A CPAP machine is one of the few pieces of medical equipment you can price like a laptop. The same ResMed AirSense 11 AutoSet is listed at $1,004.00 by cpap.com and at $1,004.00 by The CPAP Shop, both read on September 3, 2026. That is not a coincidence, it is a manufacturer-set price that online retailers hold, and it means the sticker on a new machine is unusually easy to check before you commit.
What makes the market confusing is everything around the machine. There is a legally required prescription you cannot skip, a refurbished tier that runs half the price, a bilevel tier that runs double, a humidifier that may or may not be included, and a mask-and-supply habit that never ends. This guide covers the 2026 cash price of each of those, using retailer price pages read today and the 2026 CMS DMEPOS fee schedule as the Medicare benchmark.
What Does a CPAP Machine Cost Without Insurance?
Retail figures below are from cpap.com, The CPAP Shop and SecondwindCPAP price pages read on September 3, 2026. Medicare figures come from the January 2026 DMEPOS fee schedule file (DME26-A), which lists a monthly rental allowable for each state, and from the CMS Medicare DME by Geography and Service dataset for data year 2024.
| Machine or benchmark | Low | Average | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Medicare allowable, CPAP rental per month (HCPCS E0601, 2026) | $50.04 | $54.63 | $100.22 |
| Medicare allowable, full 13-month rent-to-own (E0601 x 13) | $650.52 | $710.19 | $1,302.86 |
| What DME suppliers actually bill Medicare per rental month (2024) | $219.46 | $219.46 | $219.46 |
| New auto-adjusting home CPAP (APAP) | $873.00 | $960.00 | $1,004.00 |
| New travel CPAP | $735.20 | $825.00 | $919.00 |
| New bilevel machine (BiPAP) | $1,499.00 | $1,776.00 | $1,836.00 |
| Refurbished CPAP | $339.00 | $499.00 | $659.00 |
| Telehealth prescription renewal | $35.00 | $35.00 | $35.00 |
| Replacement mask, retail | $45.00 | $115.00 | $250.00 |
A few notes on those rows. The Medicare monthly allowable for E0601 is not one national number, it is 53 state and territory amounts. The most common non-rural figure in the 2026 file is $51.94, California is $50.44, Texas is $50.91 and New York sits at the national floor of $50.04. Rural areas are paid more, averaging $93.84 per month, and the non-continental territories run up to $100.22.
The third row is the one worth staring at. Across 734,083 Medicare beneficiaries in 2024, 4,454 DME suppliers submitted an average charge of $219.46 for each CPAP rental month, and Medicare allowed an average of $47.42. Thirteen months of that submitted charge is about $2,853 for a machine that sells for $1,004 in a browser tab. The 2023 file shows the same pattern ($228.14 submitted, $49.74 allowed), so this is a stable feature of the DME channel rather than a one-year blip.
The refurbished row is where the savings live, and it is a wide row on purpose. SecondwindCPAP lists a refurbished AirSense 11 AutoSet at $659.00, marked down from $888.00, at the top of that band and older ResMed S8 units at $339.00 at the bottom.
What Drives the Price
Auto-adjusting vs. fixed pressure vs. bilevel
These are three different products at three price tiers. A fixed-pressure CPAP blows one pressure all night. An auto-adjusting machine (APAP, which most retailers still label CPAP) senses resistance and moves the pressure within a range. A bilevel or BiPAP machine delivers one pressure on the way in and a lower one on the way out.
The gap shows up cleanly in the refurbished listings, where SecondwindCPAP sells the same generation of ResMed hardware in both configurations: the fixed-pressure AirSense 11 is $489.00 and the AirSense 11 AutoSet is $659.00, and the fixed-pressure AirSense 10 Elite is $399.00 against $499.00 for the AirSense 10 AutoSet. Bilevel is its own league. New, a ResMed AirCurve 10 VAuto is $1,776.00 and an AirCurve 11 VAuto is $1,796.00 at cpap.com, and The CPAP Shop lists a React Health Luna G3 BPAP 25A at $1,499.00 and the AirCurve 11 VAuto with heated tubing at $1,836.00.
Medicare prices the tiers the same way. The 2026 allowable for a bilevel respiratory assist device without a backup rate (HCPCS E0470) is $129.84 to $237.27 per rental month, roughly two and a half times the $50.04 to $100.22 allowed for a plain CPAP.
The prescription, which is not optional
FDA classifies the continuous PAP device as a Class II device under 21 CFR 868.5895, product code MNS, and it is a prescription device. There is no legal consumer channel in the United States that sells you one without a script on file, and every reputable retailer verifies it before shipping.
That is a real cost line, not a formality, and it is also the cheapest part of the transaction if you handle it deliberately. cpap.com sells a CPAP Prescription Renewal Service for $35.00 that connects you to a licensed physician by telehealth; it requires that you were diagnosed with sleep apnea within the past 10 years and are currently using a device, and the resulting script is written to be valid for 99 years. If you have never been tested, the prescription comes after diagnosis, which is a separate purchase covered in our sleep study cost guide.
New, open box, or refurbished
The same model can carry three prices depending on its history. SecondwindCPAP, a Minnesota respiratory-therapy shop in its 20th year, sells refurbished machines at roughly half of new: $659.00 for an AirSense 11 AutoSet against $1,004.00 new, $499.00 for a refurbished AirSense 10 AutoSet against $960.00 new, and older ResMed S8 units from $339.00.
Refurbished machines carry a shorter warranty than new (cpap.com advertises a 2-year warranty on new machines), and the blower motor has hours on it. That is the trade. Open-box and “zero hour” units sit in between, which is why reading the exact product title matters as much as reading the price.
