CMS HCRIS Hospital Cost Reports (form CMS-2552-10)

How this source shows up on Fonteum.

Tier-2 profile-enrichment for Medicare-certified hospitals. Headline fields render on hospital profile pages with full provenance (source · vintage · fiscal-year boundary). Powers the brand-hub Hospital Margin Gap analysis (Tier 1 #23) and the FHIR Organization.contained financial extensions (queued separately).

Research and data questions this source supports.

• 01Pull hospital total revenue, net patient revenue, and operating margin from CMS cost reports — the same data commercial vendors (Definitive Healthcare, Strata Decision) license at $30K–$185K/yr, now free.
• 02Build a hospital financial health dashboard that identifies facilities at risk of closure based on operating margin and charity-care load.
• 03Compare hospital cost-per-discharge across states and facility types to support research on healthcare spending variation.
• 04Support M&A diligence on hospital targets with CMS-reported balance sheet and income statement data.
• 05Power a rural hospital sustainability study combining HCRIS financial data with CMS Care Compare quality scores.

Dataset size: ~6,000 hospital cost report filings per year

Per-field display contract.

Every field below has a `display_allowed` flag in the §94 provenance schema. Write-locked fields are captured to provenance for audit but never rendered on profile pages.

What we can’t infer from this source.

• Annual, not real-time. The latest fiscal year published lags the calendar year by 9–14 months.
• Self-reported by the facility under federal regulatory obligation; CMS reviews against benchmarks but reports are not independently audited.
• Limited to Medicare-certified hospitals filing form 2552-10. Critical-access hospitals, SNF cost reports (2540-10), and home-health cost reports are filed under different forms and queue separately.
• Cross-facility comparability requires careful attention to fiscal-year boundaries (some hospitals use Jan-Dec, others July-June, etc.); the Fonteum projection preserves both fiscal_year_begin + fiscal_year_end.
• Cost-report fields are financial; they do not measure clinical quality. Margin and occupancy are operating-context signals only.

Authority, license, refresh cadence.

What the source allows.

U.S. government public-domain works (17 U.S.C. § 105). CMS publishes HCRIS as an annual ZIP archive at data.cms.gov with explicit redistribution rights. Fonteum mirrors the source bytes (SHA-256 attested) and publishes a per-snapshot manifest under data/hcris/.

What a single field looks like in the graph.

A worked example. Every field surfaced from this source carries this shape of provenance line — source · last checked · display rule · confidence (when applicable).

Official API, bulk download, and Fonteum endpoints.

Common questions about CMS HCRIS Hospitals.

What is CMS HCRIS and what data does it contain?

The Healthcare Cost Report Information System (HCRIS) is CMS's repository of annual cost reports filed by Medicare-participating facilities. Hospital cost reports (Form 2552-10) contain detailed financial data including total charges, net patient revenue, operating expenses, charity care, Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, full-time equivalent staff, and bed counts. Reports are filed by fiscal year end and available approximately 6–12 months after the fiscal year closes.

Where can I download the CMS HCRIS hospital cost report data?

CMS makes the HCRIS dataset available at data.cms.gov as quarterly CSV extracts. The Form 2552-10 Hospital Cost Reports dataset includes alpha and numeric report sections. The canonical download is at data.cms.gov/provider-compliance/cost-report/hospital-2552-10. The data is U.S. government public-domain with no redistribution restriction beyond attribution.

How does the HCRIS cost report differ from commercial hospital financial databases?

HCRIS is the primary source underlying most commercial hospital financial analytics products. Vendors like Definitive Healthcare, Strata Decision Technology, and Trilliant Health layer enrichment, standardization, and visualization on top of HCRIS, but the underlying cost report data is the same federal filing. Fonteum makes the cleaned HCRIS data directly accessible, replacing the $30K–$185K licensing cost for the base dataset.

What is the refresh cadence for HCRIS data?

CMS publishes quarterly updates to the HCRIS database as new fiscal-year cost reports are processed. Because hospitals file on their own fiscal year (not calendar year), reports arrive at CMS throughout the year rather than in a single annual batch. Fonteum re-pulls the HCRIS quarterly extract within 30 days of each CMS publication.

Can HCRIS data be used to compare hospitals in the same market?

HCRIS cost reports enable market-level comparison on revenue, cost, and margin — with the important caveat that cost report formats and accounting conventions vary by hospital system. Fonteum applies standardized field extraction from the 2552-10 worksheet codes to normalize the data, but users should be aware that cost report figures reflect CMS program accounting (not GAAP) and that some line items may be completed inconsistently across facilities.

Where this source already shows up.

Related sources in the graph

• /sources/cms-pos →
• /sources/cms-care-compare-hospitals →
• /sources/cms-care-compare →

Per-source methodology: /methodology/cms-hcris-hospital-cost-reports →

• /sources → The full source library — every dataset Fonteum cites.
• /data-provenance → The provider graph — pipeline diagram, source-family clusters, field-level provenance examples, display rules.
• /methodology → Network-wide sourcing, refresh cadence, and corrections policy.
• /editorial-policy → Independence, sourcing, conflicts, corrections, retractions.