How to look up a surgeon's payments from drug and device companies
Drug and medical device companies must report what they pay physicians and other clinicians, and CMS publishes every record free. For program year 2025 the file holds 16,131,856 general payment records totalling $3,923,550,963, naming 1,020,608 individual clinicians by NPI — and 91.5% of those records are food and beverage.
The short version: confirm the clinician's ten-digit NPI, search the name on CMS's Open Payments site, and read the payments by their nature. A meal is not a consulting contract, and a payment is a disclosure, not an accusation. What matters is the pattern: which companies, for what, and whether they make the devices or drugs this clinician would use on you.
Doing it yourself, free
- Confirm who you mean. Search the NPI Registry for the surgeon's name and state, and note the ten-digit NPI and specialty. Two clinicians can share a name; they cannot share an NPI.
- Search the clinician on CMS's Open Payments site. Results are grouped by program year, the calendar year the payments were made.
- Read the nature of each payment. Food and beverage, travel and lodging, education, consulting fees, speaking compensation, royalties and ownership are reported separately, and they mean very different things.
- Look at who paid. A company that makes the implant or device your surgery would use is a more relevant payer than one that does not.
- Put the total in context. Our free lookup shows the median for the same specialty in the same state, so a dollar figure is not read in a vacuum.
- Ask the surgeon. A clinician who consults for a device maker can explain why they recommend that device; the question is ordinary, and the answer is informative.
General payments by program year
| Program year | Records | Total | Clinicians with an NPI | Food and beverage, share of records | Food and beverage, share of dollars | Date on the file we loaded |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 15,498,687 | $3,424,344,413 | 984,069 | 91.5% | 12.1% | 30 Jun 2026 |
| 2025 | 16,131,856 | $3,923,550,963 | 1,020,608 | 91.5% | 11.3% | 30 Jun 2026 |
General payments only; research payments and ownership interests are separate files. The calendar CMS publishes: payments are collected for a calendar year, reported by the companies the following February to March, open for clinicians to review and dispute from 1 April to 15 May, and published by 30 June (CMS, read 17 Sep 2026).
What Open Payments can't tell you
- A payment is a disclosure, not wrongdoing. Companies must report; clinicians do not choose whether to appear.
- It is not about you. Nothing in the file says a payment influenced any recommendation or any patient's care.
- It runs behind. A program year is published about eighteen months after it begins, so the newest payments are not in it yet.
- Records are attributed by the reporting company. A clinician can dispute a record; a disputed record stays in the file with its dispute status.
The Surgeon Record puts a surgeon's industry payments beside their Medicare volume for the same procedures and a dated check of their licence.
Every figure on this page, and where it came from
Every number above is recomputed from the loaded records each time this page is built. Last rebuilt 2026-09-28.
| Dataset | Dataset ID | Captured |
|---|---|---|
| Open Payments - General Payment Data (program years 2024-2025) | e6b17c6a-2534-4207-a4a1-6746a14911ff | 2026-09-14 |
CMS Open Payments, loaded in full and reconciled against the publisher's own row count.
Questions people ask
Is it free to look up what companies paid a doctor?
Yes. CMS publishes the data free at openpaymentsdata.cms.gov, and our free lookup reads the same files.
Who has to report payments to Open Payments?
Drug and medical device companies report the payments they make to covered recipients: physicians, other practitioners such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners, and teaching hospitals. The obligation is on the company.
When is Open Payments data published?
CMS publishes each program year by 30 June of the following year, after a review and dispute period for clinicians from 1 April to 15 May.
Are most industry payments to doctors large?
Most records are small. In program year 2025, 91.5% of the 16,131,856 general payment records were food and beverage, but they made up 11.3% of the $3,923,550,963 paid. The rest of the money is in the other categories — consulting, speaking, travel and more — which is why a clinician's total needs reading by category.