MRI Brain Cost in Wisconsin
Mri brain stem w/o & w/dye
$673Hospital 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
Wisconsin Medicare physician rate (2026)
-4.3% 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 $164 on the Medicare allowed amount for mri brain. 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 Wisconsin
Check your ZIP code for your part of Wisconsin, whether Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay and the Fox Valley, La Crosse, Eau Claire, or the rural Northwoods.
What mri brain costs at hospitals near you
Everything above is a national average. The hospital you pick in Wisconsin 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 Wisconsin
Where Wisconsin ranks for this CPT
MRI Brain and how Wisconsin is priced
Wisconsin's Medicare pricing runs through a single statewide locality with indices near the national average, so Milwaukee, Madison, and the Northwoods share the same approved amounts. The unified locality sits atop one of the more regionally organized care systems in the country, with strong integrated groups serving defined territories. No metro premium exists in the fee schedule, so Milwaukee's higher practice costs are averaged into the statewide factors. The published rates here travel unchanged across all seventy-two counties.
Milwaukee and Madison hold the state's academic medicine and largest systems, while integrated clinics in Marshfield, La Crosse, and the Fox Valley have long histories of serving rural Wisconsin through hub-and-spoke networks. The far north is lake and forest country where specialty care means a long drive south, and some western residents use Twin Cities or Rochester, Minnesota providers. Wisconsin's tradition of clinic-based integrated care tends to keep billing relatively coordinated.
This procedure: This is the most complete brain MRI protocol: the scanner first takes a full set of images without dye, then repeats key sequences after an IV gadolinium injection, letting the radiologist compare the two. It is the standard workup for suspected brain tumors, multiple sclerosis, pituitary problems, and infection. Plan for 45 to 60 minutes in the scanner with an IV in your arm, making it the longest and most expensive of the three brain MRI codes.
What Is MRI Brain?
This is the most complete brain MRI protocol: the scanner first takes a full set of images without dye, then repeats key sequences after an IV gadolinium injection, letting the radiologist compare the two. It is the standard workup for suspected brain tumors, multiple sclerosis, pituitary problems, and infection. Plan for 45 to 60 minutes in the scanner with an IV in your arm, making it the longest and most expensive of the three brain MRI codes.
What Affects the Cost
- –As the combined protocol, 70553 carries the highest base price of the brain MRI family, before facility markup differences.
- –Hospital imaging departments charge far more than independent centers for this long scan.
- –The gadolinium dose is a separate supply charge on top of the imaging codes.
- –Longer scanner time means claustrophobia or movement problems are more likely to require sedation or a rescan, each adding cost.
- –Follow-up MRIs to track a finding over time repeat the full cost at each interval, so the surveillance schedule matters as much as the single-scan price.
Questions to Ask Before Booking
- 1.Was the full without-and-with-contrast protocol authorized, or only a plain MRI?
- 2.What is your global price for this study at a freestanding center?
- 3.How many follow-up scans is my condition likely to need, and at what interval?
- 4.Are the contrast agent and radiologist reading included in the quoted price?
- 5.If my insurer pushes back, will my doctor do a peer-to-peer review to defend this protocol?
Other featured procedures in Wisconsin
MRI Brain in other states
MRI Brain in Wisconsin: questions
Wisconsin is a single Medicare locality for this fee schedule. The 2026 physician rate for CPT 70553 is $303.32 in an office and $303.32 in a hospital, statewide. A ZIP lookup still confirms the locality mapping.
Not on the physician fee schedule. Wisconsin 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 $61 for the office physician line or $61 for the hospital physician line in Wisconsin. Medigap may cover that 20%. This is not the hospital facility fee.
No. $303.32 is only the physician's share. Adding Medicare's facility payment brings the total to about $673 in a hospital outpatient department, or about $510 at an ambulatory surgery centre. Anesthesia, pathology and other codes billed the same day are extra. Wisconsin ranks #20 of 51 states on the physician line (4% below the national office rate of $316.97).