| --- |
| license: cc0-1.0 |
| pretty_name: RateCommons hospital price files |
| tags: [healthcare, price-transparency, hospitals, cms] |
| --- |
| |
| # RateCommons hospital price files |
|
|
| Every US hospital must publish a machine-readable file of its standard charges (45 CFR 180), including the |
| amount each insurance plan pays, its gross charge and its discounted cash price. Since January 2026 the files |
| must also carry, per plan, the median and 10th/90th percentile of the amounts actually paid on claims and the |
| number of claims. RateCommons collects these files and publishes them in one schema. |
|
|
| ## How the files are found |
|
|
| Hospitals must publish `cms-hpt.txt` at the root of their website, listing each location and its file. We crawl |
| those files, seeded by DoltHub's hospital list (2023) and Wikidata's US hospitals with an official website, and |
| add every domain named inside a `cms-hpt.txt` (file hosts, contact e-mail domains) until nothing new turns up. |
| November 2026: 4,242 locations, 3,516 distinct file URLs on 1,200 domains (about 70% of US hospitals). |
| Aggregator link lists are not used as sources. |
|
|
| ## Layout |
|
|
| - `index/cms_hpt_index.parquet`: location name, file URL, source page, hpt.txt URL, EIN parsed from the file name. |
| - `full/<fid>.parquet` (one per file, `fid` = first 16 hex digits of md5(file URL)) and `full/<fid>.json` (the |
| file's header: hospital name, date, schema version, locations, addresses, type-2 NPIs; format, size, errors). |
| - `fees/hospital_fees.json`: per hospital (CMS Certification Number) x payer family x code, the facility amount |
| for the RateCommons patient-tool procedures; `fees/attach.json`: which file belongs to which hospital and how. |
|
|
| Columns of `full/*.parquet`, one row per item x code x setting x payer/plan, as published: |
| `description, code, code_type, setting, gross, cash, payer, plan, methodology, dollar, percentage, algorithm, |
| median_allowed, p10, p90, count, notes, modifiers, billing_class`. |
| |
| ## Attaching files to hospitals |
| |
| A file belongs to a hospital when one of its type-2 NPIs has an NPPES address at a hospital site (CMS Provider of |
| Services file gives the site its CCN); else when an organization NPI with the EIN in the file name does; else when |
| the street address the file lists matches the hospital's. Names are never used. Files whose NPIs span more than |
| three hospitals are not attached (system-wide files). November 2026: 2,465 of 3,227 parsed files, 2,242 hospitals. |
| |
| November 2026 release: 3,227 files normalized, 10.6 billion rows, 91 GB of Parquet (from 801 GB as published). |
| |
| ## Using it |
| |
| ```sql |
| -- DuckDB: one hospital's MRI brain rates, every plan |
| INSTALL httpfs; LOAD httpfs; |
| SELECT payer, plan, setting, dollar, percentage, median_allowed, count |
| FROM 'hf://datasets/ratecommons/hospitals/full/<fid>.parquet' |
| WHERE code = '70553'; |
| ``` |
| |
| Find a hospital's `fid` in `index/cms_hpt_index.parquet` (by name or file URL) or in `fees/attach.json` (by CCN). |
| |
| ## Caveats |
| |
| - Values are as the hospital published them; we do not correct them. Percentages are of the hospital's charges. |
| - `count` is text as published (e.g. "1 through 10"). |
| - About 9% of discovered URLs could not be read (404, HTML pages instead of files, malformed CSV). |
| - The CPT descriptor text in `description` is the hospital's own wording. |
| |
