Hospital Types
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services tracks 5,432 hospitals and sorts them into facility types that decide what each one does, what it reports, and whether it is rated at all. 3,182 carry a CMS Overall Star Rating; the rest do not, and which type a hospital belongs to is the main reason why.
Data as of . Not one of the 807 hospitals in the Psychiatric, Childrens, Rural Emergency Hospital, Acute Care - Department of Defense, Long-term categories carries an overall star rating, so an unrated hospital in those categories says nothing about its quality. The full breakdown is on our statistics page.
| Facility type | Hospitals | With a star rating | With an ER | States |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acute Care Hospitals | 3,115 | 2,670 (85.7%) | 2,838 | 56 |
| Critical Access Hospitals | 1,378 | 400 (29.0%) | 1,339 | 45 |
| Psychiatric | 635 | 0 (0.0%) | 82 | 52 |
| Acute Care - Veterans Administration | 132 | 112 (84.8%) | 112 | 49 |
| Childrens | 94 | 0 (0.0%) | 55 | 35 |
| Rural Emergency Hospital | 41 | 0 (0.0%) | 41 | 18 |
| Acute Care - Department of Defense | 32 | 0 (0.0%) | 31 | 20 |
| Long-term | 5 | 0 (0.0%) | 0 | 4 |
Types with too few hospitals to support a page of their own are listed here without a link.
Why the type decides whether a hospital is rated
The CMS Overall Star Rating is computed from measure groups that need enough cases to be statistically meaningful. Small-volume and specialty facilities rarely clear those thresholds, so CMS publishes no rating for them at all. That is a reporting rule, not a judgment about care, and it is why a search that returns "no rating" usually says something about the hospital's category rather than its performance.
The practical consequence for anyone comparing hospitals: a rating can only be compared with another rating from the same program, and a missing one cannot be read as a low one. What the rating does and does not measure is set out in what hospital star ratings really mean.
Source: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare / Care Compare, Hospital General Information · August 2026 Facility type is the category CMS publishes for each hospital. Counts are computed by PlainHospital from the same records the individual hospital pages render.
Every figure on PlainHospital is rendered directly from federal source data, no number is typed in by an editor. Every count on this page is a live query over the same hospital records the detail pages render. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of August 2026.