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U.S. News unveils this year's best hospitals quality rankings

U.S. News has released its 2025-2026 Best Hospital Rankings, which the publication says is intended to help healthcare consumers learn more about their provider options.

Sara Heath
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Published: 29 Jul 2025

U.S. News & World Report has released its 2025-2026 Best Hospitals Rankings, recognizing 152 hospitals that received the Best Hospital distinction and another 504 more that received the Best Regional Hospital designation, the organization announced.

These rankings follow a June update to the Best Regional Hospitals ranking methodology, which now solely prioritizes the Procedures & Conditions ratings and not performance in specialty rankings, the organization said at the time.

Best hospital rating systems -- whether it be from U.S. News, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services or another ranking system -- are intended to be a consumer-facing tool. Ben Harder, the chief of health analysis and managing editor at U.S. News, said the publication's rankings are designed to enable healthcare consumer choice.

"For most Americans, healthcare decisions are made close to home. The Best Regional Hospitals rankings underscore the difference high-performing local medical centers make," Harder explained in a press release. "These local hospital rankings, entirely performance-driven, equip individuals and their families, in consultation with their medical providers, to choose the highest quality care available in their own communities."

This year onward, U.S. News will be limiting the number of Best Regional Hospitals to 500, or slightly above in the case of a tie. For the 2025-2026 ranking, there wound up being 504 hospitals included in the regional ratings.

The hospitals coming in on top for the regional ratings, with "regional" being defined as one of the 25 most populous metropolitan areas in the nation, include the following:

  • Atlanta: Emory University Hospital.
  • Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Hospital.
  • Boston: Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital (tied).
  • Chicago: Northwestern Medicine-Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Rush University Medical Center (tied).
  • Cleveland: Cleveland Clinic.
  • Dallas-Fort Worth: UT Southwestern Medical Center.
  • Denver: UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital.
  • Detroit: University of Michigan Health-Ann Arbor.
  • Houston: Houston Methodist Hospital.
  • Los Angeles: Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and UCLA Medical Center (tied).
  • Miami-Fort Lauderdale: Cleveland Clinic Weston.
  • Minneapolis-St. Paul: M Health Fairview University of Minnesota Medical Center.
  • New York: Hackensack University Medical Center at Hackensack Meridian Health, Mount Sinai Hospital, New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia and Cornell and NYU Langone Hospitals (tied).
  • Orlando: AdventHealth Orlando.
  • Philadelphia: Hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania-Penn Presbyterian.
  • Phoenix: Mayo Clinic-Arizona.
  • Raleigh-Durham: Duke University Hospital.
  • Riverside-San Bernardino: Loma Linda University Medical Center.
  • Sacramento: UC Davis Medical Center.
  • San Antonio: Methodist Hospital-San Antonio.
  • San Diego: UC San Diego Health-La Jolla, Hillcrest, and East Campus Medical Centers.
  • San Francisco: UCSF Health-UCSF Medical Center.
  • Seattle: Virginia Mason Medical Center.
  • Tampa-St. Petersburg: Tampa General Hospital.
  • Washington, D.C.: Inova Fairfax Hospital.

U.S. News gives Honor Roll, specialty care rankings

In addition to hospital ratings by region, U.S. News released ratings for overall Best Hospitals ranking, Honor Roll hospitals, High Performing hospitals and Specialty Care rankings.

For the Best Hospitals rating, U.S. News compared over 4,400 hospitals practicing across 15 specialties and 22 procedures to cull the 152 best-rated facilities.

The publication also recognized 20 hospitals as Honor Roll hospitals, meaning they have excelled in delivering high-quality healthcare. New Honor Roll recipients this year include AdventHealth Orlando, Hackensack University Medical Center at Hackensack Meridian Health and University of Michigan Health-Ann Arbor.

The High Performing hospital rating means a hospital has received the highest designation possible for the Hospitals Procedures and Conditions ratings. This year, 1,624 hospitals were deemed High Performing.

Finally, U.S. News rated the top hospital by specialty, which included the following:

  • Cancer: University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
  • Cardiology, Heart & Vascular Surgery: NYU Langone Hospitals.
  • Diabetes & Endocrinology: Mayo Clinic-Rochester.
  • Ear, Nose & Throat: University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
  • Gastroenterology & GI Surgery: Mayo Clinic-Rochester.
  • Geriatrics: NYU Langone Hospitals.
  • Neurology & Neurosurgery: NYU Langone Hospitals.
  • Obstetrics & Gynecology: Brigham and Women's Hospital.
  • Ophthalmology: Bascom Palmer Eye Institute-U. of Miami Hospital & Clinics.
  • Orthopedics: Hospital for Special Surgery.
  • Psychiatry: Massachusetts General Hospital.
  • Pulmonology & Lung Surgery: NYU Langone Hospitals.
  • Rehabilitation: Shirley Ryan AbilityLab.
  • Rheumatology: Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore.
  • Urology: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Hospital ratings call into question quality measurement

U.S. News arguably puts out the biggest hospital ratings list each year. It's joined by other entities such as CMS and The Leapfrog Group, each of which rates hospitals based on their respective target areas of Medicare and patient safety.

But the topic of hospital rating has been a fraught one, with critics regularly asking whether ratings systems can accurately capture the nuances of quality and patient experience. Notably, the CMS Hospital Star Ratings and the U.S. News ratings have caught flak for these challenges.

What's more, quality can often be in the eye of the beholder. While U.S. News prioritizes factors such as how a hospital performs on the procedures and conditions it most often provides and treats, other quality ratings systems focus on factors like health equity.

Boston-based think tank the Lown Institute issues its own annual Honor Roll recipients, which are hospitals that measure high on health equity, value and clinical outcomes metrics. Notably, the hospitals usually rated well by U.S. News do not rate as high on Lown's scale, with some exceptions. U.S. News Honor Roll recipients tend to have good clinical quality but fall behind on aspects like health equity and corporate social responsibility.

Certain metrics might mean something different to different healthcare consumers. While some patients might look for hospitals that perform well on health equity metrics, others might be targeting the best performance for a certain quality metric, specialty or patient safety measure.

Sara Heath has reported news related to patient engagement and health equity since 2015.

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