What is a hospital readmission rate?

It is the share of patients discharged after treatment for a given condition who are admitted again within 30 days. CMS measures it for six conditions. Nationally the rates run from 10.6% to 16.0% depending on the condition, which is why rates should only be compared within the same condition.

Which state has the highest hospital readmission rates?

Measured on CMS's risk-adjusted excess readmission ratio, New Jersey ranks worst, averaging 1.029 with 82.0% of its hospitals readmitting more patients than predicted. Idaho ranks best at 0.940. The full ranking of every state with at least 10 reporting hospitals is below.

What does an excess readmission ratio above 1.0 mean?

CMS divides the readmissions a hospital actually had by the number it predicted for that hospital's mix of patients. A ratio of 1.0 means exactly as many as predicted. Above 1.0 means more than predicted, and hospitals above 1.0 can lose Medicare payment under the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program. Because it is risk-adjusted and centered on 1.0, the ratio can be compared across conditions and across hospitals treating different populations — unlike the raw rates.

Do for-profit hospitals have higher readmission rates?

In this data, yes. For-profit hospitals average an excess readmission ratio of 1.013 across 547 hospitals, against 0.999 for private nonprofit hospitals. Because the ratio is already risk-adjusted for patient mix, that gap is not explained by for-profit hospitals treating sicker patients.

DATA STUDY · CMS CARE COMPARE

Hospital Readmission Rates by State

Name: US hospital 30-day readmission rates and excess readmission ratios, by state, condition and ownership
Creator: CareLens
License: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Going home from the hospital is supposed to be the end of it. For roughly one patient in six treated for pneumonia, it isn't — 16.0% are back within 30 days. Across 2,833 hospitals, 50.1% readmit more patients than CMS predicts for the patients they actually treat. New Jersey fares worst, Idaho best.

Download the full dataset (CSV)Free, CC0. Every figure on this page, by state and condition.

2,833

HOSPITALS MEASURED

50.1%

WORSE THAN EXPECTED

16.0%

PNEUMONIA READMIT RATE

CONDITIONS MEASURED

▸ BY CONDITION

How often patients come back, by what sent them in

National average 30-day readmission rate for each condition CMS measures, with the range across individual hospitals. These rates are only comparable within a condition — a hip replacement and heart failure are not the same risk.

Condition	Avg readmit rate	Best hospital	Worst hospital	Hospitals
Pneumonia	16.0%	12.7%	22.7%	3,631
Heart failure	19.7%	14.3%	26.6%	3,151
COPD	18.2%	15.7%	23.9%	2,696
Heart attack (AMI)	13.6%	9.7%	16.8%	1,823
Hip / knee replacement	4.9%	2.4%	7.8%	1,625
Bypass surgery (CABG)	10.6%	7.8%	15.0%	877

▸ WORSE THAN EXPECTED

Share of hospitals readmitting more patients than CMS predicted — top 12

CMS predicts how many readmissions each hospital should have given its patients, then compares that to what actually happened. This is the share of each state's hospitals that came out worse than predicted.

▸ BY OWNERSHIP

Who owns the hospital turns out to matter

Average excess readmission ratio by ownership type. Because the ratio is already adjusted for how sick each hospital's patients are, a gap here is not explained by one group treating harder cases.

Ownership	Avg excess ratio	% worse than expected	Hospitals
For-profit	1.013	62.5%	547
Government (state)	1.003	52.8%	36
Government (local)	1.002	53.1%	130
Government (hospital district or authority)	0.999	48.1%	208
Nonprofit (profit)	0.999	48.0%	1,395
Nonprofit (profit)	0.997	44.1%	236
Nonprofit (profit)	0.992	41.2%	199
Physician	0.922	30.4%	56

▸ EVERY STATE RANKED

Hospital readmissions, state by state

Ranked worst to best on the average excess readmission ratio. States with fewer than 10 reporting hospitals are excluded, because a handful of facilities would otherwise define the state.

