OAE Hearing Test: What It Is and What It Costs

What the NIDCD says an OAE test is

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), part of the National Institutes of Health, describes the test on its page about newborn hearing screening. In its words, otoacoustic emissions (OAE) "tests whether some parts of the ear respond to sound." The same page says that "two different tests are used to screen for hearing loss in babies": the OAE test, and the auditory brain stem response (ABR) test, which "tests how the auditory nerve and brain stem (which carry sound from the ear to the brain) respond to sound."

That is as far as this page goes on the test itself. We don't describe how it is performed, what a pass or a referral means, or how accurate it is: those questions belong to the audiologist or the baby's doctor. What follows is the money side, which the NIDCD page leaves out: what the billing codes pay under Medicare and Medicaid, and what hospitals post as cash prices.

Medicare's 2026 amounts for codes 92587 and 92588

This page tracks two billing codes, 92587 and 92588; we don't reproduce their official descriptions, whose reuse permission we haven't established. For 2026, the relative values CMS publishes for its physician fee schedule work out to a national amount of $22.04 for 92587 and $33.73 for 92588 in an office setting. Medicare starts from that amount and adjusts it for each local area. It is a payment amount, not a hospital charge and not what a patient pays. Our page on whether Medicare covers a hearing test sets out when Part B pays, and the hearing test cost page gives the amounts for other audiology codes.

Cash prices in three hospitals' price files

Hospitals must post their standard charges in a machine-readable file under 45 CFR 180. We read the discounted cash amount, the charge for a person who pays cash, in files of our archive from hospitals whose sites allow automated reading:

• 92587: $436.64 outpatient at University of California Davis Medical Center (file dated April 1, 2026) and $228.16 at Denver Health Medical Center (April 30, 2026).
• 92588: $519.70 outpatient at UC Davis and $518.05 at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, both in files dated April 1, 2026.

UC Davis posts a separate inpatient cash amount for each code in the same file: $218.32 for 92587 and $259.85 for 92588. The table keeps the outpatient lines.Two hospitals per code are not a market average: for 92587, UC Davis posts nearly twice Denver Health's amount. Each amount is what the hospital billed as posted on its file date, for the hospital's part of the service. The figure lists each hospital's price transparency page and price file, and any amount comes down on written request from the hospital.

What Medicaid paid per claim line, 2023 and 2024

The HHS Medicaid provider spending file counts claim lines and payments by billing code, nationally. For 92587, Medicaid paid $33.00 per claim line in 2023, over 669,871 lines from 1,419 billing providers, and $34.39 in 2024, a year HHS marks as preliminary, over 549,438 lines from 1,318 providers. For 92588, the figures are $38.90 per line in 2023 (124,629 lines, 443 providers) and $41.34 in 2024 (preliminary; 103,089 lines, 399 providers).

Paid per claim line is the total paid divided by the number of lines: our own division of two published cells. It covers patients of every age, not newborns alone, and it says nothing about one state's fee or about whether a state program covers the test for an adult. Our Medicaid hearing test page covers what Medicaid pays for hearing tests.

Newborn screening: what the CDC and NIDCD write

Hearing screening for babies runs through state programs. The NIDCD writes that "every state has established an Early Hearing Detection and Intervention Program" and that "about 98% of babies have their hearing screened before 1 month of age." The CDC's Early Hearing Detection and Intervention page, as archived in October 2026, says: "All babies should be screened for hearing loss no later than 1 month of age."

Neither page says a given method is required, and neither gives a price. How a birth hospital bills a newborn screen, and whether it shows on a line of its own, is not something the files on this page show. For coverage of children's hearing devices, see our page on hearing aids for children.