Terms of Use

1. Acceptance of these terms

These terms govern your use of HospitalRates.com (the “Site”). In these terms, “we,” “us” and “our” mean the Site and whoever operates it. By accessing or using the Site in any way — including reading a page, running a search, following a link to it, or retrieving data from it by automated means — you agree to these Terms of Use and to the Privacy notice. If you do not agree to these terms, do not use the Site.

These terms apply to everyone who uses the Site: patients and their families, hospital and health-system staff, insurers, employers and benefit administrators, journalists, researchers, and developers building on the data. They apply whether you visit once or build a product on what you find here.

2. What the Site is

The Site publishes information derived from the machine-readable price files that hospitals in the United States are required to publish under federal price-transparency rules, together with summaries computed from those files. It is provided on a best-effort basis.

We do not set, negotiate, influence or collect prices. We are not a health care provider, an insurer, a health plan, a broker, a billing company, or an agent or representative of any of them. About sets out who publishes the Site and on what terms.

We may add, change, correct, or remove any part of the Site or its data at any time, and we are under no obligation to keep any particular page, figure or feature available.

3. Not advice, and no professional relationship

The Site does not provide medical advice. Nothing on it is a diagnosis, a treatment recommendation, or a substitute for the professional judgment of a physician or other qualified health care provider. Never disregard professional medical advice, and never delay seeking it, because of something you read here.

If you think you may have a medical emergency, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department. Price is not a reason to delay emergency care, and this Site must never be used to choose where to go in an emergency.

The Site does not provide financial, tax, legal, insurance, actuarial or business advice, and nothing on it is a recommendation to obtain or forgo any procedure, to choose or avoid any hospital, or to enter into, price or decline any contract.

Using the Site creates no physician-patient relationship, no advisory or fiduciary relationship, and no professional relationship of any kind between you and us. We do not endorse, recommend, rate or certify any hospital, and a price is not a measure of quality, safety or outcome.

4. You must verify before you act

The figures on this Site are a starting point for a conversation, not a basis for a decision. This section is the most important one on this page.

If you are a patient or a family member: before you make any decision about your care, confirm the price directly with the hospital — its billing or financial-counseling department — and with your insurer. What you are ultimately charged depends on your coverage, your deductible and out-of-pocket maximum, whether the hospital and each clinician are in your network, the diagnosis and procedure codes actually recorded, what happens during your care, and separate professional fees for physicians, anesthesia, radiology and pathology that a hospital’s own filing may not include at all. If you are uninsured or paying cash, you may be entitled to a written good-faith estimate from the provider — ask for one.

If you are a hospital, insurer, employer, researcher, journalist or developer: verify anything you take from this Site against the underlying filings and your own records before using it in a business decision, a contract or rate negotiation, a public statement, a regulatory or legal filing, a published analysis, or a product. Computed figures here describe what hospitals filed — not what patients were charged, not what was collected, and not what any particular contract provides.

You agree that you will not rely on the Site as the sole basis for any decision about medical care, payment, coverage, contracting or business, and that you are solely responsible for independently verifying any figure before you act on it. Decisions you make, and anything you publish or build using information from the Site, are yours alone.

5. Accuracy, completeness and currency

We make a good-faith, best-effort attempt to represent each hospital’s filing accurately, and the methodology page explains how every figure is computed. We publish what we do not know rather than filling the gap with an estimate. Even so, a figure on this Site can be wrong, and you should understand the reasons why:

• The filing itself may be wrong. Hospitals publish these files themselves. They can be incomplete, internally inconsistent, mislabelled, or contain placeholder values that are not real prices.
• A filed price may be one nobody actually pays. A published rate is a declaration in a required file, not evidence of a transaction.
• Filings change, and our copy has a date. Each page shows when we last checked and loaded the filings behind it. A price may have changed since.
• Coverage is incomplete. Not every hospital is included, not every procedure is priced, and some files we cannot yet read.
• We may misread a file. Formats vary enormously between hospitals and vendors, and parsing them is imperfect work.
• The same code can mean different things. Hospitals describe, bundle and group procedures differently, so figures may not be strictly comparable between them.
• The plain-language procedure names are generated with AI assistance and are not official descriptions. To make a billing code readable we generate a short lay name and summary from the code itself, reviewed against a confidence threshold before publication. They are aids to recognition, not clinical or billing definitions. The official code and its authoritative descriptor govern — if a lay name here and your hospital’s description of a procedure disagree, rely on the hospital’s, and confirm the code with them before assuming two prices describe the same thing.

We do not warrant or guarantee that any figure, description, date or statistic on the Site is accurate, current, complete or fit for any purpose. The Site is an information resource, not a verification service.

