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If you have already searched this question, you have probably found numbers between $5,000 and $80,000 and no way to tell which one applies to you. Those are self-pay list prices, and they are the figures fewest people actually pay. This page uses the rates Medicare and Medicaid publish, prices each level of care in its own unit, and shows what you can expect to owe based on how you are covered.
Key Points
- Medicare pays $277.29 a week for methadone treatment including counseling, therapy and testing.
- A day of hospital-based intensive outpatient or day treatment is priced around $322 to $422.
- Medicare charges no copay at all for opioid treatment programs, only the $283 yearly deductible.
- Marketplace and job-based plans cap everything you pay in 2026 at $10,600, or $3,500 with subsidies.
- Medicaid cost sharing is capped by federal rule at 5% of your household income.
- If you are paying cash, you are entitled to a written price estimate before you agree to care.
In This Article:
- How much does rehab cost?
- What each level of care costs
- What you’ll pay, by how you’re covered
- Why the cost figures you find online are so far apart
- How we calculated these figures
- What to do with this number
- Frequently asked questions
How much does rehab cost?
Medicare pays $277.29 per week for a full bundle of methadone treatment and $296.57 for oral buprenorphine, each covering the medication, counseling, individual and group therapy and toxicology testing. A day of hospital-based intensive outpatient or partial hospitalization care is priced at $321.83 to $421.67. Most people pay none of these figures directly, because what lands on your bill depends on your coverage.
“The cost of rehab” is really three different numbers, and nearly every page you will find collapses them into one.
A facility’s list price is what it quotes someone paying cash. Nothing regulates it, it varies enormously between programs delivering the same clinical service, and it is where the frightening figures come from. The allowed amount is what a payer actually pays. Medicare and state Medicaid programs publish theirs, so for a large share of treatment there is a real price on public record. Your share is what you are billed, and it is usually the smallest of the three. For some readers it is zero.
The rest of this page works through all three, starting with what payers pay.
What each level of care costs
Cost tracks clinical intensity, and each level of care is priced in a different unit. Residential care and withdrawal management are priced per day, day treatment and intensive outpatient per day of attendance, and medication treatment for opioid use disorder in a weekly bundle. Comparing a per-day rate against a 90-day total is what makes published cost figures look so inconsistent.
The table prices each level in its own unit and gives a typical length so you can build the episode total yourself. Rates are the published CY2026 Medicare amounts where Medicare sets one.
| Level of care | Priced by | Typical length | Published payer rate, 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Withdrawal management (detox) | Day | 3 to 7 days | No published national rate. Your state Medicaid program sets it |
| Residential or inpatient | Day | 30 to 90 days | No published national rate. Your state Medicaid program sets it, and federal facility-size rules affect whether it can be billed at all |
| Partial hospitalization (day treatment) | Day of attendance, minimum 20 hours a week | 2 to 4 weeks | $321.83 at three services a day, $421.67 at four or more |
| Intensive outpatient (IOP) | Day of attendance, minimum 9 hours a week | 8 to 12 weeks | $321.83 at three services a day, $421.67 at four or more |
| IOP at a community mental health center | Day of attendance | 8 to 12 weeks | 40% of the hospital rate, about $129 to $169 |
| IOP at an opioid treatment program | Week, minimum 9 services over 7 days | Ongoing | $826.32 |
| Methadone treatment, full bundle | Week | Ongoing | $277.29 |
| Buprenorphine, oral, full bundle | Week | Ongoing | $296.57 |
| Buprenorphine, monthly injection | Month | Ongoing | $2,063.77 |
| Naltrexone, full bundle | Week | Ongoing | $1,760.73 |
| Take-home naloxone, two-pack nasal | Per supply | As needed | $127.98 |
Rates are national and unadjusted for local wage differences. Sources and derivation are in how we calculated these figures.
There is no self-pay column in that table on purpose. Advertised cash prices are marketing rather than data, they are not published anywhere consistently, and an industry-wide average would not tell you what any one program will charge you. If you are paying cash, there is something better available to you than a range. Federal law gives an uninsured or self-pay patient the right to a written good faith estimate of expected charges before agreeing to care, and a dispute process if the final bill comes in substantially higher. Our guide to covering what insurance does not pay explains how to ask for one and what to do with it.