#	State	Avg excess ratio	% worse than expected	Hospitals
1	New Jersey	1.029	82.0%	61
2	Massachusetts	1.028	67.3%	52
3	Florida	1.022	69.1%	162
4	Illinois	1.018	67.0%	109
5	Nevada	1.014	68.4%	19
6	Mississippi	1.011	62.0%	50
7	Louisiana	1.011	55.2%	67
8	Kentucky	1.010	61.0%	59
9	Georgia	1.010	58.0%	88
10	Alabama	1.010	61.5%	65
11	California	1.008	58.7%	252
12	West Virginia	1.007	50.0%	22
13	Tennessee	1.005	50.7%	71
14	Michigan	1.004	50.6%	83
15	New York	1.003	54.8%	124
16	Ohio	1.002	52.3%	111
17	South Carolina	1.002	51.0%	51
18	Arizona	1.001	40.4%	57
19	Missouri	1.001	50.8%	63
20	Connecticut	1.000	52.0%	25
21	Texas	1.000	55.4%	242
22	Pennsylvania	0.999	51.2%	125
23	North Carolina	0.997	53.2%	77
24	New Hampshire	0.996	53.8%	13
25	Virginia	0.995	43.5%	69
26	Arkansas	0.994	52.5%	40
27	Oklahoma	0.990	39.1%	64
28	Indiana	0.990	44.7%	76
29	Maryland	0.986	31.7%	41
30	Hawaii	0.986	36.4%	11
31	New Mexico	0.984	30.4%	23
32	Wisconsin	0.982	25.4%	63
33	Minnesota	0.979	25.0%	44
34	Nebraska	0.976	27.3%	22
35	South Dakota	0.975	26.7%	15
36	Iowa	0.966	17.2%	29
37	Colorado	0.966	17.8%	45
38	Washington	0.965	20.0%	45
39	Oregon	0.963	15.6%	32
40	Utah	0.963	17.2%	29
41	Maine	0.961	23.1%	13
42	Montana	0.957	10.0%	10
43	Kansas	0.946	26.2%	42
44	Idaho	0.940	7.1%	14

Methodology

Figures come from CMS Care Compare, which publishes two different readmission measures for hospitals. The first is the plain 30-day readmission rate for each of six conditions — the share of discharged patients admitted again within a month. The second is the excess readmission ratio from the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program: the readmissions a hospital actually had divided by the number CMS predicted for that hospital's mix of patients, so 1.0 means exactly as predicted.

The state ranking uses the ratio, not the raw rates, and that choice matters. National readmission rates run from 10.6% for the lowest-risk condition to 16.0% for the highest. Averaging those together across conditions would rank states by which conditions their hospitals happen to report rather than by how well they perform. The ratio is unitless, risk-adjusted and centered on 1.0 by construction, so it can be averaged across conditions and compared between hospitals treating very different populations.

A hospital's ratio here is the mean of its per-condition HRRP ratios; a state's figure is the mean across its hospitals, with each hospital counted once regardless of size. States with fewer than 10 reporting hospitals are excluded, and ownership categories with fewer than 25. Not every hospital reports every condition — CMS suppresses measures with too few cases — so the number of hospitals behind each condition differs, and is shown.

Readmission is not the same as failure. Some patients are readmitted for reasons no hospital could prevent, and a hospital serving a poorer or sicker community faces headwinds that risk adjustment only partly captures — a long-standing criticism of the HRRP program itself. Treat this as a map of where the pressure is, not a verdict on individual clinicians. Looking up a specific facility? Search hospitals on CareLens or see overall hospital quality by state.

▸ USE THIS RESEARCH

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This research is free to reference. Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite the figures with a link back to CareLens.

CITATION

CareLens. (2026). Hospital Readmission Rates by State. Retrieved from https://carelens.io/hospital-readmission-rates

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<a href="https://carelens.io/hospital-readmission-rates" style="display:inline-block;border-left:4px solid #84cc16;padding:10px 14px;font:14px/1.4 system-ui,sans-serif;color:#0f172a;text-decoration:none;background:#f8fafc;border-radius:4px;max-width:520px"><strong>50.1% of US hospitals readmit more patients than CMS predicts for their case mix</strong><br>Source: CareLens — Hospital Readmission Rates by State (2026)</a>

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50.1% of US hospitals readmit more patients than CMS predicts for their case mix
Source: CareLens — Hospital Readmission Rates by State (2026)