MRI Brain Without Contrast Cost in North Dakota
Mri brain stem w/o dye
$439Hospital 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 Dakota Medicare physician rate (2026)
-1.0% 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 $116 on the Medicare allowed amount for mri brain 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 Dakota
Enter a ZIP code for your part of North Dakota, whether Fargo, Bismarck, Grand Forks, Minot, or the farm and oil country in between.
What mri brain without contrast costs at hospitals near you
Everything above is a national average. The hospital you pick in North Dakota 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 Dakota
Where North Dakota ranks for this CPT
MRI Brain Without Contrast and how North Dakota is priced
North Dakota's entire fee schedule flows through one statewide locality whose geographic indices sit near the national floor, lifted partly by the work index floor CMS applies to low-cost states. Fargo and a prairie town on the Canadian border publish identical Medicare-approved amounts. With no metro large enough to justify its own locality, the state is among the most straightforward in the country for Medicare pricing. Oil-patch growth in the west changed local economies but not the fee schedule structure.
Fargo and Bismarck are the state's two care anchors, each dominated by large regional systems that also reach into Minnesota, South Dakota, and Montana, with Grand Forks and Minot serving their own areas. Much of rural North Dakota depends on critical access hospitals, and winter travel adds a genuine planning constraint. Some eastern residents cross into Minnesota for care, particularly toward Fargo-Moorhead's twin market.
This procedure: A brain MRI without contrast uses a powerful magnet and radio waves, no radiation, to produce detailed pictures of the brain. It is ordered for headaches with warning signs, dizziness, memory concerns, seizure evaluation, or suspected multiple sclerosis. You lie still inside the scanner tube for 20 to 40 minutes while it makes loud knocking sounds; earplugs are provided, and no needles are involved for this non-contrast version.
What Is MRI Brain Without Contrast?
A brain MRI without contrast uses a powerful magnet and radio waves, no radiation, to produce detailed pictures of the brain. It is ordered for headaches with warning signs, dizziness, memory concerns, seizure evaluation, or suspected multiple sclerosis. You lie still inside the scanner tube for 20 to 40 minutes while it makes loud knocking sounds; earplugs are provided, and no needles are involved for this non-contrast version.
What Affects the Cost
- –Hospital-based MRI departments often charge several times what freestanding imaging centers charge for the identical scan.
- –The radiologist's interpretation fee is separate from the scan fee, and the two may come from different billers.
- –If the radiologist protocol adds contrast after reviewing initial images, the study converts to a costlier code and adds injection charges.
- –Claustrophobic patients who need sedation or an open-bore magnet add medication, monitoring, or specialty-equipment costs.
- –After-hours or stat interpretation requests can carry premium charges at some facilities.
Questions to Ask Before Booking
- 1.Has prior authorization been approved, and for which specific facility?
- 2.What is the price at a freestanding imaging center versus the hospital for this exact scan?
- 3.Is the radiologist's reading fee included in the quote or billed separately?
- 4.Could the protocol change to include contrast, and what would that cost?
- 5.If I am claustrophobic, what would sedation or an open MRI add?
Other featured procedures in North Dakota
MRI Brain Without Contrast in other states
MRI Brain Without Contrast in North Dakota: questions
North Dakota is a single Medicare locality for this fee schedule. The 2026 physician rate for CPT 70551 is $193.41 in an office and $193.41 in a hospital, statewide. A ZIP lookup still confirms the locality mapping.
Not on the physician fee schedule. North Dakota 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 $39 for the office physician line or $39 for the hospital physician line in North Dakota. Medigap may cover that 20%. This is not the hospital facility fee.
No. $193.41 is only the physician's share. Adding Medicare's facility payment brings the total to about $439 in a hospital outpatient department, or about $323 at an ambulatory surgery centre. Anesthesia, pathology and other codes billed the same day are extra. North Dakota ranks #30 of 51 states on the physician line (within 2% of the national office rate of $195.40).