ENT’s fee-for-service Medicare service total rose 0.6% from 2022 to 2025

Observations cover calendar years 2022–2025. The CMS specialty index displays August 28, 2026 as its last-modified date; that does not establish when each workbook first appeared. All four original workbooks were checked October 7, 2026.

The national otolaryngology row in CMS’s annual Medicare Part B physician/supplier reports changed little in its service total between 2022 and 2025. It recorded 13,986,377.8 allowed services in 2025, compared with 13,902,060.2 in 2022—an increase of 0.61%, calculated from the two workbooks. The series is published within CMS’s fee-for-service utilization reports.

The intervening years matter. Allowed services fell to 13,647,561.4 in 2023 and returned to 13,905,192.3 in 2024. The 2025 total was 0.58% above 2024. Those observations describe a national specialty total; they do not tell a practice how its own patient mix or workload changed.

The dollars moved differently. CMS’s reported payment amount for otolaryngology rose from $900.76 million in 2022 to $931.39 million in 2025, a nominal increase of 3.40%. Allowed charges rose from $1.219 billion to $1.274 billion, or 4.53%. These are separate columns in the source. The larger allowed-charge total should not be substituted for the Medicare payment amount. Neither figure is an all-payer practice revenue estimate.

Calendar year 2022: 13,902,060.2 allowed services; $1,219,197,725.87 allowed charges; $900,760,591.50 payment amount.

Calendar year 2023: 13,647,561.4 allowed services; $1,236,765,686.19 allowed charges; $914,183,413.22 payment amount.

Calendar year 2024: 13,905,192.3 allowed services; $1,254,747,214.89 allowed charges; $926,255,166.07 payment amount.

Calendar year 2025: 13,986,377.8 allowed services; $1,274,392,719.98 allowed charges; $931,392,070.62 payment amount.

Source: CMS, Expenditures and Services by Specialty, exact OTOLARYNGOLOGY row in each linked annual workbook. Fractional service values are retained as reported. They are not unique patient or visit counts. Dollar values are nominal and have not been adjusted for inflation.

For a practice leader, the useful comparison begins with the measure. A service total, a patient count and a surgical case count are different quantities. This specialty row contains no patient count, diagnosis breakdown, procedure breakdown or practice-level results. It cannot establish unmet local demand, reimbursement for an unchanged procedure, physician income or practice profitability. Changes in national aggregate dollars also do not, by themselves, identify the cause. Those questions need additional evidence beyond these four rows.

The same boundary applies to payer coverage. This fee-for-service series is not a census of all ENT care, a Medicare Advantage utilization estimate or a commercial-payer benchmark. It gives readers a specific national Medicare reference with a stated observation period. A practice comparison would need matching years, payer scope and units before the difference could carry a useful operational meaning.