CT Chest Without Contrast Cost in North Carolina
Ct thorax dx c-
$239Hospital outpatient total2026 Medicare, physician + facility- ✓Your ZIP's wage-adjusted hospital and surgery centre rates
- ✓Five nearby hospitals by name, with CMS star ratings
- ✓The add-on codes that typically land on the bill
- ✓A word-for-word script for asking for a good-faith estimate
- ✓A private link you can reopen and share
- ✓Everything in the Premium report
- ✓15 nearby hospitals instead of five
- ✓Filled good-faith-estimate request letter
- ✓Bill-negotiation letter
- ✓Printable PDF download
North Carolina Medicare physician rate (2026)
-5.4% vs nationalSingle statewide locality.
What the whole procedure costs
The rate above is the physician’s fee on its own. The facility bills separately, and for most procedures the facility is the larger half of the bill. These are 2026 national Medicare amounts.
Choosing a surgery centre over a hospital saves about $50 on the Medicare allowed amount for ct chest without contrast. Ask whether your procedure can be done at an ambulatory surgery centre.
Medicare may pay the facility separately for this code or package it into another service on the same day, so treat the facility share as an upper bound. Medicare allowed amounts are not what an uninsured patient is charged, and not a quote. Private plans typically allow more.
Your ZIP in North Carolina
Check your ZIP code for your region of North Carolina, whether Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham and the Triangle, the Triad, Asheville and the mountains, or Wilmington and the coastal east.
What ct chest without contrast costs at hospitals near you
Everything above is a national average. The hospital you pick in North Carolina moves the bill more than anything else you control.
Rates for your ZIP, 5 named hospitals with CMS ratings, the add-on codes, and the scheduler script.
One-off payment, no account and no subscription. You get a private link and an email. No medical records and no insurance card, ever.
What these numbers are
Every figure on this page is a 2026 Medicare allowed amount: the physician line comes from the Physician Fee Schedule adjusted by geographic practice-cost indices, and the facility totals come from the CMS hospital outpatient (OPPS) and ambulatory surgery centre rates. None of them is a hospital chargemaster price, your insurer's contracted rate, or a quote. Anesthesia, pathology, imaging reads and follow-up care are billed under their own codes when they apply, and an inpatient stay is paid a different way again.
National vs North Carolina
Where North Carolina ranks for this CPT
CT Chest Without Contrast and how North Carolina is priced
North Carolina's Medicare physician pricing comes from one statewide locality with indices just under the national average, so Charlotte, the Research Triangle, and the rural east and mountain west all share the same approved amounts. For a state with several fast-growing metros, the single-locality approach keeps the fee schedule simple even as local economies diverge. Nothing in the geographic adjustments distinguishes a Raleigh procedure from one in Boone or Greenville. As elsewhere, the office-versus-hospital setting decision moves prices more than geography within the state does.
North Carolina is unusually rich in academic medicine, with multiple nationally known university medical centers clustered in the Triangle and Winston-Salem, plus a major hospital system anchored in Charlotte that has grown across the Southeast. The rural east and the mountain counties are much thinner markets, and hospital consolidation has been reshaping who owns local care. Patients near the borders sometimes use Virginia or South Carolina providers.
This procedure: A chest CT without contrast takes cross-sectional X-ray images of the lungs and chest in a scan that lasts under a minute on the table, with the whole appointment done in 15 minutes. It sees far more detail than a chest X-ray and is ordered to evaluate lung nodules, unexplained cough, abnormal X-ray findings, or interstitial lung disease. You lie on a table that slides through a doughnut-shaped scanner and hold your breath briefly; no IV is needed for this non-contrast version.
What Is CT Chest Without Contrast?
A chest CT without contrast takes cross-sectional X-ray images of the lungs and chest in a scan that lasts under a minute on the table, with the whole appointment done in 15 minutes. It sees far more detail than a chest X-ray and is ordered to evaluate lung nodules, unexplained cough, abnormal X-ray findings, or interstitial lung disease. You lie on a table that slides through a doughnut-shaped scanner and hold your breath briefly; no IV is needed for this non-contrast version.
What Affects the Cost
- –Freestanding imaging centers routinely price this scan at a fraction of hospital outpatient rates.
- –The radiologist's professional reading fee is billed separately from the scan at many facilities.
- –Lung nodules found on a first scan typically trigger a series of follow-up CTs over one to two years, multiplying the true cost of the finding.
- –Low-dose CT for lung cancer screening is a different code with different, usually free, coverage; make sure the right one is ordered if screening is the goal.
- –Emergency department chest CTs carry ER-level facility charges far above scheduled outpatient pricing.
Questions to Ask Before Booking
- 1.Is this being ordered as a diagnostic CT or as low-dose lung cancer screening, and am I eligible for the free screening version?
- 2.Has prior authorization been obtained for the facility where I am scheduled?
- 3.What does this scan cost at a freestanding center versus the hospital?
- 4.If a nodule is found, how many follow-up scans should I budget for?
- 5.Is the radiologist fee included in the price I was quoted?
Other featured procedures in North Carolina
CT Chest Without Contrast in other states
CT Chest Without Contrast in North Carolina: questions
North Carolina is a single Medicare locality for this fee schedule. The 2026 physician rate for CPT 71250 is $125.38 in an office and $125.38 in a hospital, statewide. A ZIP lookup still confirms the locality mapping.
Not on the physician fee schedule. North Carolina uses one locality, so the Medicare physician rate is the same from one end of the state to the other. What still changes is site of service (office vs hospital) and any facility fee the hospital bills on its own claim.
After the Part B deductible, coinsurance is usually 20% of the allowed amount: about $25 for the office physician line or $25 for the hospital physician line in North Carolina. Medigap may cover that 20%. This is not the hospital facility fee.
No. $125.38 is only the physician's share. Adding Medicare's facility payment brings the total to about $239 in a hospital outpatient department, or about $190 at an ambulatory surgery centre. Anesthesia, pathology and other codes billed the same day are extra. North Carolina ranks #18 of 51 states on the physician line (5% below the national office rate of $132.60).