Three things in the table deserve attention.
The weekly bundle for opioid use disorder is the most important number on this page. Medicare pays a single flat amount that covers dispensing the medication, individual and group therapy, substance use counseling and toxicology testing for the week. For 2026 that is $277.29 for methadone and $296.57 for oral buprenorphine. The medication itself is a small part of it: of the methadone bundle, $44.41 is the drug and $232.88 is the care wrapped around it. A full year of the treatment with the strongest evidence base for opioid use disorder comes to roughly $14,400 at Medicare’s own price, and for many people the share that reaches their bill is nothing at all.
Day treatment and intensive outpatient are not priced identically, even though nearly every cost page online gives them the same range. Medicare sets separate rates for each, split into two tiers by how many services a program delivers in a day. Where you receive care changes the price too. Intensive outpatient is payable in hospital outpatient departments, community mental health centers, federally qualified health centers (FQHCs, which are federally funded community clinics), rural health clinics and opioid treatment programs. Community mental health centers are paid 40 percent of the hospital rate, which puts a day of the same clinical service closer to $129 to $169.
Where a program sits matters more than what it is called. Two intensive outpatient programs delivering the same nine hours a week can be priced three times apart depending on whether the provider bills as a hospital outpatient department or a community mental health center.
For what each of these levels of care actually involves, see our guide to types of addiction treatment.
What you’ll pay, by how you’re covered
Your out-of-pocket cost is set by your coverage, not by the price a facility quotes. Federal rules cap Medicaid cost sharing at 5 percent of household income and require providers to accept the Medicaid payment as payment in full. Marketplace and job-based plans cap your 2026 total at $10,600 for an individual, and cost-sharing reductions can lower that to $3,500.
This section covers what you end up owing. Getting your coverage to pay is a separate job, and each path links to the page that walks it.
| How you’re covered | What sets your share | Typical out-of-pocket | Yearly ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|
| Medicaid | State cost-sharing rules, kept nominal by federal rule | $0 to a small copay per service | 5% of household income |
| Medicare, inpatient | Part A deductible per benefit period | $1,736 per benefit period | None |
| Medicare, outpatient | Part B deductible, then 20% coinsurance | $283, then 20% | None |
| Medicare, opioid treatment program | Part B deductible only, no copay | $283 for the year | None |
| Marketplace or job-based plan | Deductible, then coinsurance, to the cap | Varies to the cap | $10,600 individual, $21,200 family |
| Marketplace Silver with subsidies | Same, with a lowered cap | Varies to the cap | $3,500 at 100 to 200% FPL, $8,450 at 201 to 250% |
| TRICARE or VA | Plan tier and beneficiary category, or direct VA care | Cost shares by tier, with an annual catastrophic cap | See our TRICARE guide |
| No coverage | Program funding and your income | $0 at publicly funded and free programs | Not applicable |
With Medicaid
Medicaid is the largest payer of substance use disorder treatment in the country, and federal rules keep what you pay small. Cost sharing for everyone in your household is capped at 5 percent of family income, calculated monthly or quarterly. No premiums can be charged at or below the federal poverty level, and many states charge nothing at all at that income. Inpatient copays are limited to $75. Children, and American Indian and Alaska Native people receiving care through an Indian health care provider, are exempt from cost sharing entirely.
One protection is worth knowing about and almost never mentioned: a provider that participates in Medicaid must accept the Medicaid payment plus any required copay as payment in full. They cannot bill you the difference between their list price and what Medicaid paid.
What varies by state is not what you pay but which levels of care your state covers, particularly residential treatment. Our guide to Medicaid coverage for rehab explains why.
With Medicare
Medicare has no out-of-pocket maximum, so your share depends on which part pays. Inpatient hospital care costs $1,736 per benefit period in 2026, and a benefit period restarts after 60 consecutive days out of inpatient care. Outpatient services carry a $283 annual deductible and then 20 percent coinsurance. If coverage stops before treatment does, when Medicare runs out for rehab covers the limits and what follows them.
Opioid treatment programs are the exception, and a significant one. Medicare charges no copay for opioid treatment program services. Once you have met the $283 Part B deductible for the year, a full year of medication treatment costs you nothing further, against roughly $14,400 that Medicare pays the program. Our guide to Medicare coverage for rehab covers what is and is not included.
