CMS Open Payments

CMS Open Payments is the U.S. federal transparency program (run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) that publishes payments and transfers of value made by drug and medical device manufacturers and group purchasing organizations to physicians, non-physician practitioners, and teaching hospitals. The public data site at openpaymentsdata.cms.gov exposes a free, open, no-authentication REST API (a DKAN-style data catalog under /api/1) that lets developers query general payments, research payments, and ownership and investment records by program year. The API offers a structured datastore query interface (filter, select, sort, paginate), a SQL query endpoint, CSV and JSON downloads, and a metastore catalog for dataset discovery and metadata. Reads are completely free and require no API key. Program Year 2025 alone contains roughly 17 million published records totaling about 14.67 billion dollars in payments.

CMS Open Payments publishes 5 API contracts indexed on the APIs.io network, including Datastore Query API, Datastore SQL API, Download API, and 2 more. Tagged areas include Government Data, Healthcare, Open Data, Transparency, and Payments.

The CMS Open Payments catalog on APIs.io includes 1 Spectral governance ruleset.

CMS Open Payments’ developer surface includes authentication, documentation, signup flow, and 6 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Profile data on GitHub

29.7/100 thin ▬ flat Agent 21/100 agent aware Front door AI 1/6 silent saas Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-11-06 · rubric v0.27.0 · Show this score on your site →

AccessFreeOpen⚡ Free to try

1 published contract

Government Data Healthcare Open Data Transparency Payments Clinical Data Physicians Open Government Public Sector

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-11-06 · rubric v0.27.0

Composite quality — 29.7/100 · thin

Contract Quality 8.3 / 19

Developer Ergonomics 4.9 / 15

Access Clarity 2.8 / 15

Operational Transparency 0.8 / 10

Contract Governance 1.2 / 9

Discoverability 5.0 / 8

Regulatory Posture 1.8 / 15

Create-or-Update Ergonomics 0.0 / 10

Agent readiness — 21/100 · agent aware

Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 10 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8

Request/Response Examples 0 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Pagination 5 / 5

Distinct Operations 3 / 3

MCP Tool Quality 6 / 6

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Government & Public Sector regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics applies to this provider. This API accepts writes, so it carries 10 points of the composite. It is scored from the published contracts themselves: whether a caller can create-or-update in one call, whether the write accepts a key the caller already holds, and whether the response says which branch ran. Without that, every write needs a search-and-branch in front of it, and the first time that check is skipped a duplicate record is created. Scored against the observed mean rather than raw — a provider at the catalog average is unchanged by this facet, not penalised by it.

The six quality facets above are damped to 75 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 25. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 75% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

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Agent readiness — checks not met, largest first (exact, from this profile):

MCP Server +12 pts — deployment.mode + probe verdict on the mcp/ manifest, not the pointer; an unprobed slug falls back to authorship
Idempotency +9 pts — OpenAPI mutating operations declare an idempotency key — a header, a request-body property, or a named de-duplication token whose own description says so (verified); else common[].type matches /idempoten/i (documented)
Stable Error Semantics +8 pts — OpenAPI $refs a shared error schema across 4xx/5xx responses (verified), else common[].type includes ErrorCatalog / ErrorCodes / DeclineCodes
A2A Agent Card +8 pts — a2a/-a2a.yml manifest, graded on conformance.grade against A2A 1.0.0
Request/Response Examples +7 pts — share of operations carrying request/response examples; else an Examples / Code Samples link
Registration Without a Human +6 pts — a `registration_endpoint` in the served RFC 8414 / OIDC discovery document

9 more unmet checks in the Agent Readiness table above.

Kin Score — facets with the most composite points still available (weight × headroom):

Access Clarity scores 18.4 — up to +16.3 composite points
Contract Quality scores 44.4 — up to +13.9 composite points
Developer Ergonomics scores 32.9 — up to +13.4 composite points

Each check links to what satisfies it. Publish the artifact, or tell us where it already lives, and the score moves on the next scoring run.

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from the provider profile at artifacts.apis.io/open-payments/apis.yml: open an issue on github.com/api-evangelist/open-payments to ask a question or point us at an artifact you publish. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Markets this provider is in provisional

The Kin Score Market layer reads a provider inside its market: its position, and how deep its integrations go. Depth is only comparable within a position. Provisional and unweighted: not part of the Kin Score or agent readiness.