6. Corrections

If you believe a figure here is wrong — particularly if you work at a hospital and a page misreads your filing — write to contact@hospitalrates.com and we will check it against the filing it came from and correct it if it is wrong. It helps if you name the page or the procedure code, the hospital, and where in the filing the figure appears. We take corrections seriously, but we do not guarantee any particular response time or outcome, and this section does not create a legal obligation to investigate, respond, or alter any part of the Site.

7. Permitted use

You may read, search, quote, cite, link to and share what is on the Site, for personal, professional, journalistic or research purposes. We would rather this information travel than sit still. When you quote a figure, please say when you retrieved it and link to the page it came from — the numbers change as filings do.

You agree not to:

• access the Site by automated means in a way that degrades it for others — no scraping or crawling that ignores robots.txt, imposes an unreasonable load, or circumvents a rate limit or technical restriction;
• present information from the Site as your own original research, as verified or guaranteed pricing, or in a way that strips the qualifications and dates that accompany it;
• use the Site to mislead patients about what they will be charged, or to make any claim about a named hospital that the underlying filing does not support;
• attempt to interfere with, probe, or gain unauthorised access to the Site, its API or its infrastructure; or
• use the Site in violation of any applicable law.

8. Intellectual property

The underlying price filings are published by hospitals under federal requirements and we claim no ownership of them. We do claim the work built on top: the selection, normalisation and arrangement of the data, the computed statistics, the plain-language procedure names, and the text, design, code and presentation of the Site — all of which are owned by HospitalRates.com, its operators or its licensors and protected by copyright and other laws. The name HospitalRates.com and the site’s branding are ours, and nothing here grants you a licence to use them.

9. Links to other sites

The Site links to hospital websites, government sources and other third-party pages. We do not control them, we are not responsible for their content, accuracy, availability or privacy practices, and a link is not an endorsement. Your use of any linked site is governed by that site’s own terms.

10. Disclaimer of warranties

THE SITE AND ALL INFORMATION, DATA, FIGURES, STATISTICS, DESCRIPTIONS AND MATERIALS ON IT ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, ACCURACY AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SITE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE OR ERROR-FREE, THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED, OR THAT ANY PRICE, FIGURE, DATE OR OTHER INFORMATION ON THE SITE IS ACCURATE, CURRENT, COMPLETE OR SUITABLE FOR ANY PURPOSE. NO ADVICE OR INFORMATION, WHETHER ORAL OR WRITTEN, OBTAINED FROM US OR THROUGH THE SITE CREATES ANY WARRANTY NOT EXPRESSLY STATED HERE.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain implied warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

11. Limitation of liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, NEITHER HOSPITALRATES.COM NOR ITS OPERATORS, OWNERS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, CONTRACTORS, AGENTS OR LICENSORS WILL BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA, GOODWILL OR OPPORTUNITY, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO YOUR USE OF — OR INABILITY TO USE — THE SITE OR ANYTHING ON IT, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. THIS INCLUDES, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY DAMAGES ARISING FROM A PRICE, FIGURE OR STATISTIC THAT IS INACCURATE, INCOMPLETE, OUT OF DATE OR MISREAD, FROM ANY DECISION YOU OR ANYONE ELSE MAKES ABOUT MEDICAL CARE, PAYMENT, COVERAGE, CONTRACTING OR BUSINESS IN RELIANCE ON THE SITE, AND FROM ANY AMOUNT YOU ARE ULTIMATELY CHARGED FOR CARE.

12. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless HospitalRates.com and its operators, owners, officers, employees, contractors, agents and licensors from any claim, demand, loss, liability or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of your use of the Site, your breach of these terms, your violation of any law or third-party right, or any republication, analysis or product you base on information from the Site.

13. Availability

We provide the Site on a best-effort basis and may suspend, limit or discontinue it, in whole or in part, at any time and without notice. We are not liable for any interruption, delay, data loss or unavailability.

14. Changes to these terms

We may revise these terms from time to time. The effective date at the top of this page always tells you when the current version took effect, and the version you see here is the one that applies. If the changes are material, we will make that clear on this page. Your continued use of the Site after a change takes effect is your acceptance of the revised terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the Site.

15. Termination

We may restrict or block access to the Site, at our discretion and without notice, including where use threatens the availability or integrity of the service. Sections 3 through 12, together with the general section below, survive any termination of your use.

16. General

If any provision of these terms is held unenforceable, it will be limited or severed to the minimum extent necessary and the remaining provisions stay in full effect. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these terms; we may assign them to a successor. These terms, together with the Privacy notice, are the entire agreement between you and us about the Site and supersede any earlier understanding. Section headings are for convenience only.

17. Contact

Questions about these terms, or about anything on the Site, go to contact@hospitalrates.com. A person reads it.