Two different bills get called “the heart stent bill,” and confusing them is expensive. A coronary angiogram is the diagnostic look at your arteries, and it averages $2,717 to $4,322 all-in under 2026 CMS rates. Our angiogram cost guide prices that study on its own. This guide covers what happens next: the intervention, meaning coronary angioplasty with a stent, formally a percutaneous coronary intervention or PCI.
The second split matters just as much. A scheduled, elective stent is an outpatient procedure with a knowable price. A stent placed during a heart attack is an inpatient admission billed under a hospital DRG, and the number has a different number of digits. Figures below are 2026 CMS national averages, 2024 Medicare claims released in 2026, and published cash prices verified as of September 2026.
What Does a Heart Stent Cost Without Insurance?
The CMS Procedure Price Lookup gives an all-in 2026 national average, facility fee plus doctor fee, for the outpatient version. Cash-price platforms show what self-pay patients pay when the price is set in advance. Hospital DRG data shows what the emergency version bills.
| Service/Type | Low | Average | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Angioplasty with one stent, CPT 92928, ambulatory surgery center (2026 Medicare all-in) | n/a | $7,771 | n/a |
| Angioplasty with one stent, CPT 92928, hospital outpatient (2026 Medicare all-in) | n/a | $12,257 | n/a |
| Transcatheter stent placement, prepaid cash bundle | $5,500 | $16,215 | $21,738 |
| Transcatheter stent placement, estimated national average (non-discounted benchmark) | n/a | $36,697 | n/a |
| Drug-eluting stent implant, average cash price across facilities | n/a | $45,988 | n/a |
| Stent as an inpatient stay, DRG 322 and DRG 321 (average billed charge) | $114,560 | n/a | $163,668 |
| Heart attack episode, average cash price at an inpatient hospital, by state | $21,633 | $24,331 | $30,754 |
Those last two rows describe the same event from two directions. The DRG figures are what hospitals submit as charges. The Sidecar Health figures are market-average cash estimates built from historical claims, and the platform notes its estimates exclude some accompanying professional fees, so treat them as a floor rather than a quote.
What Drives the Price
Elective vs. emergency
This is the single biggest factor and the one you have least control over. An elective stent, scheduled after a stress test or a diagnostic angiogram showed a blockage, is priced as an outpatient procedure at $7,771 to $12,257 under 2026 CMS national averages.
A stent placed during an acute myocardial infarction is billed as an inpatient stay. In CMS 2024 Medicare claims released April 2026, hospitals submitted average charges of $114,560 for MS-DRG 322 and $163,668 for MS-DRG 321. Average total payments on those same stays were $17,280 and $26,715. The gap between charge and payment is roughly six to one, and an uninsured patient gets billed off the charge column by default.
Worth knowing if you are looking up codes: CMS restructured the PCI diagnosis-related groups. The old MS-DRG 246 through 249 block no longer appears in national Medicare data. Stent cases now group to DRG 321 and 322, while DRG 250 and 251 cover percutaneous procedures without a stent and DRG 323 through 325 cover coronary intravascular lithotripsy.
Setting
For elective cases, the surgery center versus hospital gap is about 58%. The 2026 CMS all-in national average for CPT 92928 is $7,771 in an ambulatory surgery center and $12,257 in a hospital outpatient department. The physician fee is identical at $463 in both. The entire difference is the facility fee: $7,308 against $11,794.
CMS has been steadily expanding what ambulatory surgery centers may do, adding 289 procedures to the covered list for 2026 alone. Whether a given center in your market performs coronary interventions is a separate question, and many do not.
Geography
Billed charges for the identical DRG vary wildly by state. In the 2024 CMS inpatient dataset, average submitted charges for DRG 322 ran from $21,511 in Maryland, which sets hospital rates statewide, to $208,600 in Nevada and $172,463 in California. That is close to a ten-fold spread on the same procedure code.
Prepaid cash bundles were available in only twelve states as of September 2026, which means the low end of the market is not evenly distributed.
The device and the number of vessels
CPT 92928 covers one major coronary artery. CPT 92929 is the add-on for each additional vessel, and it is packaged rather than separately priced in outpatient Medicare data. A drug-eluting stent is the standard of care and is the version Turquoise Health prices at $45,988 as an average cash price across facilities. If you are quoted a single-vessel price, ask what the number becomes at two or three vessels before you sign anything.
