What the CGHS rate list actually is — and why it is not your treatment quote

Checked 11 September 2026. Every rate quoted on this page is copied from the government's own order and linked below, so you can look up the same line yourself. This page explains money and paperwork. It is not medical advice.

The short version

The Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS) publishes a rate list of what it will pay Indian government employees, pensioners and their dependants for treatment at hospitals it has contracted with. The current list was notified on 3 October 2025 and took effect 13 October 2025 (source, full text, read 11 September 2026; the same order is separately confirmed, by file number and date, on CGHS's own domain in a follow-up circular — see sources above).

It is a real, dated, government-published number. It is also not a quote for an international private patient. Read the rest of this page before you use any figure from it to judge whether a hospital's quote to you is fair.

Who CGHS rates are actually for

The order itself says the rates apply to:

"a) All healthcare services availed at CGHS-empanelled Healthcare Organisations (HCOs) b) Medical Reimbursement Claims of individuals (in r/o Serving, Pensioners and other eligible categories of CGHS beneficiaries). c) CGHS, cashless (credit) treatment shall be extended to Central Government pensioners and other specified categories of beneficiaries as per extant rules."

— CGHS Office Memorandum, 3 October 2025, §1 (source, read 11 September 2026)

Annexure VII of the same order lists exactly who qualifies for cashless treatment at these rates: CGHS pensioners, Members of Parliament, Freedom Fighters, serving central government employees, and their dependants — each holding a specific coloured CGHS card. A foreign patient paying privately is not on that list, in any category, anywhere in the order. The scheme was not built with you in mind, and its rate is not an offer made to you.

What a "CGHS package rate" actually buys

This is the useful part, and it is the part most price pages skip. The order defines exactly what its rate includes:

"The CGHS Package Rate shall be construed as an all-inclusive lump sum cost, applicable from the time of admission to the time of discharge... The package rate includes but is not limited to the following: Accommodation charges including patient's diet; Admission charges; Anaesthesia charges; Cost of medicines and consumables/disposables; Cost of surgical disposables and all sundries used during hospitalization; Doctor/consultant visit charges; Dressing charges; ICU/ICCU charges; Injection charges; Monitoring charges; Nursing care charges; O2 charges, Ventilator charges as routinely required; Operation charges; Operation theatre charges; Physiotherapy charges etc.; Procedural charges/surgeon's fee; Registration charges; Related routine and essential investigations during the admission of patient; Transfusion charges and Blood processing charges; Equipment Charges including flowtron, Infusion pump, syringe pump etc."

— CGHS Office Memorandum, Annexure II §1 (source, read 11 September 2026)

That is a genuinely useful checklist — not because it is your price, but because it tells you exactly what a comparable "package" should contain. When a private facilitator quotes you a "package price," this is the list to hold it against: does it include anaesthesia, ICU, nursing, disposables and routine investigations, the way the government's own definition does — or are some of those billed separately later?

The same Annexure also sets limits the government imposes on its own scheme, which are worth knowing even though they will not bind your private bill:

• Package duration is capped: up to 12 days of admission for specialised (super-speciality) treatment, 7 days for other major surgery, 3 days for laparoscopic surgery/angioplasty/normal delivery, 1 day for day-care or minor procedures. Treatment beyond that window is billed separately under the government's own rules.
• Implants (lenses, stents, meshes, valves) are billed in addition to the package, at a separate CGHS ceiling rate or actual invoice, whichever is lower.
• For chemotherapy, the package covers procedural charges only. Room rent, investigations and the anti-cancer medicines themselves are billed separately, on top of the procedural package (source, Annexure II §3, read 11 September 2026). If even the government's own scheme itemises chemotherapy this way, ask any hospital quoting you an "all-inclusive cancer treatment package" exactly what "all-inclusive" is doing in that sentence.
• For cancer surgery specifically, the order states that "existing CGHS rules and rates continue" — the 2025 revision changed chemotherapy, investigation and radiotherapy rates, but not the cancer surgery rates themselves (source, §2(f), read 11 September 2026). We are not publishing a cancer-surgery figure from this order for that reason — it is not in the part that was revised, and we have not separately verified the older rate it points to.

That checklist is a government definition of what belongs in a package — not a description of what any private hospital actually hands you. For what should and shouldn't appear as a separate line item on your quote, in a real international-patient quotation, see our line-by-line breakdown.

The differential that explains part of why quotes vary

The order builds three real adjustments into every rate, and they are useful even outside CGHS because they name the actual variables a private quote also depends on:

"a) Non-NABH and Non-NABL HCOs: 15% lower than NABH/NABL accredited HCOs... b) Rates for super speciality hospitals shall be 15% higher than those applicable to NABH-accredited hospitals for the corresponding Super specialities within the same city category. c) HCO located in Y (Tier II) cities and Z (Tier III) cities rates shall be 10% and 20% respectively lower than those located in X (Tier I) Cities."

— CGHS Office Memorandum, §2 (source, read 11 September 2026)

The eight X (Tier I) cities the order names are: Hyderabad, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai and Kolkata (all "Urban Agglomeration") (source, Annexure I, read 11 September 2026). Accreditation status, hospital tier (super-speciality or not) and city all move the government's own number by 10–15% each. A private quote can move by far more than that for the same reasons, plus others the government scheme doesn't have to price at all — see the next section.