With a marketplace or job-based plan
Your plan has a maximum annual limitation on cost sharing. Once you reach it you owe nothing further for covered essential health benefits for the rest of the plan year. For plan years beginning in 2026 that ceiling is $10,600 for an individual and $21,200 for a family.
Most cost pages still carry the wrong figure here, because the Department of Health and Human Services first announced 2026 limits of $10,150 and $20,300, then replaced them under a revised calculation method.
If you buy a Silver marketplace plan and your household income is between 100 and 200 percent of the federal poverty level, cost-sharing reductions bring your yearly cap down to $3,500. Between 201 and 250 percent it lands at $8,450. That is your ceiling for all covered care in the year, not for one treatment episode. Our guide to making your plan pay covers how to get there.
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With TRICARE or VA benefits
TRICARE is health insurance for active duty service members, retirees and their families. VA health care is delivered directly by the VA to enrolled veterans. They are separate systems with different costs, and some people are eligible for both. TRICARE cost shares are set by plan tier and beneficiary category and are subject to an annual catastrophic cap, which makes it one of the few payers where the numbers are standardized nationally rather than varying by state or plan. Our guide to TRICARE and VA coverage for treatment has the figures by category.
With no coverage
Being uninsured does not mean paying list price. Publicly funded programs and federally funded community clinics are built on the opposite assumption, setting charges by income rather than by service, and a health center receiving federal funding cannot deny you care because you are unable to pay. At many of them the answer is zero. A large number of uninsured people also qualify for Medicaid without knowing it.
Two pages take this further. Getting treatment without insurance is the order of operations, and free rehab explains how no-cost care is funded and who it prioritizes.
If a program answers a cost question with a financing application
Ask for the itemized self-pay price in writing and whether they offer a sliding scale, before you sign anything. If you are uninsured or paying cash, you can also ask for a good faith estimate, which is a written estimate of expected charges you are entitled to receive before care begins.
Why the cost figures you find online are so far apart
Published rehab cost figures share three problems. Many trace back to secondary sources rather than payer data, several compare prices measured in different units, and at least one prominent set was produced by averaging a low guess and a high guess. Once you know the pattern the inconsistencies stop being mysterious.
Provenance. One set of ranges circulates widely across treatment websites: $250 to $800 for 30 days of detox, $1,400 to $10,000 for three months of outpatient care, $5,000 to $80,000 for residential treatment. Where it is cited at all, the trail runs to secondary sources from 2021, not to any payer or facility data. Earlier versions of this page carried those same figures, which is why our outpatient, day treatment and intensive outpatient numbers were once identical to each other. One range had been copied into three slots.
Units. A page offering “$5,000 to $80,000” for residential care alongside “$1,400 to $10,000 for three months” of outpatient care has given you two numbers that cannot be compared, because only one states a time period. A sixteenfold range with no unit attached narrows nothing.
Method. One of the more data-forward cost pages in this category states openly that its state figures were produced by averaging the cheapest and the most expensive cost of treatment. Averaging two ends of an unsourced range does not produce an average price. It produces the midpoint of a guess.
The page currently holding the top position for this question avoids the problem by publishing no dollar figures at all. Its section headed “Treatment Options and Estimated Costs” contains none.
How we calculated these figures
Every figure here comes from a published payer schedule or a federal survey, and each is labelled so you know which. We do not average two ends of a range and call it an average, and we do not publish a figure we cannot trace to a primary source.
Order of preference. Federal published rates come first, because they are exact, dated and public. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services publishes annual payment rates for opioid treatment programs by billing code, and per diem rates for partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient care in the Outpatient Prospective Payment System final rule. The 2026 figures on this page come from the CY2026 final rule, effective 1 January 2026. Where Medicare sets no rate, which is the case for most residential treatment and withdrawal management, we say so rather than substituting an estimate. For how services are distributed and paid for nationally we use SAMHSA’s National Substance Use and Mental Health Services Survey.
What we do not do. We do not publish advertised self-pay prices as though they were cost data, and we do not publish a dollar estimate for the cost of treatment in a specific city. Local price levels matter to people paying out of pocket, and our county pages rate that separately using Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities, but the free and low-cost routes on every page do not move with local prices. Our explainer on how the Free Resource Score works covers that rating.
