Emergency Room Cost Statistics (2026)

There were 107.4 million treat-and-release emergency department visits in the US in 2021, and they cost $80.3 billion to deliver.

That works out to an average of $750 per visit.

Treat-and-release means the patient was not admitted to the same hospital. Visits that led to an inpatient stay are counted in the inpatient data instead, so this is the cost of the ED as an outpatient service.

HCUP costs are the expenses incurred in producing the service: wages, salaries, supplies and utilities. They are estimated from charges using HCUP cost-to-charge ratios.

A hospital's charge is a list price, what an insurer pays is a negotiated rate, and what a patient pays is a share of that after deductibles and coinsurance. All three differ from the cost of production, usually by a lot.

So $750 is the right answer to what an average ED visit costs the health system to provide, and the wrong answer to what an ED visit costs a patient. Almost every secondary use of this dataset makes that substitution.

The average cost per visit was $440 for children under 18, $660 for ages 18 to 44, $880 for 45 to 64 and $1,110 for those 65 and over.

The oldest group therefore costs about two and a half times the youngest.

Volume runs the other way. Adults aged 18 to 44 made the most visits at 43.4 million, but at a lower cost each, so they accounted for 35.7% of visits' aggregate cost against 40.4% of the visits.

Medicare visits averaged $1,040 and Medicaid visits $600, a difference AHRQ puts at 42.3%. Private insurance averaged $790 and self-pay $610.

Nothing about that is a pricing difference. It is case mix: Medicare patients are older, arrive with more complex presentations and receive more testing and imaging.

Medicaid accounted for the largest share of visits at 33.2% but not the largest share of cost, because each visit consumed less.

The South had the most ED visits at 42.9 million and the lowest average cost at $650. The West had 20.5 million visits at $930 each, the highest average of any region.

Private nonprofit hospitals handled 77.9 million visits, 72.5% of the total, at $790 each. Private for-profit hospitals handled 15.3 million at $510, the lowest of any ownership type.

Most ED activity is not at a trauma centre: 58.3 million visits, 54.3% of the total, were at hospitals that are not trauma centres at all.

59.1% of all US inpatient hospital stays in 2021 included evidence of ED services before admission.

18.0% of US adults reported having an ED visit in the previous 12 months.

So this is not a rare event on the edge of the health system. For most people who are admitted to hospital, the ED is how they get there.

Every other significant medical cost can be scheduled, quoted and compared. An ED visit cannot.

You do not choose the hospital, you do not know the price before treatment, and you frequently cannot confirm that every clinician involved is in network.

That combination is the specific reason emergency care was the first thing the No Surprises Act addressed, and it is why ED costs behave like an unplanned expense rather than a health decision.

The No Surprises Act protects people covered by group and individual health plans from surprise bills for most emergency services, including from out-of-network providers at in-network facilities.

It does not make emergency care cheap. It stops the specific failure where a patient with insurance is billed the difference between a list price and a negotiated rate for something they could not shop for.

Ground ambulance services were left out of those protections, which is the largest remaining gap in exactly the situation where a patient has the least choice.

The one decision available before the visit is where to go, and the difference is large for conditions that do not require emergency capability.

The ED is built to be ready for anything at any hour, and that readiness is in the cost of every visit including the minor ones.

The judgement is clinical rather than financial, and nothing here argues for avoiding an ED when it is needed. But for the subset of visits that could safely go elsewhere, the cost difference is the largest available saving in the whole health budget.

For an insured household, the worst realistic ED year is bounded by the plan's out-of-pocket maximum, which converts an unpredictable event into a known ceiling.

That ceiling is the number worth sizing a cash reserve against, because an ED visit is the archetypal expense that arrives without notice and cannot be deferred.

For a self-pay patient there is no ceiling, which is why the right to a good faith estimate and to dispute a bill substantially above it matters most to exactly that group.

The brief draws on the 2021 HCUP Nationwide Emergency Department Sample, which is large enough that small differences are statistically significant, so AHRQ discusses only differences of 10% or more.

Average costs are rounded to the nearest $10, and charges, from which costs are estimated, were missing for 0.6% of weighted ED visits.

The reference year is 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, when ED visit volume was depressed while hospital expenditure rose 11.0% from 2019. Both effects push the average cost per visit up relative to a normal year.

Every figure is from AHRQ Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project Statistical Brief #311, Costs of Treat-and-Release Emergency Department Visits in the United States, 2021, published September 2024, tables 1 and 2.

The 18.0% of adults and the 59.1% of inpatient stays are cited within that brief from its own referenced sources.

Nothing on this page is an amount billed to or paid by a patient. HCUP does not publish that, and treating its cost figures as prices is the standard error with this dataset.