# CMS Open Payments

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/open-payments/  
**Website:** https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov  
**APIs profiled:** 5

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.

## Kin Score — 37.0 / 100 (thin)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 37.0).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 74.1 |
| Contract Quality | 50.8 |
| Governance | 0.0 |
| Contract Governance | 0.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 31.6 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 21.4 |
| Commercial Clarity | 42.1 |
| Access Clarity | 42.1 |

Regulatory layer — **Government & Public Sector**: 22.2 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 29.1 (agent-aware)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | derived |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | yes |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | documented |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Free · Open access — onboarding: open, pricing: free, trial: no (confidence: high).

## APIs (5)

- **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.

## Agentic access (1)

- **Open Payments Agentic Access** — 8 operations · 2 acting

## Security (2)

- **Open Payments Authentication** — none · 1 scheme
- **Open Payments Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

## Plans (1)

- **Open Payments Plans Pricing**

## Tags

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

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/open-payments/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.