U.S. Hospital Statistics

Data as of August 2026 · figures update with each federal data refresh

CMS tracks 5,432 hospitals on Hospital Compare, but publishes an Overall Star Rating for only 3,182 of them. This page collects the national reference figures behind PlainHospital: how far the star rating actually reaches, how the ratings are distributed, what the infection benchmarks say, and what the FDA and VA files add, with the derivation for every number in our methodology. Every figure is read from the underlying federal data at page load; nothing here is typed in by hand.

Hospitals tracked

5,432

With a star rating

3,182

Rated 5 stars

384

Device reports on file

24.0M

Key findings

Headline figures from the federal data, free to cite with attribution to PlainHospital (CMS Hospital Compare and FDA MAUDE, August 2026).

• 2,250 of the 5,432 hospitals CMS lists on Hospital Compare carry no Overall Star Rating at all, 41.4% of the file. The star rating covers a minority of the hospitals the program tracks.
• 71.0% of Critical Access Hospitals (978 of 1,378) have no Overall Star Rating, and all 802 hospitals in the Psychiatric, Childrens, Rural Emergency Hospital, Acute Care - Department of Defense categories are unrated without exception. The rating is in practice an acute-care measure, not a measure of every hospital.
• 384 hospitals hold CMS's top 5-star Overall Star Rating, 12.1% of the 3,182 hospitals that carry a rating, and 7.1% of all hospitals on file. 199 hold the bottom 1-star rating.
• 1.7% of healthcare-associated-infection comparisons that carry a published benchmark verdict (1,134 of 67,704) rate a hospital worse than the national benchmark, against 19,980 (29.5%) rated better. A further 104,808 comparisons have no verdict published at all.
• 23.0% is the average HCAHPS patient-survey response rate across the 3,956 hospitals reporting one. Every patient-experience star on Hospital Compare rests on barely more than one surveyed patient in five replying.
• 934 hospitals on the CMS file report no emergency department, 17.2% of the 5,432 tracked. The listed hospital nearest a household is not necessarily one that takes emergencies.
• 24.0M adverse-event reports are on file in FDA MAUDE for the 1,000 most-reported device types, of which 221,307 record a death as the reported outcome. MAUDE reports are unverified submissions and do not establish that a device caused the event.

Which hospitals the star rating leaves out

The Overall Star Rating is the figure most people mean by "hospital rating", and it is missing for 2,250 of the 5,432 hospitals CMS lists (41.4%). The gap is not spread evenly: it concentrates in the categories CMS does not score, so a search that returns "no rating" usually says something about the hospital's type, not its quality.

Categories with fewer than 30 hospitals on file are omitted from the table to avoid reading a share off a handful of records. Each category has its own page with the state-by-state breakdown: see hospital types, including all 1,378 critical access hospitals. What the rating does and does not measure is set out in what hospital star ratings really mean.

How the ratings that exist are distributed

Among the 3,182 rated hospitals, the distribution is centred on three stars, and the top rating is genuinely scarce: 384 hospitals (12.1% of rated) hold five stars, while 199 (6.3%) sit at one.

Hospitals by state

CMS tracks hospitals across 56 states and territories. Texas has the most on file with 468, of which 217 carry a star rating. Counts scale with population, so a state's five-star total reflects how many hospitals it has and how many are eligible for a rating, not only how good they are.

Full directory: hospitals in every state.

Infection benchmarks

Hospital Compare publishes healthcare-associated-infection measures against a national benchmark. Of the 67,704 hospital-measure comparisons that carry a verdict, 19,980 (29.5%) are better than the benchmark and 1,134 (1.7%) are worse; the rest are statistically indistinguishable from it. The larger number is what is missing: 104,808 comparisons have no verdict published, usually because the hospital had too few cases to score. Any share quoted from this file has to name which of the two denominators it used.

Device adverse-event reports

The FDA's MAUDE database holds 24,003,540 adverse-event reports for the 1,000 most-reported device types we track, spanning 1991–2026. Report volume tracks how widely a device is used and how closely it is monitored as much as how risky it is, so the counts rank reporting, not safety.

How to read these reports: understanding FDA device reports · full list: device directory.

Using these figures

Every number on this page is read from the underlying federal files at the data vintage shown above; none is estimated or hand-entered. Figures move when CMS, the FDA and the VA publish new files and our pipeline ingests them, so a citation should carry the as-of date. PlainHospital does not rate, rank or recommend hospitals. These are the published federal figures and the counts we derive from them. Corrections we make to our own processing are logged in the data changelog. The figures on this page come from files anyone can check: the same data is downloadable as CSV under CC0.