How Much Does an Exercise Stress Test Cost in North Carolina?
Cv stress test supvj i&r
$69.80North Carolina physician fee2026 Medicare office rateUnder 2026 Medicare rates, an exercise stress test costs about $70 in North Carolina.
- ✓Your ZIP's wage-adjusted hospital and surgery center 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
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- ✓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)
-5.0% vs nationalSingle statewide locality.
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 exercise stress test 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.
For example 27006.
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 center 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
Exercise Stress Test 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: An exercise stress test, also called a treadmill test or exercise ECG, records your heart's electrical activity while you walk on a treadmill or pedal a stationary bike at increasing effort. It is used to look for reduced blood flow to the heart, to check symptoms such as chest pain or breathlessness that come on with exertion, and to judge how much exercise is safe. The appointment takes about an hour including preparation, with around 10 to 15 minutes of actual exercise, and this basic version involves no injections or imaging.
What Is Exercise Stress Test?
An exercise stress test, also called a treadmill test or exercise ECG, records your heart's electrical activity while you walk on a treadmill or pedal a stationary bike at increasing effort. It is used to look for reduced blood flow to the heart, to check symptoms such as chest pain or breathlessness that come on with exertion, and to judge how much exercise is safe. The appointment takes about an hour including preparation, with around 10 to 15 minutes of actual exercise, and this basic version involves no injections or imaging.
What Affects the Cost
- –Adding imaging turns it into a different and more expensive test: a stress echocardiogram bills echo codes on top, and a nuclear stress test adds imaging codes and a radioactive tracer.
- –A cardiology office bills one global fee, while a hospital splits the test into separate supervision, tracing and interpretation codes and adds its own facility payment.
- –If you cannot exercise, a medication is used to stress the heart instead, which usually means an imaging version of the test plus a drug charge.
- –An office visit with the cardiologist on the same day is billed separately.
- –Cash prices vary widely between practices and hospitals, so ask for a written quote before a non-urgent test.
Questions to Ask Before Booking
- 1.Is this a plain exercise ECG, or will imaging or a nuclear tracer be added?
- 2.Will the test be done in your office or at a hospital, and does that change what I pay?
- 3.Does my plan need prior authorization for this test?
- 4.Will there be a separate charge for an office visit on the same day?
- 5.Who reads the results, and is that fee included in the quote?
Other featured procedures in North Carolina
Exercise Stress Test in other states
Exercise Stress Test in North Carolina: questions
Under 2026 Medicare rates, an exercise stress test costs about $70 in North Carolina. North Carolina is a single Medicare locality, so the physician rate is the same statewide.
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 $14 for the office physician line or $14 for the hospital physician line in North Carolina. Medigap may cover that 20%. This is not the hospital facility fee.
No. $69.80 is the Medicare physician allowed amount for CPT 93015. Anesthesia, facility fees, implants, and other CPT codes billed the same day are extra. North Carolina ranks #18 of 51 states on this physician line (5% below the national office rate of $73.48).