The Open Payments database is CMS's public record of payments from drug and device companies to physicians and teaching hospitals, created by the Physician Payments Sunshine Act. Here is how to search it, what the downloads contain, and how ClinicaLister puts product-level payment totals next to a drug's trials and approvals.
Open Payments is a national disclosure program run by CMS. Drug and medical device makers (reporting entities) report payments and other transfers of value they make to covered recipients — physicians, non-physician practitioners and teaching hospitals — and ownership or investment interests held by physicians or their immediate family. It was established by Section 6002 of the Affordable Care Act — the Physician Payments Sunshine Act — which is why it is often called the Sunshine Act database.
Each program year is published as three sets of records: general payments (meals, travel, speaking and consulting fees, and other non-research payments), research payments, and ownership and investment interests. Records name the recipient, the company, the amount, the nature of the payment and, where reported, the drugs or devices it relates to.
Market access, medical affairs and compliance teams use it to see where a company spends on a product, benchmark promotional activity against competitors, and check relationships before engaging a physician.
Everything is free on openpaymentsdata.cms.gov: a search for individual recipients and companies, summary dashboards, and full downloads per program year.
Use the search on openpaymentsdata.cms.gov to find a physician, non-physician practitioner, teaching hospital or reporting company by name. A profile page totals what was paid, by year and by nature of payment.
Data is organised by program year (January to December). Check general payments, research payments and ownership interests separately — they are separate files with different fields.
Ready-made summaries group payments by reporting entity, by covered recipient and by nature of payment, per year and for all years, plus national and state totals and averages by specialty.
The dataset catalog offers the General, Research and Ownership files for each program year from 2019. The General files are very large — CMS warns they can exceed what spreadsheet software opens — so plan to load them into a database.
To total payments for a drug or device, filter on the product name and NDC fields. A single payment can list several products, and some payments list none, so totals by product depend on how you count those cases.
ClinicaLister aggregates the General and Research files into totals per product and program year, with the reporting manufacturer, so you can see how much a company reports spending around a product without loading millions of rows.
Where the product matches a drug in the ClinicaLister graph, its payment totals appear in the drug's commercial section beside its trials, FDA history, pricing and shortages.
The drug view charts the product's reported payment totals by program year, so a jump in spending around a launch or a new indication is visible at a glance.
The ClinicaLister MCP server lets Claude and other assistants pull the same product-level totals in plain language, alongside trial and regulatory data.
18,800+
product × program-year totals
2024–2025
program years held
Monthly
check for newly published years
ClinicaLister holds product-level aggregates built from the General and Research files — not individual payments, physicians or hospitals, and not ownership interests. Only the first product listed on a payment is counted. For payments to a named physician, use openpaymentsdata.cms.gov. Counts as of September 2026.
It is the public CMS database of payments and other transfers of value from drug and medical device companies to physicians, non-physician practitioners and teaching hospitals, plus physician ownership interests. It was created by the Physician Payments Sunshine Act.
CMS publishes each program year once, on or by June 30 of the following year, after a review and dispute period from April 1 to May 15.
Yes, on openpaymentsdata.cms.gov, free. ClinicaLister does not hold physician-level records; it holds payment totals per product and year, linked to the product's trials and regulatory data.
Yes. The General, Research and Ownership files for each program year can be downloaded from the dataset catalog on openpaymentsdata.cms.gov. The General files are very large.
No. CMS publishes the data for transparency; a payment shows a financial relationship, not improper conduct or prescribing behaviour.
See what companies spend around a product, next to its trials
Built for the Market Access / HEOR. See it in the product: Drug & Device Details. All data sources