Market	Position	Depth	Registered MCP server	Declares compatibility
Open Data Portals (CKAN / DCAT)	undeclared	-	-	-

Registered MCP server and declares compatibility are report only — not weighted. Undeclared means we found nothing we can read, so there is no number: we never infer integrations.

Standards implemented 1

Standards this provider implements or carries. De facto ones are profiled and measured by the API Commons; formal ones come from the standards directory and are linked by the provider's own tags. The evidence column says how each claim was established — not that it was made.

OpenAPI

measured — observed by APIs.io (published)

APIs 5

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

CMS Open Payments Datastore Query API

Structured query over a dataset distribution.

CMS Open Payments Datastore SQL API

SQL query over a datastore resource.

CMS Open Payments Download API

Bulk CSV or JSON download of query results.

CMS Open Payments Metastore API

DCAT-US dataset catalog and metadata.

CMS Open Payments Search API

Full-text and faceted dataset discovery.

Open Collections 6

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

CMS Open Payments Datastore Query API

OPEN COLLECTION

CMS Open Payments Datastore Query Datastore SQL API

OPEN COLLECTION

CMS Open Payments Datastore Query Download API

OPEN COLLECTION

CMS Open Payments Datastore Query Metastore API

OPEN COLLECTION

CMS Open Payments Datastore Query Search API

OPEN COLLECTION

CMS Open Payments API

OPEN COLLECTION

CMS Open Payments API pricing

Not yet checked against CMS Open Payments's own pricing page. Compiled by API Evangelist on 2026-07-11 from openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/about/api; confirm before you rely on a figure. A free plan or tier is listed.

Plan	Price
Public Open Data (Free) free	—

Plan details, limits and sources →

Rate limits

Datastore Query Row Limit: 500 default per request rows
Search Page Size: 100 max per page results
Public Request Rate: not published requests

Compiled by API Evangelist, not yet checked against CMS Open Payments's documentation. Rate-limit details →

Pricing Plans 1

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Open Payments Plans Pricing

1 plans

PLANS

Rate Limits 1

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Open Payments Rate Limits

3 limits

RATE LIMITS

Service Levels 1

Uptime the provider promises or reports, as SLA4OAI. Read from its own pages; APIs.io runs no monitors.

CMS Open Payments

SLA

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Open Payments Finops

FINOPS

Spectral Rules 1

Spectral governance rulesets for linting and validating these APIs.

CMS Open Payments API Rules

60 rules · 57 errors 1 warnings 2 info

SPECTRAL

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Open Payments Authentication

none · 1 scheme

SECURITY

Open Payments Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Open Payments Agentic Access

8 operations

8 operations · 0 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Get Started 1

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

SignUp

SignUp

Documentation 1

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Documentation

Documentation

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

AgenticAccess

AgenticAccess

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

Authentication

Authentication

DomainSecurity

DomainSecurity

Operate 1

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

RateLimits

RateLimits

Commercial 2

Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use

Plans

Plans

FinOps

FinOps

Company 1

The organization behind the API

Website

Website

Source (apis.yml)

