Newsroom · CMS Open Payments

What do drug and device companies pay your doctor?

Federal law requires every drug and device company to report what it pays U.S. physicians — meals, consulting and speaking fees, travel, royalties. Since 2018 that's $78 billion, down to the individual doctor. Most people never see it. Click your state — or search any doctor by name.

Source: CMS Open Payments, loaded by Civly · program years 2018–2024. States shaded by total reported payments. Hover for detail; click a state to open its full report.

$78.3B
reported since 2018
1.6M
physicians paid
88.3M
individual payments
$52.9B
in research funding
$211M
biggest single recipient

The national picture

Companies reported $78 billion between 2018 and 2024. Most is research funding routed to hospitals and trial sites; $22.8 billion went out as general payments — the meals, fees, trips, and royalties that land in an individual doctor's record.

Total reported payments by year

Where the $78B went

2018–2024, by payment type. Research dollars (clinical trials, mostly to institutions) dwarf the general payments that reach individual physicians.

By the numbers, 2018–2024

1,599,382

physicians and teaching hospitals took at least one payment.

88.3M

individual transfers — from $12 lunches to multimillion-dollar royalty checks.

Who pays, and who gets paid

The biggest payers are vaccine and pharma giants; the biggest individual recipients are device inventors collecting royalties. Click a state on the map to see these same lists for your state.

Top payers

Drug & device companies, 2018–2024, nationwide

Biggest individual recipients

Physicians by total received, 2018–2024

How to read this

1

A payment is not wrongdoing

Open Payments is a transparency law, not an enforcement list. Consulting, speaking, and royalty payments are legal and often legitimate. The data shows relationships, not conclusions.

2

Research vs. general payments

Most dollars are research funding routed to institutions and trial sites. We map general payments — the meals, fees, travel, and royalties tied to a named physician — because that's the "what pays my doctor" question.

3

Every figure is traceable

Numbers come straight from the CMS Open Payments public dataset; each underlying transaction carries a CMS record_id. We don't adjust the figures.

4

Whether a meal changes prescribing

Peer-reviewed studies (e.g. DeJong et al., JAMA Intern Med 2016) link even small meals to higher branded prescribing. That's the researchers' finding, not Civly's claim.

Civly builds tools like this on demand

This explorer runs on the complete CMS Open Payments dataset — one of dozens of public-records sources Civly loads, links, and turns into research. If you need the underlying data, a per-state breakdown, or a custom cut, talk to us.

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