R05.3 — Chronic cough
R05.3 is a billable, specific ICD-10-CM code for chronic cough. It is valid for submission on a claim.
Inclusion terms
Alternative wordings a physician may use in the chart for this same code.
- Persistent cough
- Refractory cough
- Unexplained cough
Risk adjustment
R05.3 does not map to an HCC and does not risk-adjust under CMS-HCC V28. That is normal — most ICD-10 codes do not. It still needs to be coded correctly; it just will not move a RAF score.
Medicare coverage
R05.3 is named in 21 Medicare coverage policies — 21 listing it as supporting medical necessity. Which of them applies to you depends on your Medicare contractor, and coverage genuinely differs by state.
- A52866Billing and Coding: Speech-Language Pathology
- A56558Billing and Coding: Allergy Testing
- A56558Billing and Coding: Allergy Testing
- A56580Billing and Coding: Computerized Axial Tomography (CT), Thorax
How R05.3 is indexed
Coders do not find codes by browsing the tabular list — they look them up in the alphabetic index, under the word the physician wrote. These are the index entries that lead here, so you can see which chart wordings map to R05.3.
- Cough›chronic
- Cough›persistent
- Cough›refractory
- Cough›unexplained
Related codes at this level
Codes that share R05. If R05.3 is not quite right, the correct code is usually one of these.
Questions about R05.3
- Is R05.3 a billable ICD-10-CM code?
- Yes. R05.3 is a billable, specific ICD-10-CM code and is valid for submission on a claim.
- Where does R05.3 sit in the tabular list?
- Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified (R00-R99), in the block Symptoms and signs involving the circulatory and respiratory systems (R00-R09).