Top 10 Payment Categories in CMS Open Payments Disclosures
PlainPharmaWatch catalogues the payment-type categories defined under the Physician Payments Sunshine Act and ranks them by total dollar volume disclosed. Rendered live from the payment_types table.
Ranked by raw reported dollar volume per category. Categories differ structurally, royalty/license totals reflect commercialization revenue concentrated among a few inventors, while food-and-beverage totals reflect millions of small per-transaction disclosures, so dollar volume and transaction count tell different stories. Full caveats below.
Research period:
Research question
Across the 16 payment-type categories defined by CMS for Open Payments disclosure, which carry the highest aggregate dollar volume, and how does the category mix illuminate the structural composition of pharmaceutical and medical-device industry financial relationships with US healthcare professionals?
Methodology
This ranking reflects the data currently in our database, sourced from the agency referenced in the citation below and updated automatically as new filings are processed.
Coverage and exclusions: the source agency occasionally suppresses values for confidentiality, small sample size, or quality control, and suppressed rows are excluded from this ranking rather than shown as zero. If the agency later revises a figure, the revised value replaces the old one automatically the next time our data is refreshed.
Data provenance: we pull each release as it becomes available and normalize it into our database; a later release simply supersedes the one before it, so readers never see a mix of old and new figures on the same page.
Comparability across years: when the source agency revises its release schedule, definitions, or coverage, we note the affected years on the methodology page so readers can compare like-with-like rather than across a changed measurement.
Editorial governance: a named editor reviews every ranking page before publication (see the byline above). If an entity disputes a figure attributed to it, corrections are checked against the official source record before any change is made.
Every number on this page can be traced back to its source by following the entity links and the citation below, so independent verification never requires anything beyond the original public source.
See the methodology page for the complete ETL pipeline, source vintage, and column lineage.
Top 10 Payment Categories in CMS Open Payments Disclosures
Live data: reflects the current dataset
The ranked top 10
Every row below reflects the current 10-record dataset. Reload the page after new data is processed to see the latest values.
| # | Payment category | Total volume | Transactions |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Royalty or License | $855M | 16,882 |
| 2 | Compensation for Services Other Than Consulting | $706M | 243,527 |
| 3 | Consulting Fee | $574M | 193,464 |
| 4 | Food and Beverage | $415M | 14,479,029 |
| 5 | Acquisitions | $266M | 521 |
| 6 | Travel and Lodging | $208M | 613,987 |
| 7 | Grant | $129M | 7,658 |
| 8 | Education | $67.6M | 172,796 |
| 9 | Honoraria | $43.7M | 16,801 |
| 10 | Debt Forgiveness | $40.7M | 7,832 |
Source: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, CMS Open Payments, Payment-type category aggregates. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, CMS Open Payments, Payment-type category aggregates. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed.
Findings
Top entity in the ranking
The top-ranked record in this dataset is Royalty or License, with a value of $855M on the Total volume column. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. Every value comes directly from the current dataset; no number is hardcoded into this page. When the source agency publishes a revision, the ranking and the prose around it update automatically.
Distribution shape
The gap between the top-ranked record ($855M) and the 10th-ranked record ($40.7M) characterizes how concentrated the top of the distribution is. Where the top value is many multiples of the median value of the visible set, the population is highly concentrated, a small number of entities accumulate the bulk of the measured quantity. Where the top and bottom of the visible set are close together, the distribution is relatively flat across the top end. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.
Aggregate context
Across the full population behind this ranking, here are the summary statistics: how many records exist in total, the sum of the ranking metric across all qualifying records, and the mean per-record value. The methodology page documents the exact filter applied (records with null or zero values on the ranking metric are excluded). This aggregate row is computed from the same dataset that powers the ranking above.
Source provenance
The records in this ranking originate from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, specifically the CMS Open Payments, Payment-type category aggregates. PlainPharmaWatch ingests the source vintage published by the agency and keeps this page current, there is no static export carrying stale numbers, and a newly published dataset is reflected here within hours. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and the steps applied to prepare the data.
Why this ranking matters
Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.
What this analysis cannot tell us
Payment categories are defined by CMS regulation (42 CFR §403.904) and include compensation for services other than consulting, consulting fees, food and beverage, travel and lodging, education, gifts, charitable contributions, royalty or license, current or prospective ownership or investment interest, compensation for serving as faculty or as a speaker for a non-accredited and non-certified continuing education program, grant, and several research-related categories. Royalty-or-license is structurally distinct: large totals reflect commercialization revenue rather than per-physician engagement and concentrate among inventors and patent-holders. The food-and-beverage category contains millions of small per-transaction disclosures (typically meals at clinical settings) and is large by count but per-transaction modest. Comparing categories by dollar volume vs transaction count therefore tells different stories about industry-clinician relationships. Categories may be reclassified across CMS program years; the totals here reflect the most recent published program year only.
Secondary cut from the same source
Top 10 payment categories by raw transaction count
Sources
- CMS Open Payments, Public Disclosure Database - https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/
- 42 CFR §403.904, Required reports of payments or other transfers of value - https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-42/chapter-IV/subchapter-B/part-403/subpart-I
Every figure on PlainPharmaWatch is rendered directly from federal source data, no number is typed in by an editor. This page draws directly on federal source data, no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.