PET/CT Scan, Skull Base to Mid-Thigh
CPT 78815
Ordered to stage a newly diagnosed cancer, restage after treatment, or look for recurrence when disease could be anywhere in the trunk.
No national payment amount
Carrier-priced: no national payment amount.
Did Medicare pay separately for CPT 78815 in Q2 2025?
Not at a published national rate. CPT 78815 carries status C (carrier-priced) in the Q2 2025 release. Your Medicare Administrative Contractor prices this code case by case, usually after reviewing documentation. Treat the blank amount as unpriced, not as $0.
How often 78815 is billed
Across Original Medicare in CY2024, 78815 ranked #48 of the 7,879 CPT codes billed to Medicare that year, ranked by patients served or total allowed dollars.
2024 Medicare fee-for-service only, national totals — Medicare Advantage, Medicaid and commercial volume are excluded, so real-world use runs higher. This is a calendar-year snapshot from the CMS Physician & Other Practitioners dataset, on a different cycle from the Q2 2025 fee schedule the rates above come from.
Common questions
Why is there no payment amount for 78815?
Its status indicator is C (carrier-priced). Your Medicare Administrative Contractor prices this code case by case, usually after reviewing documentation. The blank is deliberate: the amount is either unknown or paid under another provision, so reading it as $0 would be wrong.
Why would a Medicare claim for 78815 be denied or paid less?
Each item below comes from a CMS indicator on this page — not general billing advice.
- Its status indicator is C (carrier-priced) — Your Medicare Administrative Contractor prices this code case by case, usually after reviewing documentation. See status indicators
- 78815 splits into a professional component (modifier 26) and a technical component (modifier TC) — a claim for only one part needs that modifier to price correctly. See billing policy
- Bilateral surgery: no bilateral adjustment. See billing policy
- Assistant at surgery: restricted without documentation. See billing policy
- Co-surgeons: not permitted. See billing policy
- Team surgery: not permitted. See billing policy
Payer-specific coverage and documentation rules live outside these files, so a claim that clears every check here can still be denied on other grounds.
When does this rate change?
CMS publishes a fee schedule release every quarter (January, April, July, October), and each is versioned here. See what changed each release, or get an email when a new release moves rates.
Sources: CMS Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Relative Value Files.
Saw this code on your bill?
What is a 78815 visit in patient-friendly terms?
In plain terms: The standard oncology PET/CT. A radioactive sugar tracer is injected, the patient rests while it distributes, and a combined scanner records both metabolic activity and a matching CT for anatomic localization and attenuation correction. The imaged field runs from the base of the skull down to the mid-thigh, which captures the neck, chest, abdomen, and pelvis where most cancers spread. That coverage is what separates this code from its neighbours: one sibling covers a single limited region, the other extends the scan to a true head-to-toe survey. Think of a person newly diagnosed with lymphoma or lung cancer who fasts, gets an injection, waits quietly for about an hour, then slides through a scanner for roughly half an hour. The result tells the oncology team whether the disease has spread beyond where it started - the single biggest driver of the treatment plan. You'll typically see CPT 78815 on a bill or explanation of benefits (EOB) when a clinician performs or bills for this service.
How this amount is computed
amount = (work RVU × work GPCI + PE RVU × PE GPCI + MP RVU × MP GPCI) × conversion factor. National amounts use GPCI = 1.000. To price an RVU figure of your own, use the RVU-to-dollars converter.
| Component | RVU |
|---|---|
| Work RVU | blank |
| Practice expense RVU (non-facility) | blank |
| Practice expense RVU (facility) | blank |
| Malpractice RVU | blank |
Every rate combines three parts: work (the clinician’s time, skill and effort), practice expense (office overhead — higher when the service is done in a doctor’s own office), and malpractice (the share of liability-insurance cost). A blank means CMS publishes no national number for that part. Read it as unknown, and never as zero.
Billing policy
What 78815's billing-policy indicators mean. These show for every code, priced or not: a restriction like "bilateral not allowed" still matters on a carrier-priced code.
| Policy | Value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Bilateral surgery | 0 | No bilateral adjustment. The 150% bilateral payment adjustment does not apply to this procedure. |
| Assistant at surgery | 0 | Restricted without documentation. Payment for an assistant at surgery is restricted for this procedure unless supporting documentation establishes medical necessity. |
| Co-surgeons | 0 | Not permitted. Medicare does not recognize co-surgeons (modifier 62) for this procedure. |
| Team surgery | 0 | Not permitted. Medicare does not recognize a surgical team (modifier 66) for this procedure. |
| Multiple procedures | 0 | No reduction. No payment reduction applies when this procedure is billed with other procedures on the same date — each is treated as unrelated. |
| Professional/technical split | 1 | Splits into professional and technical. This procedure splits into a professional component (modifier 26) and a technical component (modifier TC), each separately payable. |
Rate history by release
National non-facility amount for 78815 across quarterly releases.
| Release | Status | Non-facility | Facility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q3 2026 Jun 30, 2026 – present | C | — | — |
| Q2 2026 Mar 10, 2026 – Jun 29, 2026 | C | — | — |
| Q1 2026 Dec 29, 2025 – Mar 9, 2026 | C | — | — |
| Q4 2025 Sep 11, 2025 – Dec 28, 2025 | C | — | — |
| Q3 2025 Jun 5, 2025 – Sep 10, 2025 | C | — | — |
| Q2 2025 Jun 5, 2025 – Jun 4, 2025 | C | — | — |
| Q1 2025 Dec 23, 2024 – Jun 4, 2025 | C | — | — |
Did this answer your question about CPT 78815?
We're building this out in the open. Tell us what you were actually trying to work out and we'll either answer you directly or build the page that does.
Source & method
This is computed from CMS's Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Q2 2025 release (schedule pfs, effective April 2025). National amounts apply a GPCI of 1.000 and leave sequestration off. The status indicator decides payability, never the RVU values, so a blank RVU stays blank. Releases are immutable: a rate retrieved for a past quarter always reflects that release. Commercial and cash-pay figures anywhere on this page are arithmetic on the Medicare amount, using commonly cited reimbursement ranges. They're illustrative, and no nationwide claims database stands behind them.
Description written from primary sources: CMS Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Relative Value Files. Not derived from AMA CPT descriptor text.
Conversion factor $32.3465 read from the same file, row 11, column 25.
Use the (i) buttons next to each amount above for the exact row, columns, and math.
Cite this rate
This link keeps pointing at the Q2 2025 figures, even after a newer release lands.
CPT 78815 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule rate (Q2 2025). Localis. https://localishealth.com/cpt/78815/2025/B