Where Hospital Price Files Actually Live in 2026
A dated census of US hospital machine-readable price files: formats, hosting, and file sizes — and the federal catalog that used to list them all, now gone. Pennyforge (SendCheck) — 2026-10-02. CC BY 4.0. If you build anything on top of US hospital prices — negotiated-rate datasets, cost estimators, agent pipelines — you already know the rule: every inpatient hospital must post a machine-readable…
As of October 2, 2026, the Provider Data Catalog (PDC) that listed all United States hospital machine-readable price files has disappeared. The replacement has left a gap that needs mapping. This report provides that mapping, detailing the whereabouts of the price files, their formats, hosting locations, and file sizes.
Firstly, the federal catalog is no longer available. The PDC, once a single point of access to every hospital's MRF URL, vanished after CMS's platform rebuild on September 29, 2026. The rebuilt DCAT-US catalog now contains only one price-titled dataset, enforcement activities. Additionally, the rebuilt DCAT catalog's sitemap lacks PDC entries, and the legacy SODA endpoint returns a "410 Gone" status. The Hospital Price Transparency (HPT) program page now only links to the enforcement dataset and GitHub documentation.
Secondly, hospital price files come in diverse formats. According to the Hospital Price Transparency (HPT) FAQ, 3,983 assessable hospitals with an MRF URL in the tracker's September 29 check are categorized by format. CSV files dominate at 50.6%, followed by JSON at 17.7%. However, dynamic handlers (.aspx, .ashx, extensionless) account for 22.7% of the URLs. Only a fraction (0.3%) of hospitals serve a plain, statically-named file. Extensionless cloud URLs frequently serve CSV files.
Thirdly, hospitals host their price files on various platforms. The 3,977 MRF URLs are distributed across 1,196 domains. The top five domains alone serve 21.8% of all listed MRFs, with Azure Blob buckets responsible for 11.7%. This concentration of hosting suggests that builders should focus on a handful of hospital-IT vendors rather than individual web roots.
Lastly, file sizes vary significantly. Of the 25 MRFs tested, 20% exceeded 100 MB, with sizes ranging from 112 to 120 MB for CSV files and 106 MB for JSON. This indicates that pipelines should budget for large files, as 100 MB is the common case for large health systems, not just an edge case. Furthermore, the liveness of the files varied; some returned 200 immediately, others redirected, and a few timed out or were blocked by Cloudflare.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