Whether the humidifier is in the box
Read the product title. The CPAP Shop lists the AirCurve 11 VAuto “with HumidAir Humidifier & ClimateLineAir” at $1,836.00 while cpap.com lists the AirCurve 11 VAuto “with HumidAir Humidifier” at $1,796.00, and the $40 gap is a heated hose. Medicare treats the humidifier as a separate item entirely: HCPCS E0562 has a 2026 purchase allowable of $168.20 to $316.53 and a rental allowable of $16.82 to $31.66 per month.
Masks and supplies, the part that repeats
The machine is a one-time purchase. The mask is not. At cpap.com a ResMed AirFit N20 nasal mask is $105.00, a DreamWear nasal mask is $89.99, an AirFit F20 full face mask is $155.00, an AirTouch F30i is $184.00 and the AirFit X30i oral-nasal mask is $250.00. A clearance ComfortGel Blue nasal mask is $45.00.
Medicare’s 2026 allowables show the same shape at lower numbers, because these are the amounts a supplier can bill rather than a retail price: $67.86 to $125.21 for a nasal interface (A7034), $109.52 to $200.55 for a full face mask (A7030), $41.70 to $74.80 for a replacement full face cushion (A7031), $22.56 to $38.30 for headgear (A7035), $14.19 to $36.48 for tubing (A7037) and $2.55 to $5.23 for a disposable filter (A7038). Budget $200 to $500 a year at retail depending on how often you replace the mask.
Cash Price vs. Insurance
CPAP is one of the clearest cases in all of healthcare where paying cash is not a fallback, it is often just the better deal.
Under Medicare, you do not buy a CPAP. Medicare.gov states that Medicare may cover a 12-week trial, that Medicare pays the supplier to rent the machine for 13 months as long as you use it continuously, and that after 13 continuous rental payments the machine is yours. You pay 20% of the Medicare-approved amount after the Part B deductible, and there is a compliance requirement documented by your provider partway through. The 2026 fee schedule has no purchase amount for E0601 at all, only a rental amount, which is why the rent-to-own path exists.
Run the arithmetic and the total allowed cost of that 13-month path is about $650 to $675 in most states, of which your share is roughly $130 to $135 plus whatever the deductible absorbs. That is genuinely cheaper than the $1,004 cash price, if you are on Medicare, if the supplier accepts assignment, and if you clear the compliance documentation.
Commercial insurance is a different story. If you have a $3,000 deductible, the DME supplier’s billed amount lands entirely on you, and that billed amount is the $219 per month number, not the $47 allowed number. Uninsured, the choice is even simpler: a $1,004 machine bought outright and owned outright, or a rental you do not own with no negotiated rate behind it.
Two other trade-offs are worth naming honestly. A cash-bought machine does not count toward a deductible or out-of-pocket maximum. And buying online means no local respiratory therapist walks you through the setup, which is a real service some DME suppliers provide well.
How to Pay Less
- Price the machine at two retailers before you accept a supplier quote. cpap.com and The CPAP Shop both list the ResMed AirSense 11 AutoSet at $1,004.00, which gives you a hard number to hold a local supplier against. Run any quote through our fair price checker before you sign a rental agreement.
- Buy the prescription separately from the machine. cpap.com’s $35.00 renewal explicitly states that if you renew through the service you are free to fill the prescription with any supplier you choose. Getting the script and shopping the hardware are two transactions, and treating them as one is how people end up locked into a rental.
- Price the refurbished version of the exact model you were quoted. SecondwindCPAP lists a refurbished AirSense 11 AutoSet at $659.00 against $1,004.00 new and a refurbished AirSense 10 AutoSet at $499.00 against $960.00 new. That is a $345 to $461 difference on the same hardware, and the fixed-pressure versions are cheaper again at $489.00 and $399.00.
- Ask the DME supplier for the cash price, in writing, before insurance is billed. Suppliers submitting $219.46 per rental month to Medicare are not going to volunteer a self-pay rate. Our guide to hospital price transparency files explains how posted-price rules work and how to ask for a discounted cash rate rather than a billed charge.
- If a DME bill already arrived and it is enormous, dispute it against the benchmark. A $2,800 charge for 13 rental months of an E0601 sits against a Medicare allowable near $675. Our guide to negotiating medical bills walks through the sequence, and the negotiation script gives you the wording.
- Use a community health center for the visits, not the equipment. The evaluation, the follow-up and the compliance check are office visits, and federally funded health centers charge for those on an income-based sliding scale. Our guide to free clinics and sliding-scale care covers how to find one.
- Buy the mask separately from the machine. Bundles at cpap.com run $972 to $1,150, which is the machine plus a mask at close to full price. A $45.00 clearance mask does the same job as a $155.00 one if it fits your face.
Bottom Line
The realistic 2026 cash range for a CPAP machine is $339 refurbished to $1,004 for a new ResMed AirSense 11 AutoSet, plus $35 for a telehealth prescription if you need one, plus $200 to $500 a year in masks and supplies. Bilevel machines start around $1,499 new. Medicare’s 2026 benchmark is $50.04 to $100.22 per rental month, about $675 total over the 13-month rent-to-own path in most states.
The expensive version of this is the passive one: taking whatever machine the sleep lab’s preferred DME supplier sends, on a rental you do not own, billed at more than four times what Medicare allows. If a CPAP is not the route you end up taking, our oral appliance cost guide covers the dental alternative and our Inspire implant cost guide covers the surgical one.