Medicare 2026 vs 2027 rates for dermatology codes

Enter your office ZIP code or pick your Medicare locality to see what Medicare pays in an office (non-facility) setting for common dermatology codes in 2026 and 2027, and download it as a spreadsheet.

• Rates are Medicare's national physician fee schedule amounts adjusted for your locality, before the patient's deductible and 20% coinsurance, and before any sequestration cut. Your contractor's posted fee schedule is the final word.
• 2026 uses CMS's October 2026 release (RVU26D); 2027 uses the January 2027 release (RVU27A). All 2027 amounts are for clinicians who are not in an Advanced Alternative Payment Model (APM), which is nearly every dermatologist. Qualifying APM participants get a conversion factor 1.0% higher.
• The 1.0 floor on the work geographic index (GPCI) expired for 2027. In the 49 localities whose work GPCI is below 1.0, the "Lost to expired floor" column shows what each code would have kept had the floor continued; localities at or above 1.0 are not affected.
• The 2006 comparison uses CMS's 2006 fee schedule (RVU06AR2, conversion factor $37.8975) with each locality's 2006 geographic indexes, adjusted for inflation with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U, all items, U.S. city average, series CUUR0000SA0): from its 2006 annual average (201.6) to October 2026, the latest month published (337.511), a factor of x1.674. That puts 2006 in today's dollars; 2027 inflation is not known yet, so the true 2027 gap will be somewhat wider. We use CPI rather than CMS's Medicare Economic Index, which nets out economy-wide productivity and rose only about 45% over the same years. California's localities were redrawn in 2017; there we use the 2006 locality of the area's main county. Codes created after 2006 (the 2019 biopsy codes, Mohs surgery, lipoma excision by size) have no 2006 rate.
• The hospital and ASC view shows what Medicare pays in total, all-in, for the same code in 2027 in each setting. Office is the non-facility fee schedule amount. Hospital outpatient and ASC totals are the surgeon's facility fee schedule amount for this locality plus CMS's national facility fee from the CY 2027 OPPS/ASC final rule (Addendum B for hospitals, Addendum AA for ASCs). We do not apply CMS's hospital wage index to the facility fee, so the real amount runs roughly 5 to 15% lower in rural areas and 15 to 50% higher in New York and the California metros. Hospitals bill every clinic visit as G0463, so the office visit codes use that fee. Some hospital fees (status Q1) are paid only when the procedure is done on its own and are bundled when it comes with another procedure. A "-" means no separate payment in that setting: add-on codes, codes not on the ASC list, or codes CMS packages into another service.
• Code descriptions are our own plain-English summaries, not official CPT descriptors.