aid: open-payments
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/open-payments/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
name: CMS Open Payments
kind: government
description: CMS Open Payments is the U.S. federal transparency program (run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services)
  that publishes payments and transfers of value made by drug and medical device manufacturers and group purchasing organizations
  to physicians, non-physician practitioners, and teaching hospitals. The public data site at openpaymentsdata.cms.gov exposes
  a free, open, no-authentication REST API (a DKAN-style data catalog under /api/1) that lets developers query general payments,
  research payments, and ownership and investment records by program year. The API offers a structured datastore query interface
  (filter, select, sort, paginate), a SQL query endpoint, CSV and JSON downloads, and a metastore catalog for dataset discovery
  and metadata. Reads are completely free and require no API key. Program Year 2025 alone contains roughly 17 million published
  records totaling about 14.67 billion dollars in payments.
deliveryModel:
  model: saas
  open_source: false
  commercial: true
  callable_host: true
  label: Hosted service · you call their endpoint
  confidence: high
  source:
  - openapi
  - pricing
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: free
  onboarding: open
  trial: false
  try_now: true
  public: true
  gated: none
  gated_source:
  - onboarding
  label: Free · Open access
  confidence: medium
  source:
  - plans
  - authentication
  - security
  generated: '2026-11-06'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/open-payments.png
tags:
- Government Data
- Healthcare
- Open Data
- Transparency
- Payments
- Clinical Data
- Physicians
- Open Government
- Public Sector
created: '2026-07-11'
modified: '2026-07-11'
specificationVersion: '0.23'
apis:
- aid: open-payments:open-payments-datastore-query-api
  name: CMS Open Payments Datastore Query API
  description: Structured query over a dataset distribution.
  humanURL: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/about/api
  baseURL: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/api/1
  tags:
  - Datastore Query
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/open-payments-datastore-query-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/about/api
  - type: APIReference
    url: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/datasets
  - type: OpenCollection
    url: collections/open-payments.opencollection.json
  - type: PostmanCollection
    url: collections/open-payments.postman_collection.json
- aid: open-payments:open-payments-datastore-sql-api
  name: CMS Open Payments Datastore SQL API
  description: SQL query over a datastore resource.
  humanURL: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/about/api
  baseURL: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/api/1
  tags:
  - Datastore SQL
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/open-payments-datastore-sql-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/about/api
  - type: APIReference
    url: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/datasets
  - type: OpenCollection
    url: collections/open-payments.opencollection.json
  - type: PostmanCollection
    url: collections/open-payments.postman_collection.json
- aid: open-payments:open-payments-download-api
  name: CMS Open Payments Download API
  description: Bulk CSV or JSON download of query results.
  humanURL: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/about/api
  baseURL: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/api/1
  tags:
  - Downloads
  tags_raw:
  - Download
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/open-payments-download-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/about/api
  - type: APIReference
    url: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/datasets
  - type: OpenCollection
    url: collections/open-payments.opencollection.json
  - type: PostmanCollection
    url: collections/open-payments.postman_collection.json
- aid: open-payments:open-payments-metastore-api
  name: CMS Open Payments Metastore API
  description: DCAT-US dataset catalog and metadata.
  humanURL: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/about/api
  baseURL: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/api/1
  tags:
  - Metastore
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/open-payments-metastore-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/about/api
  - type: APIReference
    url: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/datasets
  - type: OpenCollection
    url: collections/open-payments.opencollection.json
  - type: PostmanCollection
    url: collections/open-payments.postman_collection.json
- aid: open-payments:open-payments-search-api
  name: CMS Open Payments Search API
  description: Full-text and faceted dataset discovery.
  humanURL: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/about/api
  baseURL: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/api/1
  tags:
  - Search
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/open-payments-search-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/about/api
  - type: APIReference
    url: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/datasets
  - type: OpenCollection
    url: collections/open-payments.opencollection.json
  - type: PostmanCollection
    url: collections/open-payments.postman_collection.json
common:
- type: AgenticAccess
  url: agentic-access/open-payments-agentic-access.yml
- type: Authentication
  url: authentication/open-payments-authentication.yml
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/open-payments-domain-security.yml
- type: Website
  url: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov
- type: Documentation
  url: https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/about/api
- type: SignUp
  url: https://www.cms.gov/priorities/key-initiatives/open-payments
- type: Plans
  url: plans/open-payments-plans-pricing.yml
- type: RateLimits
  url: rate-limits/open-payments-rate-limits.yml
- type: FinOps
  url: finops/open-payments-finops.yml
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com

CMS Open Payments API — frequently asked questions

Does CMS Open Payments have an API?

Yes. APIs.io lists 5 APIs from CMS Open Payments, including CMS Open Payments Datastore Query API, CMS Open Payments Datastore SQL API and CMS Open Payments Download API, and 2 more.

Is there an OpenAPI specification for the CMS Open Payments API?

Yes. APIs.io indexes 5 OpenAPI specifications for CMS Open Payments, each linked for download from this page.

How do I authenticate with the CMS Open Payments API?

CMS Open Payments uses bearer-token authentication (none · 1 scheme). The details are profiled on APIs.io as Open Payments Authentication.

How much does the CMS Open Payments API cost?

APIs.io lists 1 pricing plan for CMS Open Payments, with each plan's price, limits and inclusions under Pricing on this page.

Is the CMS Open Payments API ready for AI agents?

CMS Open Payments has a Kin Score of 29.7 out of 100 (thin) and an Agent Readiness score of 20.7 (agent-aware), scored by API Evangelist on 2026-11-06.

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