A complete blood count is the most ordered blood test in American medicine. On 2024 Medicare claims alone, 54,652 providers ran 26.2 million CBCs with differential for 11.9 million beneficiaries in office settings. It is also one of the cheapest things a laboratory does: Medicare pays $7.77 for it.
So why do people end up with a three-figure bill for one? Because the CBC is almost never the whole charge. This guide separates the panel itself from the draw and the visit that come with it, prices the CBC at every route a self-pay patient can actually use, and gives you the federal benchmark to negotiate against.
What Does a CBC Test Cost Without Insurance?
Seller prices below were read September 4, 2026 from each company’s own product page. Medicare figures come from the CY2026 Quarter 3 release of the Clinical Laboratory Fee Schedule (effective July 1, 2026) and the CMS Physician and Other Practitioners file covering 2024 claims, released May 21, 2026. Hospital figures come from three machine-readable price files: the University of Vermont Medical Center’s, dated April 28, 2026; St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center in Boise, dated March 25, 2026; and Ochsner Clinic Foundation in New Orleans, dated April 1, 2026.
| How you buy it | Low | Typical | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Medicare benchmark, CBC with differential (CPT 85025, 2026 CLFS) | $7.77 | $7.77 | $7.77 |
| Medicare benchmark, CBC without differential (CPT 85027) | $6.47 | $6.47 | $6.47 |
| Direct-to-consumer lab store | $27.00 (Walk-In Lab) | $29.00 (Labcorp OnDemand, Quest) | $35.00 (Quest with its $6.00 physician fee) |
| Hospital outpatient, posted cash price | $10.56 (Ochsner, 22% of gross) | $35 | $53 (UVM hospital line) |
| Hospital inpatient, posted cash price | $13.20 (Ochsner) | $53 | $60 (St. Luke’s) |
| Hospital gross charge before any self-pay discount | $48 (Ochsner) | $53 | $60 (St. Luke’s) |
| Average charge billed to Medicare, office setting (2024 claims) | $7.59 allowed | n/a | $37.12 submitted |
The remarkable thing here is how tightly the three big retail sellers agree. Walk-In Lab is $27.00, Labcorp OnDemand is $29.00, and Quest is $29.00. That is a real market price, not a guess, and it should be your reference point for any quote you get.
The second thing worth noting is how small the gap is between the hospital and the retail store on this particular test. On expensive services hospitals charge many multiples of the market rate; on a CBC, St. Luke’s outpatient cash price of $29 to $35 is essentially the retail price, and Ochsner’s discounted cash price of $10.56 sits well below it. The hospital markup shows up on the visit and the facility fee, not on the panel.
How much does a complete blood count cost at Medicare rates? $7.77 with the differential and $6.47 without. Providers submitted an average of $37.12 for the with-differential version in office settings on 2024 claims, or about 4.9 times what Medicare allowed.
What Drives the Price
Whether the differential is included
A “CBC with differential” (CPT 85025) adds an automated breakdown of the five white blood cell types. Medicare pays $7.77 for it versus $6.47 for the plain automated count (85027). The differential version is what most consumer lab products sell, and what most clinicians order.
Where the sample is processed
The same test carries different prices inside a single hospital’s own file. UVM lists CPT 85025 at $35 on its professional line and $53 on its hospital line. St. Luke’s carries two outpatient CBC lines at $29 and $35 and two inpatient lines at $50 and $60. Ochsner runs three separate CBC line items (routine, occupational-medicine screen, and point-of-care) all at $48 gross. Which line your claim lands on depends on how the encounter was coded, not on the blood.
The draw is its own charge
Venipuncture is CPT 36415 and it is billed separately from the panel. Ochsner lists it at $13 gross and $2.86 discounted cash. Direct-to-consumer lab prices fold the draw into the sticker price, while a clinic or hospital bill itemizes it, so a $29 quote and a $29 line on a bill are not describing the same thing.
The visit that generated the order
This is the line item that turns a $29 test into a $200 bill. If the CBC came from an urgent care or office visit, the evaluation and management code is billed at the practice’s own rate on top of the lab work. Compare against our doctor visit cost and urgent care cost guides to see which half of your bill is which.
Bundling with other panels
A CBC is usually ordered with a metabolic panel or a lipid panel, and buying them together spreads the flat physician-order fee and the draw across more tests. See comprehensive metabolic panel cost and lipid panel cost for those prices, and blood work cost without insurance for how full multi-panel bundles are priced.
Cash Price vs. Insurance
At $27 to $35, a CBC is well below almost every deductible in the individual market. Running it through insurance mostly means applying a small negotiated amount toward a deductible you may never reach, while adding a claim and an office visit to the transaction.
The exposure for an uninsured patient is not the panel; it is the submitted charge. Providers billed Medicare an average of $37.12 per office CBC on 2024 claims against an allowed amount of $7.59. Add the $21.82 average submitted charge for the draw and you are at roughly $59 in billed charges for a test that Medicare values at $16.08 all in.
Hospital self-pay policy is where the real variation lives, and it is close to a coin flip. UVM and St. Luke’s list identical figures for gross charge and discounted cash price on every CBC line, meaning neither offers a self-pay reduction at all. Ochsner discounts self-pay to 22% of gross across the board, turning a $48 CBC into $10.56 and a $13 blood draw into $2.86. You cannot tell which policy applies to you without asking for the discounted cash rate by name. Hospital price transparency explains how to pull any hospital’s file and find your code before you call.
How to Pay Less
Buy direct from a lab store and skip the visit. If you only need the panel and have a reason to run it, a retail CBC is $27.00 to $29.00 with the draw included. Compare at least the three sellers priced above, since the whole spread is under $10 and there is no quality trade-off. Run any quote through our fair price checker first.
Order everything in one visit. The physician service fee at Quest and Walk-In Lab is $6.00 per order rather than per test, and the draw happens once. If you need a CBC plus a metabolic panel plus iron studies, one order is meaningfully cheaper than three.
Ask for the hospital’s discounted cash rate by name. The exact phrase matters. Ochsner’s posted self-pay price is 22% of gross, which beats every online lab priced in this guide, while two other hospitals publish no discount at all. Nobody will volunteer which policy you fall under.
Ask what the CBC costs before the draw, not after. Because it is such a routine add-on, a CBC is often ordered without any price conversation. Asking for the lab line price separately from the visit price is the single most useful question in the room.
Use a community health center or free clinic if you need the visit too. Sliding-fee schedules at federally qualified health centers typically cover both the encounter and the routine lab work at one income-based price. Start with free clinics and sliding-scale care.
Dispute a hospital lab bill using the federal benchmark. Request an itemized hospital bill so CPT 85025 appears on its own line, then use how to negotiate medical bills with the $7.77 Medicare rate and the $29 to $35 retail price as your two anchors. Our negotiation script tool has the wording, and if the total bill is large, check hospital charity care.
Do not let a small lab balance go to collections. A $35 line item is trivial to resolve and expensive to ignore. If one has already slipped, medical bills in collections covers what to do next.
The Bottom Line
A complete blood count is a $7.77 test at Medicare’s rate, a $27 to $29 product at retail, and anywhere from $10.56 to $60 at a hospital depending on whether that hospital discounts self-pay. Across all three, it is one of the few places in American healthcare where the cash price and the federal benchmark live in the same neighborhood.
If your CBC bill is in the hundreds, the panel is not what you are paying for. Get the bill itemized and find the visit charge, the facility fee and the draw, because that is where the money is. For the tests most often ordered with it, see our ferritin test cost guide, urinalysis cost and A1C test cost.