatient figure on the site.
145,879 price rows Download it from CMS →
Medicare Outpatient Hospitals — by Provider and Service
The same for hospital outpatient visits, grouped by APC. This file publishes a Medicare-allowed amount rather than a total payment, which is why outpatient markup is scored separately.
63,518 price rows Download it from CMS →
Hospital General Information
Name, address, type, ownership and the CMS overall star rating for every Medicare-certified hospital. The star rating is displayed for context and is not part of the grade.
5,508 hospitals Download it from CMS →
What we compute rather than read
Medians, quartiles and the spread between the cheapest and dearest hospitals are calculated from the provider-level rows above, not read from a CMS geography file. Two reasons: those files publish an average but not a median or a range, which is exactly what a reader needs, and a benchmark derived from a different population than the prices beside it would quietly disagree with the page it sits on.
We hold 11,574 precomputed national and per-state benchmarks across 608 procedures, rebuilt whenever the source files change.
What is missing, and why
These files cover Medicare patients only. They do not include what private insurers negotiated, what a cash-paying patient would be quoted, or the separate bills from physicians who bill independently of the hospital.
CMS also suppresses figures it considers unreliable or identifying — around 45% of rows in the outpatient file carry no submitted charge at all. We skip those rows rather than treating a blank as a zero, which would turn missing data into a suspiciously cheap hospital.
Data vintage
CMS republishes annually. The importer resolves the newest release from the CMS catalogue rather than a fixed URL, so a new data year is picked up rather than silently missed, and it throws rather than importing garbage if a column is renamed. Prices on the site were last refreshed 26 August 2026.
If you find an error
Federal files contain mistakes, hospitals merge and change ownership, and our own code can have bugs. If a number here disagrees with the source, tell us — with the hospital and the figure — and we will check it.