In April 2025, Money updated its ranking of the best hospitals for pediatric care.

Our methodological approach is largely similar to our ranking of the nation’s top general hospitals. However, we included new data this year related to pediatric specialists and hospital accreditation programs to further distinguish the highest-quality facilities.

As with all of our hospital rankings, Money included its own price transparency analysis, which is an unweighted grading of each hospital’s billing and pricing practices.

Our core data partners for this project were Denniston Data and Definitive Healthcare.

Here’s a closer look at how we arrived at the top 75 hospitals for pediatric care.

Starting with high-quality facilities

In the U.S., there are over 6,000 hospitals. To narrow this list down, we first started with facilities that have received either a four- or five-star quality rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

The CMS rating (included on the list of hospitals as “federal rating”) is based on five key factors that are weighted as follows:

• Mortality (22%): measures 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

The patient experience rating plays a doubly important role. It was pulled out as a standalone factor for ranking and also used as a filter. Like with the federal rating, each hospital had to have a patient rating of at least three stars.

The patient rating includes factors such as attentiveness and clear communication from hospital staff. Key factors for any pleasant hospital stay, these are especially crucial for doctors who are dealing with young patients.

CMS ratings make up 45% of a hospital’s overall score.

Highlighting pediatric expertise

Next, we leveraged a novel way that Denniston Data, our data partner, measures quality care: by identifying high-performing doctors and other providers based on their level of experience with certain procedures. We then rewarded hospitals for their staffs’ collective experience in the form of a Composite Ranking Score (CRS). To be measured by pediatric experience, and considered for this specialty list, facilities must have active pediatric specialists on staff.

The CRS is a percentile that gets translated into a letter grade. The letter grading system is based on this percentage range:

• A+ is a CRS 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%.

Additionally, we considered whether a hospital had a pediatric trauma center designation from a state accrediting body and/or the American College of Surgeons. (A hospital may have both or neither.) These designations range on a scale of Level V to Level I, from least to greatest.

A Level V pediatric trauma center has the basic resources to stabilize children in the event of an emergency and can arrange to have them transferred to a higher level of care at a different hospital. A Level I trauma center, by contrast, provides around-the-clock comprehensive emergency care, surgery and rehabilitation services. We also favored facilities that have a dedicated pediatric intensive care unit (ICU).

Collectively, these pediatric specialty factors comprise 45% of a hospital’s score.

The remaining 10% of the score accounts for designations and accolades that indicate a hospital’s focus on providing quality care. These include a childhood asthma certification from the Joint Commission as well as quality care awards from the American Nursing Credentialing Center and the Emergency Nurses Association.

Measuring price transparency

Money has supplemented the weighted factors in our analysis with our proprietary “Price Transparency” grade for each hospital on the geriatric care list. This metric, a longstanding component of our methodology, reflects how closely the final bills for the facility align with its publicly estimated prices. In 2025, we updated our analysis to reflect the level of charity care — or free care — that hospitals provide for low-income patients.

Money assessed how well hospitals' publicly posted prices (also known as chargemaster rates) align with the actual revenue collected for care, whether that revenue comes from Medicare, insurance companies or direct patient payments.

Put simply, we aimed to answer: How does a hospital’s sticker price compare to what patients (or Medicare) ultimately pay?

To evaluate this, we used two ratios. One compared the chargemaster rates to the total patient payments from both insured and uninsured individuals. The second looked at the difference between a hospital’s gross charges and the amounts Medicare approved for reimbursement. Both ratios were standardized on a 100-point scale and converted into letter grades using the same grading system described earlier.

To factor in charity care, we deducted the value of that care from each hospital’s gross charges before calculating the ratios. This step ensures that hospitals offering more free care than most aren’t penalized for lower-than-expected revenue in our analysis.

Even after accounting for charity care, most patients end up paying less — sometimes substantially less — than a hospital’s listed prices.

While this gap can be viewed as discounting, it’s more accurate to say that chargemaster prices are often set far above what insurers or patients actually pay. These negotiated adjustments, which occur behind closed doors, contribute to the broader problem of unclear pricing and overall high health care costs.

It’s important to note that the price transparency grade is not a measure of affordability. A hospital with a B+ transparency score isn't necessarily less expensive than one rated C; rather, the higher score simply reflects a facility whose price information more accurately reflects what patients might actually pay.

While the transparency score doesn’t factor into a hospital’s final ranking or grade, we display it to help patients factor in the reliability of the facility’s advance estimates to reflect final bills.

Vetting top-scoring hospitals

While data and metrics form the foundation of our hospital rankings, they may not always capture the full picture of certain facilities.

To address potential concerns that might not be reflected in the numbers, Money conducted an editorial review of each hospital under consideration, to identify possible red flags.

As a result of this review process, we excluded several hospitals where past incidents raised questions about the quality or safety of care. The issues we found ranged from falsified research and inaccurate reporting to verified cases of malpractice, unnecessary procedures or sexual misconduct — all of which can point to deeper, systemic problems.

In the end, 75 hospitals passed our editorial screening and made it on to our list of the best hospitals for pediatric care.

A note on hospitals that provide pediatric care

Based on our methods and the availability of reliable data, Money did not specifically rank dedicated children’s hospitals, which are a subset of specialty hospitals.

Instead, our ranking is of short-term acute care facilities with a workforce of highly experienced pediatric specialists.

According to the Children’s Hospital Association, there are only about 220 dedicated children’s hospitals in the U.S., and they are dispersed unevenly across the country — with several states only having one and some states having zero. By and large, these hospitals do not participate in CMS’s quality reporting surveys, thus disqualifying them from inclusion.

Data sources: Denniston Data Inc; Definitive Healthcare
Supplementary data: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; American Nurses Credentialing Center; Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; Emergency Nurses Association; RAND Health Care; The Joint Commission