The professional fee gap
CMS 2024 physician claims data, released May 21, 2026, shows cardiologists submitted an average charge of $2,119 for CPT 92928 against a Medicare allowed amount of $528. For CPT 92941, the emergency code for stenting during a heart attack, the figures were $2,300 submitted and $625 allowed. That four-to-one ratio on the doctor’s line is the same negotiating room that exists on the facility line.
Cash Price vs. Insurance
For a scheduled stent, a prepaid cash bundle can genuinely beat a hospital bill. MDsave’s national average of $16,215 sits against a $36,697 estimated non-discounted national average, and individual bundles are concrete: Lake Granbury Medical Center in Texas lists a transcatheter stent placement at $18,332 that includes the facility fee, operating and recovery room services and supplies for an outpatient stay under 24 hours, physician supervision, and anesthesiology. That kind of all-in bundle removes the most common source of surprise follow-up bills.
For an emergency stent, cash pricing is not a lever you can pull. You arrive by ambulance, the cath lab runs, and the bill arrives afterward. What you can do afterward is refuse to pay the chargemaster number. Hospitals are required to publish a discounted cash price for shoppable services, and uninsured patients at nonprofit hospitals are generally entitled to be billed no more than amounts generally billed to insured patients under federal financial assistance rules.
If you have coverage, the arithmetic is different. Under 2026 Medicare rates the average patient share for CPT 92928 is $1,553 at a surgery center and $1,828 at a hospital outpatient department, with Original Medicare capping hospital outpatient copayments at $1,676 per service. Under a commercial plan, a stent will typically exhaust your deductible and then run coinsurance on top, so the number to ask for is the plan’s negotiated rate at that specific facility, not the cash price.
How to Pay Less
- Separate the diagnostic quote from the intervention quote. Before a catheterization, ask in writing what the price becomes if a stent is placed in the same session. Our angiogram cost guide covers the diagnostic side, and the difference between the two is roughly three-fold. Test any number you are given with our fair price checker.
- Ask for the ambulatory surgery center price on elective cases. The 2026 CMS gap is $7,771 versus $12,257 for the identical code. Not every market has the option, but nobody offers it unless you ask.
- Pull the hospital’s posted cash rate. Every hospital publishes a machine-readable file containing a discounted cash price for shoppable services, and 92928 and 92941 are in it. Our hospital price transparency guide walks through finding and reading it.
- Get the itemized bill before paying a dollar. A cath lab bill runs to dozens of lines covering contrast, sedation, the recovery bay, and any overnight stay. Anesthesia bills separately, covered in our anesthesia cost guide, and an admission adds nightly charges covered in our hospital stay cost guide. Start with an itemized hospital bill request, then work the number with our medical bill negotiation guide and negotiation script.
- Apply for charity care, especially after an emergency. Nonprofit hospitals must maintain written financial assistance policies, and heart attack admissions are exactly the scenario those policies exist for. Check eligibility with our charity care checker and read our hospital charity care guide. If the bill has already been sold, see medical bills in collections.
- Budget for the drugs that follow. Dual antiplatelet therapy after a stent runs for months to years. Our guides to Plavix cost and Brilinta cost cover generic and brand pricing, and generic clopidogrel is one of the cheapest cardiac drugs on the market.
Bottom Line
A scheduled heart stent costs $7,771 to $45,988 without insurance, and the range is that wide because setting and pricing method matter more than anything clinical. The 2026 CMS all-in national averages are $7,771 at a surgery center and $12,257 at a hospital outpatient department. Prepaid bundles run $5,500 to $21,738. Turquoise Health’s average cash price across facilities is $45,988.
An emergency stent during a heart attack is a different bill entirely: average submitted charges of $114,560 to $163,668 against average total payments of $17,280 to $26,715. Those two columns are the whole negotiation. If your cardiac workup is still in progress, our guides to stress test cost and echocardiogram cost cover the earlier steps, and if the blockages turn out to be too diffuse for stenting, our heart bypass surgery cost guide covers the surgical alternative.