Hospital Price Transparency Tool: Search CPT Codes and Procedure Costs at Any U.S. Hospital

Since 2021, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has required every U.S. hospital to publish a machine-readable file listing their negotiated rates with every insurance plan, their gross charges, and their cash pay prices. In practice, these files are enormous — often gigabytes of raw JSON data — and completely inaccessible to anyone without specialized software.

This free tool changes that. Upload your hospital’s pricing file directly from your device and search by CPT code or procedure description to instantly see negotiated rates for every insurance plan — including Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and commercial plans — plus the discounted cash price for uninsured patients.

Your file never leaves your computer. Nothing is uploaded to any server. Chronically Advocating built this tool because real advocacy requires real numbers, and price transparency data is one of the most underused tools available to patients and their advocates.

How to Find Your Hospital’s Pricing File

Federal law requires every U.S. hospital to publish a machine-readable pricing file, but they’re rarely easy to find. The fastest way is a Google search.

Type your hospital’s name plus “machine readable file” or “price transparency” — for example: Mayo Clinic price transparency JSON

You’re looking for a file ending in .json on the hospital’s official website, often buried under “Billing” or “Patient Financial Services.” Download it to your device, then upload it into the tool below.

Hospital Price Transparency Search Tool

CMS Machine-Readable File Viewer — All processing stays in your browser