Money’s ranking of maternity care hospitals spotlights 75 top-tier facilities for care during or after a pregnancy, as well as in the delivery of babies.
Our analysis favors hospitals that demonstrate exemplary standards and earn high patient ratings from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as well as distinctions from the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative and The Joint Commission.
Our core data partners for this project were Definitive Healthcare and Denniston Data. We also relied on publicly available data from CMS and The Joint Commission. The University of Southern California’s Chan department provided data on the nation’s neonatal intensive care units (NICUs).
Here’s a detailed look at how we arrived at our 75 top choices.
Setting a strict benchmark
First, to be considered among the nation’s top facilities for maternity care, a hospital must first demonstrate that it maintains high standards in the fundamentals of care, regardless of specialty.
We began by limiting the list to short-term, acute-care hospitals that have received a quality and patient ratings of three-stars or higher from CMS, based on their track record for all patients, whether for maternity care or not.
The CMS rating (included on the hospitals ranking as “Federal Rating”) is based on five key factors that are weighted as follows:
- Mortality (22%): reflects the death rates related to cardiovascular issues, strokes, pneumonia and treatable complications after surgery
- Safety (22%): tracks the rate of infections associated with certain surgeries, IVs and catheters and rates of complications after specific procedures
- Readmission (22%): considers how often some patients are readmitted to the hospital, along with how long they stayed and whether there were unplanned visits for outpatient treatment
- Patient experience (22%): gauges whether patients had a positive experience based on their self-reported ratings of how well their doctors and nurses communicated with them; other factors include whether their bathroom was clean and their room was quiet at night
- Timely and effective care (12%): estimates how quickly patients received care for chest pain or strokes; how long they stayed during an ER visit; percent of health care staff who are vaccinated for flu and COVID-19 and other time-sensitive metrics
In addition to this benchmark, our best maternity hospitals must have met key standards in performing high-quality perinatal procedures. For many picks, that means a designation as “Baby Friendly” by the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative, a joint venture from the World Health Organization and the United Nation’s Children’s Fund. Baby Friendly hospitals specialize in maternal education, giving mothers training on the importance of breastfeeding and the skills they need to do so.
Hospitals that lack his designation must instead have either a certification in perinatal care from The Joint Commission (TJC) or a base-line dedication to quality maternity care, as verified by the TCJ and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).
A certification or advanced certification in perinatal care from the TJC indicates a hospital has met or exceeded strict standards of care for maternal, fetal and newborn health, and has also demonstrated low rates of infant mortality, maternal complications, unnecessary labor and more.
Applying all the criteria above yielded a short list of 585 hospitals, which we further refined.
Rewarding stand-out maternity care
Next, the facilities that met our benchmarks were further evaluated on several factors that yielded what’s displayed on the ranking as the “Maternity Grade.”
The letter grade is based on a numerical ranking score that follows this range:
- A+ is a score of 95% to 100%.
- A is 85% to 94.99%.
- A- is 80% to 84.99%.
- B+ is 75% to 79.99%.
- B is 65% to 74.99%.
- B- is CRS 60% to 64.99%.
- C+ is 55% to 59.99%.
- C is 45% to 54.99%.
- C- is 40% to 49.99%.
- D+ is 35% to 39.99%.
- D is 25% to 34.99%.
- D- is 20% to 24.99%.
- F is below 20%.
The factors that determined a hospital’s numerical ranking score were broken up into three core categories: hospital quality, maternity procedure focus and designations.
Hospital quality (25%)
A hospital’s quality score — weighted at 25% — captures its federal CMS star ratings for quality and patient experience. Together, these gauge not only how safe a hospital is but also how patients felt about the care they received.
This category also includes several measures of the hospital’s general quality of care and resources, such as how well equipped the hospital is at handling trauma care for both adults and children.
As mentioned above, a hospital must meet a benchmark of at least 3 out of 5 stars for quality and patient experience to be considered. This category also factored in whether CMS was penalizing the hospitals for excess readmissions or hospital-acquired conditions.
Maternity focus (45%)
To determine how focused a hospital is on maternal procedures, we considered the number of births and all perinatal procedures it performed in 2024. We favored hospitals for which maternity-related procedures represented a notable portion of their total care, as well as hospitals that have high levels of births relative to their peers.
Additionally, we gave preference to hospitals with neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) or premature ICUs. (A special thanks to the University of Southern California for providing national data on the level of care of each NICU, which is presented on the ranking table.)
