RVU calculator
Medicare pays ((work RVU × work GPCI) + (PE RVU × PE GPCI) + (MP RVU × MP GPCI)) × conversion factor. Enter the three relative values, pick your locality, and this does the rest — including the two separate CY2026 conversion factors that most calculators still get wrong.
No account, no card, no email. All 109 Medicare localities.
Enter the relative values above. They are in the CMS Physician Fee Schedule Relative Value File, or on any fee schedule your payer publishes.
Have the code but not the RVUs? The workspace looks them up
What the three RVUs are
Work RVU
The practitioner's time, skill, effort and risk. It is the component people mean when they say 'RVUs' in a compensation conversation, and it is the only one that does not vary with where the service is performed.
Practice expense RVU
Overhead: staff, rent, equipment, supplies. Published in two columns — facility and non-facility — because in a hospital the facility is separately paid for that overhead and the practitioner is not.
Malpractice RVU
Professional liability insurance cost. Much the smallest of the three, and the one most often left out of a back-of-envelope estimate, which is why the estimate comes out low.
The GPCIs adjust each component for local cost, and the gap is not small: against rural Alabama, Manhattan pays about 22% more on a work-heavy office visit and about 35% more on a practice-expense-heavy procedure. The spread depends on the code, because the three indices move independently — which is exactly why a “national” RVU estimate is a figure that happens to be right only where all three sit at 1.000, and that is true of almost nowhere.
What this number is not
It is an estimate of the Medicare allowed amount. It is not a payment guarantee, not a coverage determination, and not advice about what to bill — and it is your certification on the claim, not ours.
- This is an estimate of the Medicare allowed amount, not a guarantee of payment. Only your MAC's remittance advice tells you what was actually paid.
- It is not a coverage determination. A code can be perfectly priced and still be denied as not medically necessary, or denied under an LCD/NCD.
- Sequestration is not applied. Medicare's payment is reduced by 2% under sequestration, on top of everything below.
- Quality adjustments are not applied. MIPS/value-based payment modifiers adjust a practitioner's payment by up to several percent, up or down, and are specific to that practitioner.
- Multi-line claim adjustments are not applied: multiple-procedure reduction (MPPR), bilateral, assistant-at-surgery, co-surgeon and team-surgeon modifiers all change the amount and depend on the OTHER lines of the claim, which a single-code estimate cannot see.
- It assumes the annual Part B deductible has already been met. Until it is, the beneficiary owes the full allowed amount, not 20%.
- Non-participating providers and those accepting assignment are paid differently; this is the participating-provider allowed amount.
- Anesthesia is not priced here. It is paid on base units plus time against a separate anesthesia conversion factor.
- Many HCPCS Level II codes are not paid from this fee schedule at all -- drugs are paid on ASP, durable equipment on the DMEPOS fee schedule, lab on the clinical lab fee schedule. Those codes carry a status indicator that says so, and this calculator refuses them rather than pricing them.
Common questions
- How do you calculate RVU payment?
- Multiply each of the three relative value units by the matching geographic practice cost index for your locality, add them together, and multiply by the conversion factor. In full: payment = ((work RVU × work GPCI) + (PE RVU × PE GPCI) + (MP RVU × MP GPCI)) × conversion factor. The CY2026 conversion factor is $33.4009, or $33.5675 if the practitioner is a Qualifying APM Participant.
- What is the 2026 Medicare conversion factor?
- There are two. CY2026 is the first year Medicare publishes a separate conversion factor for Qualifying APM Participants ($33.5675) and for everyone else ($33.4009). Any calculator written before 2026 assumes a single number and is therefore quietly wrong for one of the two populations. Both figures are read from the CONV FACTOR column CMS stamps on every row of its RVU files, not transcribed from a press release.
- Why do I have to type the RVUs in myself?
- Because the alternative would be worse. Looking an RVU up by code means holding the CPT code set, which is copyrighted by the American Medical Association and requires a licence we do not hold. A calculator that refused 99213 — the most likely thing anyone types — would be useless. Taking the relative values as input engages no licence at all, and as a side effect the tool works for any code: CPT, HCPCS Level II, a proposed-rule value, or a commercial fee schedule that is not Medicare's.
- Where do I find the RVU values for a code?
- In the CMS Physician Fee Schedule Relative Value File, published annually with quarterly corrections and free to download from cms.gov. Each row carries the work RVU, two practice-expense RVUs (facility and non-facility), and the malpractice RVU. Your own payer's fee schedule may publish them too. If you would rather not look them up, the paid workspace does it for you.
- What is the difference between facility and non-facility RVUs?
- The practice-expense RVU differs by where the service happens. In a facility the hospital is separately paid for the room, staff and equipment, so the practitioner's practice-expense RVU is lower — often much lower. The same service can pay a third less in a hospital than in an office. Pick the setting that matches the place of service on the claim, then enter the practice-expense value from that column.
- Is this RVU calculator free?
- Yes, with no account, no card and no email. The GPCI table for all 109 Medicare localities and both conversion factors are public-domain CMS data. What the paid workspace adds is the lookup: enter a code and it fills in the relative values, applies the fee-schedule status indicator, and refuses codes that are bundled or not separately payable.
GPCI and conversion-factor data from the CMS Physician Fee Schedule Relative Value File, public domain. Every dataset we load, and when.