Hospital price transparency
Warning notices: findings and response duties
A warning notice follows a CMS determination that one or more hospital price transparency requirements have not been met. It is not simply a report that a web crawler could not download a file. CMS reviews the hospital's disclosures against the federal requirements and identifies specific violations in its notice.
The hospital must acknowledge receipt in the form and manner, and by the deadline, specified in the notice. The June 2026 CMS FAQ answers this directly: a response acknowledging the warning is required. Do not confuse acknowledgement with completing the correction, or assume a generic deadline overrides the notice.
CMS may skip a warning and request a corrective action plan in cases described in its enforcement policy, including hospitals that have made no attempt to meet the disclosures. A warning stage therefore should not be treated as a guaranteed grace period before any other action.
Recommended practice is to preserve the notice, confirm the hospital and location involved, assign each cited deficiency, and retain dated evidence of the corrected public disclosure. CMS's FAQ says it reviews the website after the indicated warning period; it does not require separate notification simply because warning-stage deficiencies have been corrected. Follow any specific instructions in the actual notice.