Where this falls short. Published rates are national and unadjusted for local wage differences, so your area’s rate will differ. Commercially negotiated rates are not reliably public, so the private-insurance figures reflect plan design rather than facility pricing. State Medicaid rates vary, which is why the residential and withdrawal management rows name your state program rather than a number. And what a payer pays is not always what a program will accept from someone paying cash.
How we research and vet resources covers the rest of our editorial process.
What to do with this number
The only cost figure that matters is the one attached to your coverage, so the next step is working out which payment path you are on. It takes about fifteen minutes and it changes every other number on this page.
Knowing that residential care lists in the tens of thousands is not useful by itself. Knowing that you qualify for Medicaid, or that your plan caps your year at $10,600, or that the community clinic ten minutes away sets its charges by income, is what turns a price into a decision.
- Work out which payment path applies to you – the fifteen-minute version.
- Closing the gap – if your coverage pays some of it and you owe the rest.
- Helping someone else pay – if you are looking on someone’s behalf.
- Browse treatment programs – by state and city.
Frequently asked questions
Does rehab cost money?
Not always. Publicly funded programs, community clinics that set charges by income, and some nonprofit and faith-based programs provide treatment at no charge or for a nominal fee. Whether a person pays anything depends on the program’s funding source and their income rather than on the treatment itself.
What is the average cost of rehab?
There is no reliable single average, and figures presented as averages are often the midpoint of an unsourced range. Published payer rates are more useful. Medicare’s 2026 rate for a week of methadone treatment is $277.29, and a day of hospital-based intensive outpatient care is $321.83 to $421.67, which a person can apply to their own expected length of treatment.
How much does rehab cost without insurance?
Someone without insurance is rarely charged what they are first quoted. Publicly funded programs and federally funded community clinics set charges by income, and many charge nothing at the lowest income levels. A large share of uninsured people also qualify for Medicaid without knowing it. Anyone paying cash is also entitled to a written good faith estimate of expected charges before care begins.
Is there a limit on what insurance can make me pay?
Yes, for most plans. Federal law sets a maximum annual limitation on cost sharing of $10,600 for an individual and $21,200 for a family for plan years beginning in 2026. Once a person reaches it they owe no further cost sharing for covered essential health benefits that year. Original Medicare has no equivalent cap, though Medicare charges no copay for opioid treatment program services.
Why does medication treatment for opioid use disorder cost so much less than residential rehab?
Because it is a weekly outpatient service rather than daily residential care. Medicare pays one flat weekly amount covering the medication, counseling, individual and group therapy and toxicology testing. It also has the strongest evidence base of any treatment for opioid use disorder, so the lower price does not reflect a lower standard of care.
Can a treatment program bill me for what my insurance didn’t pay?
It depends on the payer. A provider participating in Medicaid must accept the Medicaid payment plus any required copay as payment in full and cannot bill the patient for the difference. Rules differ for private insurance, particularly for out-of-network care.
You Might Like
- How to Pay for Rehab
- Free Rehab: How It Works and Who Qualifies
- How to Cover What Insurance Doesn’t Pay for Rehab
- Types of Addiction Treatment and Levels of Care
References
- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Final Rule Payment Rates for Opioid Treatment Programs, CY2026. Page last modified 14 July 2026.
- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Opioid Treatment Programs: Billing and Payment. No copayment for OTP services; Part B deductible applies.
- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CY2026 Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System final rule, CMS-1834-FC, 21 November 2025.
- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. 2026 Medicare Parts A and B Premiums and Deductibles. Announced 14 November 2025.
- Federal Register. Medicare Program; CY 2026 Inpatient Hospital Deductible and Hospital and Extended Care Services Coinsurance Amounts. 19 November 2025.
- 42 CFR 447.56, Limitations on premiums and cost sharing.
- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Maximum annual limitation on cost sharing, plan years beginning 2026.
- KFF. Cost-sharing reductions and marketplace out-of-pocket limits, 2026.
- Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. National Substance Use and Mental Health Services Survey 2024. Publication No. PEP25-07-013. Published 30 September 2025.
Method version 1.0. Previous figures on this page were replaced because they could not be traced to a primary source.
