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.

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

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.

What these numbers are. Each figure is taken from that hospital's own machine-readable price file, published because federal rules require it. Each figure is for a single billing code. A real episode of care usually involves several codes and may carry a facility fee on top, so treat these as a way to compare hospitals and to know what to ask, not as a quote. Always ask for a Good Faith Estimate in writing before you are treated.

Paying for this yourself?

Two guides worth reading before you book anything, and neither needs a membership.