How much does it cost to have a baby?

Cost breakdown

Each table below comes from one source, named underneath it, with the date that source last revised the figures. Everything is a United States figure in USD.

What changes the price

Which code the stay is billed under, which the birth decides

The whole structure hangs on this. A vaginal delivery without complications is MS-DRG 807, with a complication 806, with a major one 805, and the caesarean codes 788, 787 and 786 step the same way. At The University of Chicago Medical Center the lowest figure moves from $6,421.76 on 807 to $15,711.49 on 786, on one day, in one file, for the same plans. Nobody picks the code. It is assigned from what happened.

Which plan you are on, rather than which insurer

Insurer is the question people ask and plan is the question that decides it. The University of Chicago Medical Center names two Cigna plans on MS-DRG 807, one at $6,421.76 and one at $13,146.90. Same hospital, same code, same company, same file.

Which hospital, and it is not a small effect

On MS-DRG 788, a caesarean without complications, the highest figure published is $19,852.91 at The University of Chicago Medical Center, $41,364.69 at Oregon Health & Science University and $53,609 at NYU Langone Tisch Hospital. Three attested files, three dates inside four months of each other, one code. Read the notes above before setting those three side by side, because the highest column does not mean the same thing at all three.

The baby, who is a separate admission

This is the line people do not budget for, and all three files carry it. A normal newborn is MS-DRG 795 and is priced apart from the mother: $1,903.10 to $4,899.14 at The University of Chicago Medical Center, $1,290.05 to $7,783.18 at Oregon Health & Science University and $1,489 to $12,910 at NYU Langone Tisch Hospital. If the baby needs more than a normal newborn stay the code changes, and MS-DRG 792, prematurity without major problems, reaches $78,602.18 at NYU Langone Tisch Hospital.

What the file is not pricing

Every delivery row quoted here is marked as a facility charge in an inpatient setting, which is the hospital. It is not the obstetrician, the anaesthetist, the prenatal months or anything after you go home, and none of those is in these files. A figure that covers less than you assumed is worse than no figure, so it is worth asking any hospital which of those its own quote includes.

The date on the file, and nothing after it

These are not live prices. Each is true as of the date its hospital attested to, and the three here are months apart. A rate agreed with an insurer changes when the contract does, and the file is the only thing that tells you when it was last looked at.

How to pay less

Ask for the consumer display rather than the whole file

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services requires two things of every hospital, and the second is a display of shoppable services in a consumer-friendly format. A planned delivery is exactly that. Asking for it by name is faster than downloading a file that runs to hundreds of megabytes.

Find your own plan in the file rather than reading its range

The range is the least useful number in it. The University of Chicago Medical Center prints the plan and the rate side by side, so a reader on Cigna One Health Hmo has $6,421.76 on MS-DRG 807 and a reader on Unitedhealthcare All Commercial Plans has $13,959.99, and neither is served by anything in between.

Ask which code they expect to bill, and ask early

It is the question that moves the number most and the one nobody asks. The complication level is not knowable in advance, but whether a caesarean is planned usually is, and at The University of Chicago Medical Center that is the difference between a row starting at $6,421.76 and one starting at $9,132.57.

Ask for the newborn line on its own

It is a separate admission under a separate code, so it is a separate question. Asking it separately is the only way to learn whether the quote you were handed covers one patient or two.

Check the date before you rely on any of it, including this page

Every hospital file carries the date its own attester signed. A figure from a file dated months ago is a figure from months ago, whoever republishes it and however recently they did.

Treat a national average as a headline, not a budget

An average is a model of many births at many hospitals under many plans. A bill is one code, at one hospital, under one plan, and all three of those are published.

What to read next

The scans along the way are billed separately from the delivery codes above, under CPT rather than MS-DRG: what an ultrasound costs on its own is published by the same hospitals.

Questions

Where these figures come from

Every figure here is published by the hospital named beside it, in US dollars, in the United States, in its own machine-readable standard charges file under 45 CFR 180.50, and each of those files carries the attestation that the information encoded is true, accurate and complete as of the date in the file. The dates are the ones the files give themselves: 1 April 2026 for The University of Chicago Medical Center, attested by Chris Allen, 23 March 2026 for Oregon Health & Science University, attested by Sandy Catalan, and 1 January 2026 for NYU Langone Tisch Hospital, attested by Karim Habibi. All three files, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services pages linked below, were read on 23 September 2026, and the two CMS pages on what a hospital must publish were read again on 9 October 2026. Figures are reproduced as each file publishes them, with thousands separators added and trailing zeros dropped. Nothing here is averaged, turned into a ratio or restated as a typical cost, and the three hospitals are three hospitals rather than a national picture. These are agreed facility rates. No figure here is a bill or a quote, and none of them is what an individual pays once a deductible and coinsurance have been applied.

• Hospital Price Transparency

  Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services · page last modified 16 September 2026

  The rule itself. CMS states that starting 1 January 2021 each hospital operating in the United States is required to publish pricing information online in two ways, as a comprehensive machine-readable file with all items and services and as a display of shoppable services in a consumer-friendly format, that CMS audits a sample of hospitals and investigates complaints, and that hospitals may face civil monetary penalties for noncompliance. Cited for the obligation and the enforcement, never for a price.

• Hospital Price Transparency: Consumers

  Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services · page last modified 10 September 2024

  CMS's own description of what a hospital must make public: standard charges including the rates they negotiate with insurance companies and the discounted price a hospital is willing to accept directly from a patient if paid in cash. Cited for what the files are supposed to contain, which is how this page can say what a given file leaves out.

• Hospital Price Transparency: Hospitals

  Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services · page last modified 10 March 2026

  The CMS page setting out what a hospital must publish: a single machine-readable file of gross charges, discounted cash prices, payer-specific negotiated charges and de-identified minimum and maximum negotiated charges for all items and services, and a display of at least 300 shoppable services a consumer can schedule in advance.

• Price transparency: standard charges machine-readable file

  The University of Chicago Medical Center · Attested by Chris Allen · file last_updated_on 1 April 2026

  The hospital's own machine-readable file, 363488183_the-university-of-chicago-medical-center_standardcharges.json, schema version 3.0.0, carrying the attestation required by 45 CFR 180.50 that the information encoded is true, accurate and complete as of the date in the file. At MS-DRG level it publishes no gross charge and no discounted cash price, and instead names each health plan and the rate agreed with it, alongside a minimum and a maximum.

• Billing and insurance: standard charges machine-readable file

  Oregon Health & Science University · Attested by Sandy Catalan · file last_updated_on 23 March 2026

  The hospital's own machine-readable file, 931176109_Oregon-Health-and-Science-University_standardcharges.csv, schema version 3.0.0, carrying the same attestation under 45 CFR 180.50. At MS-DRG level it publishes no gross charge, no discounted cash price and no dollar amount against any individual plan: every plan row is a formula, and the file publishes a minimum and a maximum beside them.

• Standard charges machine-readable file

  NYU Langone Tisch Hospital · Attested by Karim Habibi · file last_updated_on 1 January 2026

  The hospital's own machine-readable file, 133971298-1801992631_nyu-langone-tisch_standardcharges.csv, schema version 3.0.0, hospital_name NYU Langone and location_name Tisch Hospital, carrying the same attestation under 45 CFR 180.50. It publishes both MS-DRG and APR-DRG rows; only the MS-DRG rows are quoted here, so that the bundle being priced is the same one the other two hospitals price.

Sources on this page checked between 23 September and 9 October 2026. How we source prices.