For the 2026 ranking, we omitted a previous ranking factor, one that compared the rates that hospitals scheduled births early for no medical reason. CMS no longer requires the reporting of this figure, and the data is no longer available at scale.
The maternity-focus category was weighted at 45%.
Maternity, perinatal and other accreditations (30%)
Finally, we rewarded hospitals that achieved various designations and accreditations from the BFHI, TJC and/or ACOG, as mentioned above.
Facilities were required to have at least one such designation. Having multiple designations was a plus, as was the level of the designations received. For example, a hospital earned a higher accreditation score if it had a level 4 maternity care designation, as opposed to one with a level 2 designation, or no designation at all.
The TJC and ACOG standards for maternity care are as follows:
- Level I (standard maternity care): Care for low to moderate-risk pregnancies, demonstrating the ability to detect, stabilize, and initiate management of unanticipated maternal-fetal or neonatal problems that occur during the antepartum, intrapartum, or postpartum period until the patient can be transferred to a facility at which the specialty maternal care is available
- Level II (specialty care): All the care included in Level I, plus moderate- to high-risk antepartum, intrapartum and postpartum conditions
- Level III (subspecialty Care): All the care included in Levels I and II, plus care for more complex maternal medical conditions, obstetric complications and fetal conditions
- Level IV (regional perinatal care centers): All the care included in Levels I, II and III, plus on-site medical and surgical care of the most complex maternal conditions and critically ill pregnant women and fetuses throughout antepartum, intrapartum and postpartum care
Other designations or distinctions that were considered include: Baby Friendly Hospital, advanced perinatal certification from TCJ, Academic Medical Center, Emergency Nurses Association's Lantern Award and the American Nurses Credential Center's Magnet Recognition.
The accreditation category was weighted at 30%.
Measuring price transparency
As an added benefit, Money included its unique “Price Transparency” grade for each hospital we ranked.
While this transparency metric does not contribute to a hospital's overall grade or position on our rankings, we display it because it helps patients reduce price surprises and accurately plan the cost of a hospital stay.
Here’s how we calculated the score: Using data and feedback from Denniston Data, the nonprofit RAND Health Care and Definitive Healthcare, Money analyzed the extent to which a hospital’s publicly listed prices (known as chargemaster prices) accurately align with the revenue the hospital receives for care, either directly from patients or from Medicare.
In effect, we wanted to know: How does the listed price compare with the amount that you’re billed after you’re discharged?
We used two ratios to measure this. The first compares the hospital's chargemaster prices and its gross patient revenue, whether paid by uninsured patients or insurance companies; the second ratio is between the gross billed amount and the total amount approved by Medicare.
These ratios were standardized on a 100-point scale and translated into a letter grade based on the same ranges as listed above.
We also subtracted the cost of charity care the hospital reported from its gross charges before calculating the ratios above. This step ensures that no hospital is penalized for any discrepancies between its listed prices and the revenue it receives, simply because it provided free health care.
Even when accounting for charity care, patients usually pay less — and often far less — than the publicly listed prices.
While this practice is technically discounting, the reality is that many hospitals publicly list exorbitant chargemaster prices that then get negotiated down by insurers, the federal government or patients themselves. These agreements behind closed doors serve to obfuscate what hospital care truly costs and helps keep prices high overall.
Keep in mind that the price transparency grade doesn't reflect the cost of care. For example, a hospital with a B+ grade isn’t necessarily cheaper than one graded as a C – it only provides publicly listed prices that are more accurate, which in turn can better help you financially prepare for your stay.
Vetting the top-scoring hospitals
Numbers and data are at the core of our hospital rankings, but they don't always tell the whole story.
To account for controversies or other issues at a facility that may not show up in data, Money reviewed each hospital on our list for any potential red flags.
Through this vetting process, we removed several hospitals where incidents may have signaled that patient care had been compromised, revealing deeper systemic issues. These issues include incidents such as falsified research, inaccurate hospital data, substantiated complaints of sexual harassment, widespread malpractice or unnecessary treatments, all of which undermine patient care.
Ultimately, 75 hospitals made the cut, each one vetted by Money’s editorial team.
Data sources: Definitive Healthcare; Denniston Data; University of Southern California
Supplementary data: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; RAND Health Care; The Joint Commission; American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists; The Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative; American Nurses Credentialing Center; Emergency Nurses Association
