The same CT abdomen-and-pelvis scan, 73 Colorado hospitals, prices 62× apart
A CT scan of the abdomen and pelvis with contrast is a single, well-defined procedure. Hospitals bill it under one code — CPT 74177 — whether it is performed in Denver, in Durango, or at a 25-bed hospital on the eastern plains. The scan itself does not change from one hospital to the next. The price does.
Seventy-three Colorado hospitals published a cash price for that exact code in their machine-readable price file, retrieved June 27–28, 2026. The lowest was $451.57, at Banner North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley. The highest was $27,983.23, at HCA HealthOne Mountain Ridge in Thornton. That is a 62× spread — sixty-two times as much for the same code, in the same state.
Every figure below is the number a hospital itself posted in its public file. These are posted prices, not quotes: they are what each hospital says it charges, not a guaranteed offer, and your own bill can differ. But the hospitals are the ones who published them.
What Medicare pays
Medicare publishes a price for this scan, too. For hospital outpatient departments in Colorado, its 2026 technical reference for CPT 74177 is about $368 — the facility charge, which is what these price files list (the radiologist’s separate reading fee is billed on its own and is excluded here).
Measured against that anchor, the median Colorado hospital’s posted cash price — $3,136 — is roughly 8.5× Medicare. The lowest posted price, $451.57, sits close to it (about 1.2×). The highest, $27,983.23, is about 76× Medicare for the identical code.
Why the spread is so wide
Some variation is legitimate. A rural hospital running its scanner at low volume carries a higher fixed cost per scan than a busy urban department; staffing, local wages, and contrast media genuinely differ. Those differences are real. They are not 62-fold — and the pattern here does not point that way. The most expensive posted prices in this dataset come from large metro hospitals, not the small rural ones.
The spread is not random noise, either. The six highest posted prices in the state — from $13,024.50 to $27,983.23 — all belong to hospitals in a single for-profit system, HCA HealthOne. Same-system hospitals frequently post the identical number: the five AdventHealth hospitals in the data each posted $7,203.55, and two UCHealth hospitals post an identical figure. Posted prices are set hospital by hospital and system by system, off a chargemaster — not derived, scan by scan, from what the procedure costs to deliver. That is what a 62× spread on one unchanging code exposes.
What you can do
The price your hospital posted is a starting point you are entitled to see. Two things help:
- Compare before you go. Our live comparison page for CPT 74177 ranks every hospital’s posted price for this code and stays current as the data refreshes.
- Check a bill you already have. The Check-a-bill tool lets you enter what you were charged and see it against the posted price and the Medicare reference, line by line.
Posted prices are not quotes. Before you schedule, call the hospital, give them the code — 74177 — and ask for a written estimate; a good-faith estimate is your right if you are uninsured or paying cash. The posted number is your leverage, not your final bill.
How we counted
The Colorado lineup on this site is 82 hospitals. For CPT 74177, 73 of them posted a cash price in their machine-readable file. The other 9 post no cash price for this code and are not shown. All 73 posted prices appear in the chart above; none were dropped.
We run a scope-flag check on posted prices — it sets aside any figure implausibly low to be the whole procedure (for instance, a hospital posting only a surgeon’s fee under a full-procedure code). Here it excluded nothing. For an imaging code it structurally cannot fire: the check engages only when a code’s Medicare reference is $5,000 or more, and this scan’s reference is about $368. So read each dot as what the hospital’s own file says the cash price is — not as an independently verified offer. A number that looks surprisingly low, or surprisingly high, can also be an artifact of how a hospital assembled its file; the honest claim is only that this is the figure the hospital published.
These figures are frozen from our July 2026 dataset (prices retrieved June 27–28, 2026); the comparison pages linked above stay current as the data refreshes. The site’s full published dataset is available on GitHub, and our sources and method are laid out on the about page.