CMS HPT Tracker / price transparency audit

45 CFR 180 · National compliance audit

Who actually publishes their prices?

Every hospital in the United States is required to post a machine-readable file of its standard charges, and to point at it from /cms-hpt.txt. We fetched that pointer for all hospitals on the CMS registry and followed it as far as it went. This is what came back.

A snapshot, not a live feed. Every label on this page describes what one automated crawl saw on the snapshot date. Nothing has been re-checked since — a hospital may have published, moved or broken its file in the meantime, so check its own site before relying on anything here. This is independent work: not a CMS determination, not an enforcement action, and not legal or pricing advice. What this page can and cannot tell you.

The field

Every hospital in the country, one mark each

Ordered the way CMS numbers them, so each state arrives as a block. Solid marks are hospitals the crawl reached and could judge. Hollow marks are the ones nobody could check — no working website on record, so no request was ever sent. Hover a mark to name it; click to open its file.

One mark per hospital on the CMS registry, in all. Hollow marks are hospitals the audit never reached.

Scale of the crawl

What one pass over the country costs

Findings

Every check, ranked by how often it fired

Bar lengths are relative to the most common finding, not to the registry total. A failing result means a defect we could see directly; it does not mean a hospital was fined.

File age

How stale is the published data?

Days since the file was last changed, for every file the crawler read. The rule asks for an update at least once every twelve months.

Composition

Hospitals by class

Critical access and psychiatric hospitals are the hardest to reach, and they are also where the registry most often has no website at all.

ClassMix TotalCompliant

By state

Compliance is uneven, and coverage is worse

Rate is compliant hospitals as a share of those we could judge — reached, and either passing or failing. Reached is how much of the state the audit got to at all. A high rate on low coverage is a small sample, not a clean bill of health — rates marked * rest on fewer than half the hospitals in the state. Click a column to sort.

State Mix Hospitals Reached Compliance rate

Work queue

What it would take to close the gap

Every hospital the audit could not judge sits in one of four buckets, each with a different fix. Three of them are real work. One is already done.

Outreach

Who we've contacted, and what we heard back

Notes and a log of the emails we sent, kept per hospital. Nothing here sends mail — we send from our own client and record it, or let the tracker pre-fill a draft. Open any hospital from the register below to add to its file.

Follow-ups

Hospitals with a follow-up date set, soonest first. Overdue ones are marked.

Recent activity

The last thing logged against each hospital.

Storage checking…

The register

Look up any hospital

Search by name, city, state or CMS certification number.

Method

How a hospital gets its label

1. Resolve the domain

Start from the hospital's website in the CMS registry. Where there isn't one, the hospital is recorded as not assessed rather than guessed at.

2. Fetch the pointer

Request /cms-hpt.txt at the root and under /.well-known/. A 403 or 429 is recorded as blocked, not as a failure.

3. Match the facility

Pointer files often list a whole system. Names are matched to the CCN, with a model adjudicating the ambiguous cases against address and location.

4. Read the file

Fetch the charges file and read its header for the CMS template version and last_updated_on. Age is taken from file metadata where the header is silent.

Limits

What this page can and cannot tell you

An automated crawl can see whether a file exists and answers. It cannot see whether the file is right, and it cannot see anything at all through a hospital that refuses it. Read these before quoting a number from this page.

The date is doing a lot of work

Every label is fixed to the snapshot in the dateline and is never re-checked in the browser. Publishing a file takes an afternoon, so a hospital marked failing may well be compliant by the time you read this — and the reverse happens too.

“Compliant” means found, not correct

It means a file was located, fetched and parsed. Nothing here validates its prices, its completeness, its coding, or the rest of what 45 CFR 180 asks for. A hospital can clear every check on this page and still be short of the rule.

“Not compliant” is an observation, not a violation

Only CMS can determine noncompliance or issue a penalty. A failing label records a defect this crawl could see directly — a dead link, a missing pointer, a stale file. It is not an enforcement action and implies no fine.

Blocked is not a verdict

Hospitals whose sites refuse automated traffic are very often publishing correctly; we simply cannot see them. They are held out of the compliance rate rather than counted against it.

Not assessed means we don't know

A large share of the registry was never reached at all, mostly because CMS has no working website on file. Nothing in that bucket counts for or against a hospital, and it is excluded from every rate on this page.

Matching is automated, and imperfect

Pointer files often list an entire health system. Facilities are matched to a CCN by software, with a language model adjudicating the ambiguous cases. Some hospitals will be matched to the wrong file, and some will be missed inside a file that does name them.

The registry underneath has its own lag

Names, ownership, websites and CCNs come from the CMS Hospital General Information file. Closures, mergers, rebrands and new websites land there late, and this page inherits that.

File age is only as honest as the file

Age comes from last_updated_on where the header carries it and from HTTP metadata otherwise. A file republished without touching its date reads as older than it is; a file re-uploaded unchanged reads as newer.

This will not tell you what you'll be charged

Standard charges are not prices you will pay. For an actual estimate, use the hospital's own price estimator and talk to its billing office. Nothing here is medical, billing, legal or financial advice.

Corrections are welcome, and they stay yours

Anything you correct in a hospital's drawer is stored on your side and changes only your copy of this page — the published crawl is untouched. If you work at a hospital labelled wrongly here, that is the fastest way to show it.