ABR Hearing Test: What It Measures and What It Costs

What the NIDCD says an ABR test measures

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) describes the auditory brain stem response on its page about newborn hearing screening. It writes that "two different tests are used to screen for hearing loss in babies," and that the ABR "tests how the auditory nerve and brain stem (which carry sound from the ear to the brain) respond to sound." On the setup, the same page says: "During this test, your baby wears small earphones and has electrodes painlessly placed on his or her head."

We stop at that description. How precise the test is, what a given tracing means and what comes after a result are questions for the audiologist who ran it. The rest of this page is about money: three billing codes, what Medicare pays a clinician and a hospital for each, and what named hospitals post as cash prices. The CMS files we read don't tie the three codes to an age group, so the amounts below are not specific to newborns.

Medicare's 2026 amounts for 92651, 92652 and 92653

Three codes cover ABR testing in Medicare's physician fee schedule. For 2026, the relative values CMS publishes work out to a national amount of $80.16 for 92651, $107.88 for 92652 and $80.16 for 92653, in an office setting. The facility column of the file reads NA for all three: CMS publishes no facility amount for them.

Medicare adjusts each national amount for the local area before paying, and the patient's share depends on the plan, so none of these figures is a bill. We don't reprint the official code descriptions, whose copyright the American Medical Association holds: the practical step is to ask the clinic which of the three codes it will bill, then look up the line here. When Part B pays for a hearing test is covered on our page on whether Medicare covers a hearing test.

The hospital outpatient rate: APC 5722

A hospital outpatient department is paid under a different Medicare system, the outpatient prospective payment system (OPPS). In the October 2026 Addendum B, CMS places all three ABR codes in ambulatory payment classification (APC) 5722, with status indicator S, at a national unadjusted rate of $220.60 each.

That amount is the hospital's payment from a separate fee system, not the clinician's amount from the section above, and we don't add the two together. One APC rate for three codes also means Medicare's national rate for a hospital is the same for 92651, 92652 or 92653, even though the physician fee schedule prices 92652 higher.

What hospitals post as cash prices for ABR codes

Under 45 CFR 180, hospitals post their standard charges in a machine-readable file, including a discounted cash price: the charge for a person who pays cash. We took one such amount per hospital for each ABR code, from the files of named hospitals whose sites allow automated reading:

• 92651: median $293.72 across 11 hospitals, from $197.23 at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minnesota to $807.30 at OHSU Hospital and Clinics in Oregon.
• 92652: median $642.53 across 21 hospitals, from $91.44 at Brookdale Hospital Medical Center in New York to $1,284.80 at two Memorial Hermann hospitals in Texas.
• 92653: median $509 across 25 hospitals, from $42.75 at Jefferson Hospital in Pennsylvania to $2,580.01 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in California.

The spread inside each code is wide, and the sample is not the market: hospitals whose terms restrict automated access or reuse are left out, and the median counts each hospital once, whatever its size. Each amount is the hospital's own charge as of its file date, for the hospital's part only. The figure lists every hospital with its price transparency page and price file; an amount comes down on the hospital's written request.

Three prices for one test, side by side

Take 92652. Medicare's physician fee schedule gives $107.88, the outpatient system pays a hospital $220.60, and the median cash price posted by 21 hospitals is $642.53. These are three different things: a payment to a clinician, a payment to a hospital, and a hospital's own charge to someone paying without insurance.

For a cash payer, the hospital's posted price is the closest of the three to a bill, and it varies more than tenfold between hospitals in the sample. Asking the hospital for its discounted cash price for the code it plans to bill, before the appointment, is how to turn these ranges into one number. Our hearing test cost page gives the same kind of figures for other audiology codes, and the OAE hearing test page covers the other newborn screening test.