SelfPay Prices
What hospitals actually charge people paying for themselves.
Self-pay hospital prices for 58 common procedures across 25 US metros, read from the price files federal rules require every hospital to publish. Compare free.
Self-pay prices for 58 common procedures — MRIs, mammograms, colonoscopies, blood panels — at 409 hospitals across 25 US metros, read straight from the machine-readable standard-charge files federal rules require every hospital to publish. Search a procedure and see what each hospital in a metro charges someone paying without insurance, compared on the same billing code.
Every US hospital has been required to publish its prices since 2021, and almost nobody reads the files, because they are enormous — one hospital's runs to 13.7 million rows. The spreads hiding in them are wild: the same urine test is $8 at one Columbus hospital and $36 at another. We read all of the files so a person paying cash can see the spread before picking a hospital.
- Find each hospital's machine-readable standard-charge file at the fixed address federal price-transparency rules require it to advertise.
- Download and parse the files — 132 GB and ~448 million rows across 409 hospitals in 185 health systems.
- Extract the discounted cash price for the 58 procedures people actually shop for, keeping only figures the file states as dollar amounts.
- Publish per-metro and per-procedure comparison pages to selfpayprices.com, every price traceable to the hospital's own published file.
Concrete entry points on selfpayprices.com — open any of these to land directly in the data the URL describes.
SelfPay Prices is operated by Shovel (ByShovel LLC) and lives at selfpayprices.com. The umbrella studio site (this domain, byshovel.com) is the home for licensing inquiries and the broader portfolio.