A worked example, so this is concrete

We are using this example only to show how one government-published number compares with what is currently on the open market — not as advice on whether, where, or how to have a kidney transplant. Eligibility rules for a foreign national to receive a kidney transplant in India are a separate, legally significant question this page does not cover; a hospital or the relevant authorisation committee is who can answer that, not this page.

The order's line for "Kidney Transplantation (related)" — code NU096, Tier I (X) city, NABH-accredited hospital, semi-private ward — is:

₹3,74,000 (source, Annexure I, code NU096, read 11 September 2026)

At the non-NABH rate the same line is ₹3,17,900; at the super-speciality rate, ₹4,30,100. In Tier II cities the NABH rate drops to ₹3,36,600, and in Tier III to ₹2,99,200 (same source, same code, read across the three city tables). A separate line, NU097, covers "Kidney Transplantation (Spousal/unrelated) Including immunosuppressant therapy" at a higher rate — the "related" line above does not state that immunosuppressant therapy is included, so treat these as two different things, not interchangeable numbers.

We are not converting this to US dollars, because we could not fetch today's exchange rate from a primary source in time to publish it with the same discipline as the rest of this page. As a rough bound only: at any exchange rate between ₹80 and ₹100 per US dollar, ₹3,74,000 is between roughly $3,740 and $4,675. Convert it yourself at today's rate before comparing it to anything quoted to you in dollars.

Now compare that with what is currently published on the open market for the same operation. We checked three unrelated commercial sites the same day as this page — none of them CGHS, none of them serving a government scheme patient — and found a spread from $5,500 to $24,000, more than four times, with only one of the three naming even a methodology, let alone a specific hospital or invoice. The full three-way comparison, source by source, is on why every website gives you a different price for treatment in India — we are not repeating the table here to avoid publishing it twice.

We are not publishing a fourth number to add to that pile. The point of this page is that the only figure above with a named government author, a file number and a dated order behind it is the CGHS one — and that figure is not for you either.

What the current rate list does not contain — and why that matters if you're comparing fertility costs

If you searched for this page because you are looking for a government reference figure for IVF or fertility treatment, we checked, and we want to tell you plainly what we found rather than stretch a number to fit.

The current CGHS rate list (Annexure I, Obstetrics & Gynaecology codes OG002–OG005) contains lines for "Pregnancy/RA/SLE/IVF Conception/Severe Anaemia" — but reading the full line, these are rates for delivering a high-risk pregnancy that resulted from IVF conception (normal or caesarean delivery of a high-risk pregnancy), not a rate for the IVF procedure itself (source, Annexure I, codes OG003 and OG005, read 11 September 2026). We found no CGHS package rate for the IVF/assisted-reproduction procedure itself in this order.

We also found references, on non-government pages, to an older CGHS circular from 2011 that reportedly capped IVF reimbursement at a fixed amount per cycle for a narrow category of beneficiaries. We could not locate that order on a government domain ourselves, it would be fourteen years old if genuine, and it predates the October 2025 rate revision by well over a decade. We are not publishing a figure from it. If you are looking for a government reference point for fertility treatment cost in India, the honest answer today is: we could not find a current one.

How to look up a rate yourself

CGHS also runs a public rate-lookup page at cghs.mohfw.gov.in/AHIMSG5/hissso/cghsRateListLogin with selectors for city tier, accreditation status and ward type. It is built as a web application; when we loaded it directly on 11 September 2026 we received the page shell but could not confirm from our end whether it returns results without a beneficiary login. Try it yourself, and if it works without logging in, you can look up the code for a specific procedure (each line carries a short alphanumeric code, like NU096 above) directly.

Failing that, the full order — all 331 pages, all three city tiers, all listed procedure and investigation codes — is the PDF cited at the top of this page. It is long, and it is not designed for a patient to read cover to cover. Searching it (Ctrl+F / Cmd+F) for a keyword from your diagnosis is the fastest way to find the relevant code, if a matching one exists at all — as the fertility section above shows, sometimes it doesn't.

What to do with this

1. Do not quote a CGHS rate to a hospital as if it were the price you expect to pay. It is a different scheme, for a different patient, with different rules about what a hospital can and can't bill for outside it.
2. Do use the government's own package definition as a checklist. Ask whether the quote you were given includes everything Annexure II lists — anaesthesia, ICU, nursing, disposables, routine investigations — or whether some of those come as extras once you're admitted.
3. Ask what happens if you stay longer than planned. The government caps its own package duration and bills anything beyond it separately. Ask your hospital, in writing, what their equivalent rule is.
4. If a rate matters to your decision, ask for it in writing, from the hospital, with a date on it — not from a search result, and not from this page. This page shows you what one real, dated government number looks like, precisely so you can recognise the difference when a private quote doesn't look like one.

This page describes money and paperwork only. It is not medical advice, and it does not recommend any hospital, doctor, or treatment. Rates above are quoted verbatim from a Government of India order and are current as of the order's effective date; CGHS revises rates periodically and this page will go stale — check the date on this page against the date on the source before relying on either.

This is general information about process and paperwork, not medical advice. Infirmy does not diagnose, recommend a treatment, or tell anyone what care to seek.