News of the Day October 7, 2026
New Federal Regulations Make It Easier to Find, Compare, and Report Healthcare Pricing Information

On Monday, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), announced that Americans will have access to more reliable, accessible, and actionable information about what their health coverage includes and what they are likely to pay before receiving care under new regulations that strengthen federal healthcare price transparency requirements. The actions taken today to create a more transparent healthcare marketplace also ensure employers can make more informed decisions; researchers can better understand healthcare markets; and innovators can build better tools.

Updates to the Transparency in Coverage (TiC) rules, finalized today by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), in partnership with the Departments of Labor and the Treasury (the Departments), build on the historic health care price transparency rules established during President Trump’s first term.

The final rules improve the underlying healthcare pricing data by reducing duplicative and unnecessary information, providing more context about in-network prices, increasing available out-of-network pricing information, and strengthening accountability for the completeness and accuracy of published data. Reporting frequency for pricing information will change from monthly to quarterly, maintaining meaningful transparency while lowering administrative burden.

The rules also require group health plans and health insurance issuers to provide consumers with personalized cost-sharing information by phone, in addition to existing online tools.

These improvements will help technology developers build better consumer tools, give consumers more reliable information when comparing costs before receiving care, and enable employers and researchers to better analyze healthcare markets, all of which will help drive competition across the healthcare industry.

The Departments plan to begin development of the initial schema for the Prescription Drug File in November 2026 and will finalize it on or around May 2027. Plans and issuers will be expected to publish their Prescription Drug Files using this schema starting in December 2027 and monthly thereafter.

Recent data have found that the top 25% of the most expensive healthcare service prices have dropped by 6.3% per year following the initial implementation of price transparency requirements on hospitals and health plans.