HCRIS Hospital Cost Report — Medicare cost report lookup by CCN

Look up any US hospital's Medicare cost report from the CMS HCRIS (Healthcare Cost Report Information System) release and get its financials for a fiscal year as clean JSON.

Give it a CMS Certification Number, a hospital name or a state. Get back total costs, inpatient and outpatient gross charges, the cost-to-charge ratio, staffed beds, patient days and discharges — plus the filing status of the report those numbers came from.

{
  "providerCcn": "010005",
  "hospitalName": "MARSHALL MEDICAL CENTERS SOUTH",
  "city": "BOAZ", "state": "AL", "county": "MARSHALL",
  "fiscalYear": 2023,
  "fiscalYearBegin": "2022-10-01",
  "fiscalYearEnd": "2023-09-30",
  "reportStatus": "Settled",
  "reportRecordNumber": "829296",
  "totalCosts": 170140152,
  "inpatientTotalCharges": 118714415,
  "outpatientTotalCharges": 444004520,
  "totalCharges": 562718935,
  "costToChargeRatio": 0.3024,
  "numberOfBeds": 182,
  "totalDays": 34258,
  "totalDischarges": 6846,
  "medicareDays": 7840,
  "medicareDischarges": 1435
}

Why this exists

The HCRIS bulk files are free, and they are also close to unusable: a 136 MB ZIP per fiscal year holding 19.5 million rows of

report / worksheet / line / column / value

This Actor does the part that is actually hard: resolving the right worksheet cells, from the right line, for the right report, and refusing to answer when the source is not trustworthy.

What it looks up

Financials — Worksheet C Part I, line 202:

Utilisation — Worksheet S-3 Part I, line 14: numberOfBeds, totalDays, medicareDays, medicaidDays, totalDischarges, medicareDischarges, medicaidDischarges.

Every record carries a sourceFields map naming the exact worksheet, line and column each number came from, so anything here can be traced back to the filed report.

Input

Correctness — the part that matters

Cost report figures get used in rate negotiations, 340B and DSH work, valuations and market analysis. A confidently wrong number is worse than no number, so:

It reads line 202, not line 200. HCRIS also publishes a small derived extract with three tidy numeric columns, and using it would have been wrong. Those columns are Worksheet C Part I line 200 — a subtotal. Line 201 is a deduction and line 202 is the total. On FY2026 report 836588 that is 3,568,482 less 212,888 giving 3,355,594: reporting line 200 as "total costs" overstates cost, and therefore the cost-to-charge ratio, for every hospital with a line 201 entry. The extract's cost column is also blank for a large share of filers, where the real figure sits in the worksheet file.

Every field was validated against CMS's own labelled data. Each mapping was checked against the CMS Hospital Provider Cost Report dataset, joined on the report record number. On FY2023: 11 of 11 financial and utilisation fields matched exactly across 1,093 reports, with zero mismatches, and the six identity fields matched on 1,172 of 1,172.

Fiscal dates are never taken from the provider index. That HCRIS file has its FYB and FYE columns swapped — in all 7,202 rows the "end" date is earlier than the "begin" date. Dates come from the report tables, and the run fails outright if those ever develop the same defect.

A stale release is caught before you are charged for it. HTTP 200 is not freshness. The newest fiscal year end inside the payload is checked against today, the index row count against the publisher's own record-count table, and the worksheet extraction against the share of every report in that year's release that yields line 202 cells — so a moved cell address is caught, while a single hospital CMS has not settled yet is reported rather than treated as a source failure. Any of those guards failing aborts the run before anything is billed, rather than returning blanks.

Nothing found is said out loud. A CCN with no filing for the year you asked for comes back as no_report_for_fiscal_year, listing the years that are on file — never as a hospital with zero costs. An unrecognised CCN comes back as unknown_provider_number. A filing CMS holds but has not yet worked through comes back as no_financial_data_in_filing, and is not billed.

Three things about HCRIS fiscal years

Some filings carry no financial cells, and you are not charged for those. A report can be listed in the HCRIS index for a fiscal year and still have no Worksheet C Part I line 202 rows in that year's worksheet release. It comes back as no_financial_data_in_filing with its identity and period intact, and it is not billed. This is per-report rather than per-year — measured 2026-08-03, both FY2023 and FY2024 carry line 202 for 99% of the reports in their releases.

A report's fiscal year is keyed on its period BEGIN date, under the federal fiscal year — not its end date and not the calendar year. A period running 2023-01-01 to 2023-12-31 is FY2023; one starting 2025-10-01 is FY2026. Measured across all 88,376 reports in the current release, the begin-date rule holds 88,376 times; an end-date reading would be wrong 72,829 times.

One hospital can hold several reports in one fiscal year — usually a short stub period plus a full year, around a change of ownership or a year-end move. Each filing is returned as its own record, with its own period and status, rather than being merged into a single total that was never filed.

Source and licence

CMS HCRIS HOSPITAL-2010 (Medicare cost report form CMS-2552-10), from downloads.cms.gov/files/hcris/. Field definitions follow the CMS Cost Report Data Dictionary. This is a US Government work in the public domain, published by CMS for programmatic reuse — no key, no CAPTCHA, no rate-limit circumvention, no login.

Note that HCRIS is a settlement pipeline and lags by design: reports are filed roughly five months after a fiscal year ends, and a report's status moves from As Submitted through Settled as it is processed. The status is on every record so you can see which you are looking at.