Montana prices
What it actually costs, hospital by hospital.
Every hospital in the country is now required to publish what it charges and what it gets paid, in a file almost nobody can read. We read Montana's and put them side by side. Free to use, no membership needed.
The short version
7.2×
At Great Falls Clinic Medical Center, someone paying their own way is asked $1,723 for a head CT. No insurer pays that hospital more than $239 for it. Same hospital, same procedure, same billing code.
Across the state the gap is wider still: knee arthroscopy is listed at $1,230 at one Montana hospital and $16,955 at another.
Compare a procedure
19 procedures across 9 Montana hospitals.
Knee arthroscopy with meniscus repair
7 hospitals · from $1,142
Upper endoscopy with biopsy
8 hospitals · from $438
Colonoscopy, diagnostic
8 hospitals · from $709
Vaginal delivery, global care
6 hospitals · from $3,889
Caesarean delivery, global care
6 hospitals · from $4,229
Cataract surgery with lens implant
4 hospitals · from $1,616
CT, head, without contrast
9 hospitals · from $354
MRI, brain, without contrast
9 hospitals · from $672
Chest X-ray, two views
9 hospitals · from $98
MRI, lower back, without contrast
9 hospitals · from $658
CT, abdomen and pelvis, with contrast
9 hospitals · from $1,034
Ultrasound, abdomen, complete
9 hospitals · from $266
Mammogram, screening, both sides
9 hospitals · from $77
Comprehensive metabolic panel
8 hospitals · from $48
Lipid panel
8 hospitals · from $61
Haemoglobin A1C
8 hospitals · from $22
Complete blood count with differential
9 hospitals · from $22
Office visit, established patient, 20-29 min
7 hospitals · from $68
Emergency department visit, moderate
9 hospitals · from $219
Where these come from
Federal rules require every hospital to publish a machine-readable file of its standard charges, and to put an index file at its own domain saying where that file lives. Since April 2026 those files must contain the actual negotiated dollar amounts a hospital was paid, rather than estimates or formulas like "120% of Medicare".
We fetched Montana's, parsed them, and pulled the same billing codes from each. Every figure on these pages came from a hospital's own file. Nothing is modelled or estimated.
Hospitals included
Great Falls Clinic Medical CenterCommunity Medical CenterBarrett Hospital & HealthCareLivingston HealthCareMarcus Daly Memorial HospitalClark Fork Valley HospitalSidney Health CenterBeartooth Billings ClinicBig Horn County Memorial Hospital
Not yet included
These publish their files in formats we have not parsed yet. They are on the list: Intermountain Health St. Vincent Regional, Bozeman Health Deaconess Hospital, Providence St. Patrick Hospital, Bozeman Health Big Sky Medical Center.
Paying for this yourself?
Two guides worth reading before you book anything, and neither needs a membership.
