U.S. News & World Report’s latest annual ranking of the nation’s best hospitals went local this year with a revamped regional option outlining the highest performers at the state and metro levels.
The publication, on Tuesday, handed out the “Best Regional Hospitals” title to 504 hospitals. Whereas hospitals given the designation were previously selected based on their collective performance across specialty rankings—an area of U.S. News’ methodology that incorporates expert opinion—the new version is based on U.S. News’ Procedures & Conditions scores and therefore wholly determined by patient outcomes.
A prior blog post from the publication on changes to this year’s approach noted that nearly 90% of hospitals previously named as top regional performers maintained the title under the updated methodology. And, as before, Best Regional Hospitals are ranked ordinally at the state- and metro-area levels to help give consumers a practical resource when seeking care.
“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,” Ben Harder, chief of health analysis and managing editor at U.S. News, said in a release.
The publication notes there are cases in which the highest-ranking hospital may not be the best choice for a consumer—for instance, in cases where a hospital has a low overall rank in a specialty but excels in treating a specific condition, or if a hospital is out of network with an insurer.
The 36th annual ranking reviewed data for more than 4,400 hospitals, including information from more than 800 patient care records.
Top 50 rankings were awarded across 15 specialties, 12 of which are primarily based on performance data sources while three others (ophthalmology, psychiatry and rheumatology) are entirely based on expert opinion. There were 152 total hospitals that scored well enough to be ranked at least once among the 15 lists.
The Procedures & Conditions ratings, meanwhile, expanded to 22 common procedures and conditions and were broadly adjusted to lean more heavily on risk-adjusted outcomes. These adjustments included age, sex, comorbidities, transfer status, Medicare eligibility status and socioeconomic status.
Over 1,600 hospitals were deemed "High Performing" in at least one of the measured procedures and conditions, and 19 earned the top mark across all 22 areas.
“Overall, the high performing hospitals routinely perform better on outcomes,” explained Chelsey Wen, senior health data analyst for U.S. News. “They will routinely have lower complication rates, they'll have higher survival rates, lower readmission rates and serve a larger volume of patients overall compared to other rated hospitals. That provides an important signal of quality for patients.”
The new annual release also means a new cohort of “Honor Roll” hospitals, a highly watched best-of-the-best list of 20 facilities that scored exceptionally well in both sides of U.S. News’ methodologies.
Joining the non-ordinal collection this year were AdventHealth Orlando, Hackensack University Medical Center at Hackensack Meridian Health and University of Michigan Health-Ann Arbor. Honorees from last year that fell off the list, meanwhile, were Duke University Hospital; North Shore University Hospital at Northwell Health; and UC San Diego Health-La Jolla, Hillcrest and East Campus medical centers.
The full list of 2025-26 Honor Roll hospitals is as follows:
- AdventHealth Orlando, Florida
- Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston
- Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles
- Cleveland Clinic
- Hackensack University Medical Center at Hackensack Meridian Health, Hackensack, New Jersey
- Hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania-Penn Presbyterian, Philadelphia
- Houston Methodist Hospital
- Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore
- Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston
- Mayo Clinic-Arizona, Phoenix
- Mayo Clinic-Rochester, Minnesota
- Mount Sinai Hospital, New York
- NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia and Cornell
- Northwestern Medicine-Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago
- NYU Langone Hospitals, New York
- Rush University Medical Center, Chicago
- Stanford Health Care-Stanford Hospital, Palo Alto, California
- UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles
- UCSF Health-UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco
- University of Michigan Health-Ann Arbor