The United States healthcare system contains many contradictions. As we approach 2026, the pace of technological advancements and medical innovation continues to accelerate, yet providers are simultaneously confronting obstacles such as higher operational costs, clinician burnout and healthcare worker shortages. Patients, for their part, are increasingly facing challenges including fragmented care, rising insurance premiums and fees, and difficulty accessing medical services. Add to this mix a growing distrust in medical institutions and public health messaging, and consumers often find themselves wondering where to turn for credible and practical information on their healthcare.
Enter Forbes’ newest list: Forbes Top Hospitals 2026. This unbiased, data-driven rating system cuts through the confusion to identify general acute care hospitals across the country offering high-quality healthcare services. These inaugural ratings are meant to serve the best interests of patients while offering hospital leaders a unique vantage point with which to evaluate their facility’s performance in comparison with their peers.
To produce this list, Forbes partnered with Inovalon, a healthcare data and analytics firm, and collaborated with nationally recognized measurement experts, physicians, statisticians, health policy researchers and patient advocates.
With this team, we developed the Forbes Top Hospitals methodology, which is based on validated healthcare quality measures extracted from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Provider Data Catalog (PDC). These publicly reported measures—which assess key aspects of care, including patient outcomes, hospital best practices, value, and patient experience—were chosen because they have undergone a thorough national review process that includes testing and input from leaders in the healthcare community, establishing these metrics as reliable and statistically sound.
Two other aspects of the methodology were central to Forbes’ approach. The first was that patient outcomes (such as rates of readmissions, infection and mortality) were weighted more heavily than other metrics to reflect the substantial influence that outcomes have on determining the quality of healthcare services. The second was to account for the socioeconomics of the hospital’s patient population in a meaningful way. Given that social drivers of health (SDOH)—such as income, education and access to transportation—have been shown to impact health outcomes, Forbes adjusted the outcome measures for SDOH in the communities surrounding each hospital. The goal was to produce a more level comparison of hospital quality despite differences between any given hospital’s location and patients.
To calculate the ratings, we began with the approximately 5,400 general acute care hospitals that are listed in the CMS PDC and currently operating in the U.S. From that pool, roughly 2,500 hospitals met our inclusion criteria (detailed in the methodology). This group of remaining hospitals then went through our analyses. The result: 253 hospitals received an overall rating of 5 stars, and 509 hospitals received an overall rating of 4 stars. These 4- and 5-star hospitals earned their place on our first-ever Forbes Top Hospitals list.
To learn more about our ratings or access the methodology, click here.
For answers to frequently asked questions about the ratings, click here.
Forbes Top Hospitals ratings are not medical advice. They can assist people in learning about different providers, but the ultimate choice for care should be made by the patient or their loved ones in consultation with their medical provider. In any emergency, call 911.
For any comments or questions about Forbes Top Hospitals, please email: TopHospitals [at] forbes.com.
As with all Forbes lists, there is no fee to be considered or selected.