CPT 80048 Medicare lab fee

Negotiated rates for 80048 vs Medicare Copy link

Commercial payers' negotiated rates for 80048 have medians of 70% to 100% of Medicare, depending on specialty.

Insurers must publish the rates they negotiate with in-network clinicians (the Transparency in Coverage rule). We reduce each file to medians by county and specialty and set them against Medicare's amount for the same place.

Payers publish this data, and each dataset carries its month. A negotiated rate describes the contract, not the payment, and networks and plan designs vary. We publish a benchmark only when at least 10 providers from at least 5 separately contracting groups (tax IDs) stand behind it, and no single group accounts for more than 25% of it. Browse all payer benchmarks →

Global period: what 80048's fee already covers Copy link

The global surgery concept does not apply to this code.

Check a pair of codes Copy link

Enter a second CPT or HCPCS code billed on the same date of service. We'll check the current NCCI procedure-to-procedure edit for the pair.

See every current NCCI pair for 80048 →

Based on CMS's National Correct Coding Initiative (NCCI). A few examples appear here; use the complete edit page to check a specific pair.

Modifier 59 and the X modifiers are not a universal bypass—CMS expects the most specific applicable modifier, and which one that is depends on the pair and the documented circumstances.

Check a paired code or view all 17 NCCI pairs →

Medically Unlikely Edit (MUE) limit: 2 units per patient per date of service.

Rate history by release Copy link

National Office (non-facility) amount for 80048 across quarterly releases.

How often 80048 is billed Copy link

Across Original Medicare in CY2024, 80048 ranked #65 of the 7,879 CPT codes billed to Medicare that year, by patients served or total allowed dollars. It repeats: a patient billed for it in 2024 was billed 1.7 times on average that year.

2024 Medicare fee-for-service national totals. They exclude Medicare Advantage, Medicaid and commercial volume, 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 Q4 2026 fee schedule above.

Who bills 80048 to Medicare

Observed CY2024 Medicare fee-for-service billing, by the rendering clinician's CMS specialty. Each share is that specialty's slice of all observed services for this code that year.

Setting split that year: 100% Office (non-facility) · 0% facility. CMS publishes only this facility vs non-facility split, never the exact place of service. The Office (non-facility) figure does not identify urgent care or any other specific setting.

CY2024 Medicare fee-for-service only, from the CMS Physician & Other Practitioners dataset, which suppresses rows under 11 beneficiaries. We omit specialty groups with fewer than 30 observed clinicians, so the shares can fall short of 100%. Specialty and practice-type pages linked elsewhere on this page are curated code lists, not utilization claims.

Related codes Copy link

Codes near 80048 in the pathology and laboratory services group, with their national Q4 2026 amounts at GPCI 1.000. A dash means the release publishes no payable PFS amount in that setting.

Localis groups these codes for payment research. The grouping isn't the AMA's code families.