Teleradiology cost per read 2026: prices by modality

The common belief about teleradiology cost per read is that the quoted rate is the price. It is only the starting number: minimums, surcharges, and platform fees decide what a study finally costs, and a low rate with a monthly volume minimum attached can invoice higher in a slow month than a plainer rate priced per study.

Here is the market context for reading any quote: industry-typical teleradiology cost per read in the US in 2026 runs roughly $10 to $15 per X-ray, around $28 per ultrasound, $25 to $40 per mammogram, $30 to $50 per single-region CT, $45 to $75 per single-part MRI, and up to about $99 for PET-CT. STAT interpretations typically add 20 to 50 percent on top. AstraRad prices every study as one figure per signed report, with nothing recurring billed beside it. A complete written rate card reaches you within one business day of a request.

What does a teleradiology read cost per study?

A teleradiology read costs roughly $12 to $99 per study in 2026, depending on modality. NDX Imaging, one of the few US providers publishing a rate table, lists starting prices from $12 for an X-ray, $28 for ultrasound, $32 for mammography, $40 for CT, $60 for MRI, and $99 for PET-CT on its published prices page, checked August 9, 2026.

Those are market figures published by another company, and none of them is an AstraRad price. Read each as a floor: a published starting rate generally assumes committed volume, a routine tier, and an uncomplicated study. The honest figure for any modality is a band, because almost nobody else in US teleradiology publishes a rate at all, and the wider bands used through this page are assembled from the handful of vendor rate sheets, market surveys, and buyer-reported contract terms in circulation.

Many buyers benchmark quotes against the Medicare professional component for each CPT code, published in the CMS Physician Fee Schedule. It's a reasonable floor. What it doesn't price is overnight availability, subspecialty routing, or a turnaround commitment you can enforce, and a teleradiology contract is selling all three.

Teleradiology cost by modality, across all twelve study types

AstraRad prices twelve study types, and the table below sets an industry-typical figure against each one. Every figure in it is a third party's published or reported market number, and none of them is an AstraRad price.

Five of the twelve carry no published figure anywhere in the market, and that gap is worth naming: those five are exactly the studies where subspecialty training changes the report, and exactly the ones a vendor is most likely to price by exception once you have signed. Ask any bidder for all twelve lines on one page before you compare a single number. Coverage detail by modality sits on MRI teleradiology, PET-CT and nuclear medicine reads, and X-ray and ultrasound overflow.

Read the whole table as a starting position. Minimums, priority surcharges, and platform fees land on the same invoice and can lift what you pay per study well above the number in the middle column. The bottom of each band also tends to describe a preliminary interpretation or a large volume commitment, not a final signed report from a fellowship-trained subspecialist.

How do you compare a flat fee, a per-RVU rate, and a per-report rate?

Reduce all three to one number: cost per signed study, computed on your own monthly mix. Three vendors can quote three structures that are not comparable on their face, and the arithmetic that makes them comparable takes an afternoon.

Take a 1,000-study month at one outpatient facility: 520 CR X-ray, 120 ultrasound, 90 mammography, 180 single-region CT, 70 single-part MRI, and 20 PET-CT and nuclear medicine studies. Every dollar figure below is an industry-typical assumption used to show the method, and none of them is an AstraRad price.

Vendor A quotes a flat monthly fee of $28,000 for up to 1,200 studies. Divide by the 1,000 studies actually sent and the cost per signed study is $28.00.

Vendor B quotes $38 per work RVU. Pull the work RVU for every CPT code in that mix from the CMS Physician Fee Schedule relative value files, multiply each by its monthly volume, add them, and divide by total studies. That gives a blended work RVU per study. Call it 0.62 for this plain film heavy mix. At $38, the cost per signed study is $23.56.

Vendor C quotes per signed report, applied line by line at the published market rates above: 520 X-rays at $12, 120 ultrasounds at $28, 90 mammograms at $32, 180 CTs at $40, 70 MRIs at $60, and 20 PET-CT and nuclear studies at $99. That totals $25,860, or $25.86 for each signed study.

One axis, three numbers. Now run the identical month at 800 studies in the same proportions, because the slow month is where the structures actually separate. Per-RVU and per-report both bill for work delivered, so cost per signed study holds at $23.56 and $25.86. The flat fee does not care that 200 studies never arrived: $28,000 divided by 800 is $35.00 per signed study, a 25 percent jump on a figure that already sat highest of the three.

The blended work RVU per study is the figure worth computing carefully, because it is the one that moves when your mix moves. A plain film heavy month sits well under one work RVU per study; a cross-sectional heavy month runs far above it, and a per-RVU quote reprices with it silently. Run the exercise across twelve months of your own study counts and the annual totals separate further than any single month suggests.

What moves your per-read price up or down?

Five levers move a per-read price once the base rate is set: the priority tier, whether a subspecialist reads the study, whether it lands after hours, how much volume you commit to, and what happens when a study is rerouted mid-shift. Four of the five push the number up. One pushes it down.

Stacked surcharges are where a quoted rate and an invoiced rate drift furthest apart, because they attach to exactly the volume you cannot schedule. A vendor with a 20 percent STAT multiplier, a separate after-hours fee, and a subspecialty routing charge can invoice half again the base rate on a single 2 a.m. head CT, and each of those lines is defensible in isolation. Ask for all five levers in writing, priced against the base rate, before you sign anything.

AstraRad prints the priority multiplier on the rate card itself: one published factor, applied to the base per-report rate, for STAT reads delivered under 1 hour and urgent reads under 4 hours. Routine reads, delivered under 24 hours, bill at the base rate.

