About The Birth Bill
We’re building a crowdsourced record of what people actually pay to give birth in the US — by hospital and by insurance type — so expecting parents can plan with real numbers.
The gap we’re filling
Since 2021, federal rules require hospitals to publish their prices, and tools like SumHealth, CarePriceGuide and FAIR Health make list, cash and negotiated prices easier to find. Those are useful, but they’re the price before your deductible, coinsurance, separate physician bills and your baby’s own bill. The number most families want — what came out of their own pocket — isn’t published anywhere. Research gives a national sense of scale: a Peterson-KFF analysis of 2018–2020 large-employer claims found people who gave birth paid $2,854 more out of pocket than similar people who didn’t. We want that answer hospital by hospital.
Methodology
Two kinds of numbers, always labeled
Published data comes from public government datasets. User-reported numbers come from parents through our submission form. We never mix them or present one as the other.
Published data: where it comes from
- New York — New York State Department of Health, SPARCS “Hospital Inpatient Discharges: Cost Transparency”, calendar year 2021 (the latest year in the dataset when we retrieved it on 2026-10-19). For each hospital it reports the number of discharges, mean and median charge, and mean and median estimated cost, by APR-DRG and severity level. Hospital city and county come from the NYS Health Facility General Information dataset.
- Washington — Washington State Department of Health, CHARS “Hospital Census and Charges by DRG, 2025” (published on the CHARS reports page), calendar year 2025. It reports discharges, mean length of stay and mean charge per discharge by APR-DRG, all severities combined. Washington suppresses counts under 10. Hospital city comes from CMS Hospital General Information.
We use APR-DRG 560 (vaginal delivery) and 540 (cesarean delivery). We include hospitals in eight metro areas (listed on the browse page, with the counties each one covers) that had at least 50 deliveries in the data year. Our “average charge” for a hospital is the discharge-weighted average of the published per-severity means, which equals the overall mean charge for those stays. Everything else is shown exactly as published. The full table, with a source URL and retrieval date on every row, is downloadable as CSV.
What published charges don’t tell you
- A charge is the hospital’s list price. Insurers pay negotiated rates that are usually much lower, and what you owe depends on your plan.
- These are facility charges for the birth parent’s stay only — not the OB/midwife, anesthesiologist, pediatrician, or baby’s own bill.
- New York’s figures are from 2021 and Washington’s from 2025. Prices change, so don’t compare the two states directly.
- A hospital with sicker or higher-risk patients will have higher averages. New York’s severity breakdown helps; the “Minor” row is the closest thing to an uncomplicated birth.
User-reported bills: how we review them
- Submissions land in a private review queue. They are never published automatically.
- A moderator checks each one: is the hospital real, is the year plausible, do the numbers add up (for example, “you paid” shouldn’t be more than “total billed”)?
- We remove anything identifying from the notes, and we never publish email addresses.
- Approved bills appear on the hospital’s page with year, birth type, coverage type and the dollar amounts. We show a median once a hospital has at least three bills.
- We reject spam, duplicates and anything we can’t make sense of. We don’t edit the dollar amounts.
User-reported numbers are self-reported and unverified. They’re real people’s experiences, not a statistical sample.
Who we are
The Birth Bill is a small independent project. We make money from clearly labeled affiliate links (see our disclosure), never from hospitals or insurers, and never by selling your data.
Spot an error? Tell us and we’ll fix it.