Insights › ER waits, state by state
Index insight · computed 2026-06-12
How long America waits in the ER
The median US hospital keeps emergency patients 148 minutes from arrival to departure. Where you live changes that by more than two hours — and at the slowest hospitals, nearly a quarter of patients give up and leave before being seen.
148 minnational median ED visit
225 min90th-percentile hospital
23%left-before-seen rate at the worst hospitals
Longest waits, by state median
AL
146 min
Shortest waits
AL
146 min
State medians across 4,077 reporting hospitals (states with ≥15). Look up any hospital's own ED time on its profile.
Read this carefully: Median ED time covers patients discharged from the ED (not admitted). State medians reflect each state's hospital mix — academic centers and trauma centers run longer for structural reasons; this is wait reality, not a hospital quality verdict by itself.
Source: CMS Care Compare, Timely & Effective Care (OP-18b, OP-22), per-hospital. Computed 2026-06-12; reproducible from the analysis code against the files hashed on the methodology page.
Long waits are a capacity-and-flow problem — the kind that shows up in data long before it shows up in headlines.
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