Subspecialty routing is never an upgrade charge here, because it is the default: every study goes to a board-certified, fellowship-trained subspecialist in the matching discipline, so a child's abdominal CT goes to a pediatric radiologist. Which studies gain most from that match is mapped in subspecialty reads by study type. Nights, weekends, and holidays carry no separate line item, because the panel is staffed continuously on scheduled US shifts, with night reading run as a committed shift with a fixed rest interval. A 3 a.m. Sunday head CT reaches a subspecialist the same way a 2 p.m. Tuesday one does, and is priced the same.

A study escalated mid-shift is billed once, at the tier it is signed under, itemized on its own invoice line. Committed monthly volume earns a published discount ladder, applied automatically. The SLA page documents the full commitment structure and the clock behind it, measured from last-image arrival to radiologist signature; for emergency workflows specifically, see STAT CT reads.

Every study carries one printed price

AstraRad runs one model for every client: a fixed price per signed report, set by study type and complexity, printed on a written rate card. No monthly minimums. No subscriptions. No platform fees. No per-seat charge. No onboarding or integration fee. A fixed printed multiplier on STAT and urgent priority, applied automatically and visible on every invoice line. The agreement runs month to month with 30 days notice, and a complete rate card reaches you within one business day of a request. That is the entire commercial structure, and your volume can double or halve without any part of it changing.

The rate card lists all twelve study types we read separately, from CR X-ray, mammography, and ultrasound through every CT and MRI variant, including coronary CTA and cardiac MRI, to nuclear medicine gamma and PET-CT. Every reader is licensed in the state where your patients are located and signs the final report under their own name. The panel holds headroom for 25,000 additional studies a month, so a busy week on the worklist doesn't move your price. Ask for the rate card through our contact page and the complete document arrives within one business day; the pricing page sets out the model.

Six inclusions to itemize before you compare

A per-read quote is only comparable once you know what sits inside it. Ask every vendor to price these six items against the base rate:

At AstraRad all six sit inside the per-report price. One report in every 20 is independently double-read by a second subspecialist, and major discrepancies run under 0.3% of signed reports, each one reviewed at the monthly discrepancy meeting and closed with the reader who signed it. Connectivity is included as well: DICOM from your PACS or portal upload, HL7 and FHIR report delivery, no integration project, no platform fee. Where a cheap quote turns out to buy a preliminary interpretation with the final billed separately, the difference between STAT, preliminary, and final reads is the first thing to pin down. For a fuller evaluation framework, see how to choose a teleradiology company.

Slow months are where the two models separate

Slow months separate the two pricing models because a minimum bills you for volume you didn't send, while per-report pricing simply invoices fewer reports. Compare them on effective cost per read: the total invoice divided by the studies you actually sent. A contract-minimum model usually shows a lower base rate, then attaches a monthly minimum, fixed platform fees, and often a multi-year term; a per-report model has one printed price, so the effective cost equals the rate card in any month, slow or busy.

Run the arithmetic on a single slow month. An imaging center that commits to a 1,000-study monthly minimum and sends 700 studies pays for 1,000, which puts its effective price roughly 43 percent above the rate it negotiated so carefully. Under per-report pricing the same month invoices 700 studies at the rate card price, and the effective cost is the rate card price.

That gap shows up more often than buyers expect, because imaging volume never sits still: referral patterns shift, a referring group changes hands, a scanner goes down for service, a holiday week thins the schedule, and outsourced volume swings hardest of all when your own radiologists take their leave in one block. A minimum prices your good months and bills you for your quiet ones. The way to see this before you sign is to take twelve months of your own study counts, apply each vendor's full structure to every month individually, and total the year. Quotes that looked five percent apart on the base rate routinely land fifteen or twenty percent apart on the annual figure.

The same logic runs upward. An 8,000-study backlog clears in under 30 days at the same per-report rates, with no surge pricing, because the capacity comes from a panel that is already staffed. To be fair to the other model: if your volume is genuinely high, flat, and predictable, a negotiated minimum contract can beat per-report pricing on the annual total, and AstraRad is the wrong fit for a buyer whose only goal is the lowest rate on a guaranteed block of volume. Practices leaning on teleradiology for overflow coverage have the most to gain from modeling the annual total first. If you are weighing outsourced reads against a hire, the in-house vs outsourced cost comparison covers recruiting, benefits, and subspecialty coverage gaps.

Almost nobody publishes a rate list

Very few teleradiology companies publish their prices, and no central list exists for the industry. NDX Imaging is the exception cited throughout this page, and it deserves the credit: a buyer can walk into a first call already knowing the shape of the number, which is impossible almost everywhere else in the category. Most vendors price each contract individually and treat rates as confidential negotiating material, which is why the wider bands in this guide are assembled from scattered secondhand sources. The practical effect: quotes arrive with different inclusions, surcharge structures, and minimums, and comparing them means reverse-engineering three sets of fine print before you can put two numbers side by side.

A written rate card removes that step. When the per-report price for every study type and the priority multiplier sit on one page, you can line vendors up against each other and forecast spend from your own volume history. That's the standard we hold ourselves to, and you can hold every other bidder to it as well.

Judge a quote by the year it produces

Teleradiology cost per read in 2026 runs roughly $12 to $99 per study across modalities on published industry data, with a 20 to 50 percent STAT premium as the market norm. What you pay is decided after that: by minimums, by surcharges, by platform and per-facility fees, and by the distance between the volume you send and the volume the contract assumes. The rate is what you're quoted; the effective cost is what you pay.

Bring twelve months of your own study counts to every vendor conversation, normalize each quote to a single cost per signed study, get each inclusion listed in writing, and put the turnaround commitments in the contract itself. When you want a printed number to test that model against, ask us for a rate card. The rest of the buying research lives in the teleradiology resource library.