The same CT abdomen-and-pelvis scan is priced 62× apart across 73 Colorado hospitals
A CT scan of the abdomen and pelvis with contrast is a single, well-defined procedure. Hospitals everywhere bill it under the same code, CPT 74177, whether the scanner sits in downtown Denver or in a 25-bed hospital out on the eastern plains. You might reasonably expect the prices for it to land somewhere near each other. As it turns out, they do not even come close.
Seventy-three Colorado hospitals published a cash price for that exact code in their machine-readable price files, retrieved June 27 and 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. Do the division and the spread is 62×: the most expensive hospital in the state posts sixty-two times as much for this code as the least expensive one.
A caveat before going further. Every figure below is a number the hospital itself posted in its public file. These are posted prices, not quotes; each is what the hospital says it charges, and what lands on your own bill can differ. Nobody handed us these numbers to interpret, though. The hospitals published them.
What Medicare pays
How do these prices compare to something with a published basis? Medicare posts a price for this scan, too. For hospital outpatient departments in Colorado, its 2026 technical reference for CPT 74177 is about $368. That is 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 of $3,136 is roughly 8.5× Medicare. The lowest posted price, $451.57, sits close to it, at about 1.2×. The highest, $27,983.23, works out to about 76× Medicare for the identical code.
Why the spread is so wide
Some of the variation is legitimate, and it is worth being fair about that. A rural hospital running its scanner at low volume carries a higher fixed cost per scan than a busy urban department does. Staffing, local wages, contrast media, and equipment costs all genuinely differ from place to place, too. Differences of that sort are nowhere near 62-fold, though. The pattern in this data does not point that way in any case: the most expensive posted prices come from large metro hospitals, not from the small rural ones.
If cost is not producing the spread, what is? It is not random noise. The six highest posted prices in the state, running 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, too: the five AdventHealth hospitals in the data each posted exactly $7,203.55, and two UCHealth hospitals share an identical figure. Posted prices are set hospital by hospital and system by system, off a chargemaster. They are not derived, scan by scan, from what the procedure costs to deliver. A 62× spread on one unchanging code is what that looks like from the outside.
What you can do
The price your hospital posted is a starting point you are entitled to see, and there are two ways to put it to work here. Our live comparison page for CPT 74177 ranks every hospital’s posted price for this code and stays current as the data refreshes, so you can compare before you go. If you already have a bill, the Check-a-bill tool takes what you were charged and sets 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. Treat the posted number as leverage rather than as 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, so they are not shown. All 73 posted prices appear in the chart above; none were dropped.
We also run a scope-flag check on posted prices, which sets aside any figure implausibly low to be the whole procedure (a hospital posting only a surgeon’s fee under a full-procedure code, for instance). Here it excluded nothing. In fact, 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 and 28, 2026); the comparison pages linked above stay current as the data refreshes. Our sources and method are laid out on the about page.