Advertising Disclosure

HospiceAtlas is funded by flat monthly fees paid by hospices that choose to enhance their listing. This page explains exactly what those fees do and — more importantly — what they never do. We keep our funding walled off from our data on purpose, and we'd rather over-explain it than leave any doubt.

Every hospice is listed, for free

First and most important: every Medicare-certified hospice appears on HospiceAtlas at no cost, and cannot be removed by paying or by declining to pay. The core listing — name, address, phone, ownership, Medicare data, quality ratings, and service area — is built from public government data and is the same whether a hospice pays us or has never heard of us. Paid features are additions to a listing that already exists, never the price of appearing at all.

What the paid tiers buy

Hospices can claim their listing and choose a flat-fee tier:

• Verified — $49/month. A "claimed" badge, the ability to edit the description, add photos, list languages and specialties, and state a response-time commitment.
• Featured — $99–$149/month ($99 in standard counties, $149 in the top-20 metro counties). Everything in Verified, plus a labeled sponsored slot at the top of the relevant county page and an accent on the profile.

Every one of these is a presentation feature. They change how a listing looks and what information a hospice can add about itself. They do not change the underlying government data, and they do not change where a hospice falls in a quality-sorted list.

What payment never does

This is the line that matters, and it isn't negotiable:

• Payment never affects rankings. County and ZIP-finder results are sorted by quality signals — family-survey ratings first, then other neutral factors — and never by who has paid.
• Payment never affects star ratings. Ratings come straight from the CMS CAHPS survey data. We can't and don't alter them.
• Sponsored placement is always labeled. A Featured hospice's slot is marked "Sponsored," with a note that payment affects placement of that labeled slot only and never the quality ratings or the ranked results below it. There's at most one sponsored slot per standard county page, and at most three in the top-20 metro counties (where the Featured rate is $149).
• We never sell leads, and we never take money on a per-referral, per-admission, or percentage basis. Charging for referrals in this field would violate the federal Anti-Kickback Statute. Flat monthly fees, paid regardless of how many families a listing reaches, are how we stay on the right side of that line — and how we keep our incentives aligned with families, not against them.

Families always contact hospices directly. We don't collect patient information to route anyone anywhere.

For the full picture of where our data comes from and how rankings are built, see our methodology page. If you work at a hospice and want to claim or upgrade a listing, start on our claim page.