Are insurance reimbursement rates confidential?

Since 2022, most commercial health plans have been required to publish machine-readable files listing the in-network rates they’ve agreed to with providers. These are the insurers’ own filings, not survey estimates, not Medicare-based guesses, not crowd-sourced anecdotes: published in-network rates, direct from the source.

That means the rate a given insurer pays for, say, 90837 (a 60-minute therapy session) is now a matter of public record. So is the spread, the range between what the lowest-paid and highest-paid in-network providers earn for the same code. For most readers, that spread is the surprising part: two clinicians with the same credential, billing the same code to the same insurer, are often paid materially different amounts.

The files are real, but they’re also enormous and awkward: tens of gigabytes per insurer, keyed by internal identifiers rather than names. That’s the gap between “technically public” and “actually usable,” and it’s why most providers have never seen their own number in context.

Your full contract. The published files carry negotiated rate amounts. They don’t carry the rest of your participation agreement: the terms, the clauses, the administrative detail. Your contract as a document remains between you and the insurer.

The fact that you looked. Checking where your rate sits against the published data is not something the insurer is notified about, and SharedRates doesn’t publish or share the identity of anyone who runs a comparison. The data is already public; reviewing it is a private act of due diligence, the same as looking up any other published benchmark before a business conversation.

Patient information. This public rate data is about negotiated rates, not protected health information. Nothing in these files touches patient records, claims detail, or anything covered by HIPAA.

The practical upshot is that the information gap that used to favor the insurer in a fee conversation has narrowed. When you ask for a fee schedule review, you no longer have to argue from a feeling that your rate might be low. You can reference where it sits in the insurer’s own published data, the same files their contracting team works from.

None of this obligates you to do anything. Whether to look, and whether to act on what you find, is your call. But the question “am I even allowed to know this?” has a clear answer now: the rates were made public by federal rule, and they’re there for any provider (or any insurer) to reference.