Free medical coding software, and the one thing none of it includes

What is free here

All of it, permanently, with no account. These are not trial versions of paid pages.

• ICD-10-CM lookup

  The complete FY2026 tabular list. Every code, every Excludes1 and Excludes2 note, every 'code first' instruction, and the seventh-character rules spelled out rather than implied.

• Codes by condition

  Start from the diagnosis instead of the code, with the disambiguation a coder actually needs — which of these eleven codes applies to what the chart documents.

• ICD-10-PCS lookup

  The inpatient procedure code set, in full. Public-domain CMS data, so there is nothing to license and nothing to charge for.

• HCPCS Level II

  Drugs, supplies, DME and the modifiers, refreshed on the quarterly CMS cadence with the release date shown on screen.

• MS-DRG payment table

  All 772 groups with FY2026 relative weights, geometric and arithmetic mean length of stay, and the 10% weight cap where it applies.

• Denial code explanations

  CO-16, CO-97, CO-45 and the rest in plain English: why you got it, what to do with the one on your desk, and what would have prevented it.

• Claim scrubber

  Paste a diagnosis set and get Excludes1 collisions, invalid header codes and missing seventh characters back instantly. Free up to 5 codes at a time.

• RVU calculator

  Medicare reimbursement from work, practice-expense and malpractice RVUs, adjusted by GPCI for your locality against the CY2026 fee schedule.

• Decision guides

  Walk a chart note to a code one documented fact at a time, with the guideline paragraph behind every step.

What is not free, here or anywhere

CPT. The codes and their descriptors are the American Medical Association’s copyrighted property and are licensed per user, per year. Every encoder that shows you CPT descriptors is paying for that licence and recovering it from your subscription, which is a large part of why the incumbents cost $659 to $999.95. We do not hold the licence, so we do not show CPT content and we do not claim to.

If you code physician procedures all day, that is a real gap and no amount of free ICD-10-CM closes it. If your work is diagnosis-led, it is not a gap at all — and you are being charged for CPT you never open.

Common questions

Is there genuinely free medical coding software?

Yes, for diagnosis and supply coding. ICD-10-CM, ICD-10-PCS, HCPCS Level II, MS-DRG weights and the ICD-10-CM Official Guidelines are all published by CMS and the NCHS as public-domain government data, so any site can offer them and no site has a licensing cost to pass on. Our lookups for all of those are free with no account. What is never free is CPT, and that is a licensing fact rather than a business decision — see below.

Why is there no free CPT lookup anywhere?

CPT codes and their descriptors are copyrighted by the American Medical Association and licensed per user, per year. Every tool that shows you CPT descriptors is paying the AMA for the right and recovering it from your subscription — that is a large part of why Codify, Find-A-Code and EncoderPro cost what they cost. We do not hold that licence and we do not show CPT content. Anyone offering you free CPT descriptors is either unlicensed or about to ask for your card.

Is free medical coding software good enough to work from?

It depends entirely on what you code. If your work is diagnosis-led — inpatient coding, HCC and risk adjustment, denials, DRG validation, anything where the question is which diagnosis code the documentation supports — a complete, current, well-organised ICD-10-CM reference genuinely is enough, and paying $659 a year for one is paying for CPT you are not using. If you code physician procedures all day, no free tool covers your main code set, and there is no version of that fact that improves.

Is there a catch — ads, a signup wall, or a code limit?

No ads and no signup wall on any lookup: no account, no email, no card, and no interstitial between you and a code. The one limit anywhere is the free claim scrubber, which checks 5 codes at a time rather than an unlimited set — and the checks themselves are the full ones, not a crippled preview. We would rather the free tool be honestly smaller than quietly worse.

Can I download medical coding software instead of using it in a browser?

Not from us, and it is worth knowing why nobody serious offers this any more. Coding reference data changes constantly — ICD-10-CM annually with April addenda, HCPCS quarterly, Medicare coverage policy continuously — and a downloaded copy is out of date the week after you install it. Coding from stale reference data is the failure mode the download is supposed to prevent. If you need the raw files, CMS publishes them free, and we list every one we use with its release date on our data sources page.

What do you charge for, then?

$390 a year buys the things a lookup cannot do on its own: unlimited claim scrubbing, Medicare coverage policy by your MAC jurisdiction, HCC and risk-adjustment factors, fee estimates, and saved history across sessions. One tier, one price, and the free lookups stay free whether or not you ever buy it.

Comparing paid options instead? We survey the market here, including where somebody else is the better buy, and every dataset we use is listed with its release date on data sources.