No figure here is an estimate. Each is copied from a form the hospital filed, or computed from such figures with the formula stated.

Source

Every nonprofit hospital files IRS Form 990 with Schedule H. The IRS publishes every e-filed return as XML. This report reads the 2025 and 2026 releases (about 1.2 million filings), keeps the 19,245 that include Schedule H, and takes the latest fiscal year for each of the 2,306 filers. Each page links the filing it was built from.

CEO pay

Form 990 Part VII, Section A lists officers, directors, key employees and the five highest-paid employees with three compensation columns: from the organization, from related organizations, and other compensation (deferred pay and benefits). CEO pay is the sum of the three. The chief executive is the person whose title contains CEO or chief executive and who is not marked former; where titles are ambiguous, the filing was read by hand and the decision recorded with its reason. Systems whose chief executive could not be identified from the filing are shown on their own pages but not ranked.

Charity care

Schedule H Part I line 7a, "financial assistance at cost": free or discounted care given under the hospital's written financial assistance policy, valued at cost. Column (e), net of any grants received for it. The percentage of expenses shown on this site is that figure divided by total expenses from Form 990 line 18, computed the same way for every system; the percentage the hospital itself entered in column (f) is published in the data files for comparison. It excludes bad debt (Part III) and Medicaid shortfall (line 7b), which the IRS reports separately.

Systems, and what one row is

Many systems file one return per hospital. Filings that report the same chief executive are combined into one row: revenue, expenses and charity care are summed and the chief executive is counted once. Where a system's hospitals file under their own presidents, each hospital appears as its own row under its own president, and the parent's executives are attributed to no hospital. So a row is a filing, or a set of filings, with the chief executive that filing reports; it is not always the whole corporate system, and a hospital president's pay is compared only with that hospital's charity care. Where a filing reports a parent organization's executive rather than the hospital's own, the hospital is shown but excluded from CEO figures, with the reason in the data files. Every combination above $1 billion in revenue was checked by hand, as was every row on the headline list.

States

A system is listed on the page of every state where one of its filings reports a hospital facility (Schedule H Part V, Section A, which gives each facility's city and state), not only the state of the filing address. Its figures on each state page are system-wide. Where the filing address is in another state, the row says so. Puerto Rico filers are listed under Puerto Rico; the few filers with no hospital in the United States are listed separately, outside the US. A state's median charity care is the median across the systems with a hospital there, so a multi-state system counts in each of its states; no median is given for a state with fewer than 5 systems reporting a charity care figure.

Children's hospitals

Medicaid and CHIP cover most low-income children, so children's hospitals report little uncompensated care and appear at the bottom of any charity care ranking. They are shown in grey and can be hidden from any table.

What this report does not do

It does not estimate the value of the tax exemption. It does not count public hospitals (county, state, veterans), which file no Form 990. It does not judge whether a chief executive is overpaid. It puts two of the hospital's own numbers beside each other.

Independent check

CEO pay figures were compared against CEO Paycheck, which reads the same filings with its own method: of 129 systems present in both, 121 agree on the person and the dollar amount. The eight differences are explained in section 7 of the reproduction manual.

Corrections

If a figure is wrong, send the filing that contradicts it to [email protected]. The correction runs at the top of the affected page with the date, and in the corrections log on the Standards page.

The full reproduction manual, with every rule and every manual decision, and the data files and scripts that build this report from the IRS release, are published alongside it.