Medicare PFS Conversion Factor (by effective period)

What it is

1. 1A tiny annual reference table holding the national Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) conversion factor — the single dollar multiplier CMS publishes each calendar year that converts a procedure's geographically-adjusted RVUs into a Medicare-allowed payment amount.
2. 2It exists so the agent can compute Medicare-allowed dollars for any HCPCS/CPT code in a given year and benchmark commercial rates against Medicare (the commercial-to-Medicare ratio).

Grain

How to read it

1. 1SELECT calendar_year, pfs_conversion_factor, percent_change FROM medicare_silver.medicare_conversion_factor ORDER BY calendar_year — returns the 7 annual national PFS conversion factors (2020-2026) with their YoY change, e.g. to look up the multiplier for converting a code's RVUs into a Medicare-allowed amount for a given year, or to show the CF trend (steady decline 2020-2025, +2.92% rebound to 33.29 in 2026).

Traps

1. 1Grain is calendar_year, NOT id. The profiler reports id as the unique key, but id is a pure sequential surrogate equal to calendar_year-2019 (VERIFIED 0 mismatches) — it adds nothing. Join and filter on calendar_year.
2. 2Five columns are 100% NULL and are dead/aspirational schema, not meaningful: end_date, anesthesia_conversion_factor, rule_number, public_law, source_file_id. In particular there is NO usable anesthesia conversion factor here, and NO rule/public-law/file provenance — only the coarse mirror_source string. Don't try to price anesthesia or cite the enacting law from this table.
3. 3No is_current / no snapshot duplication. This is a single mirrored snapshot: created_at is one identical timestamp for all rows and asserted_at is a single date (2026-06-03). There is exactly one row per year, so no dedup/as-of filtering is needed — but also don't expect bitemporal history of CF revisions.
4. 4The table models only ONE CF per year at Jan-1 effective_date. It does NOT capture intra-year/mid-year CF revisions that occurred via legislation in some of these years (end_date is null, no second row). Treat each year's value as the single representative annual CF.
5. 5prior_year_cf for the earliest year (2020 = 36.0391) is an external anchor with no matching row in this table; every other year's prior_year_cf is just the previous row's pfs_conversion_factor. Don't assume prior_year_cf is always derivable from this table — it isn't for the first year.
6. 6This is the standard PFS conversion factor only. To get a Medicare-allowed dollar amount you must multiply by per-code geographically-adjusted RVUs from the fee-schedule tables (PFS RVU/GPCI sources) — this table is just the scalar multiplier, not a fee schedule itself. The 2026 value (33.29) reverses the multi-year decline (first positive percent_change, +2.92%).

Columns (25)

Query it

describe_data_source(source_fqn="medicare_silver.medicare_conversion_factor")     # the card, live
query_substrate(sql="SELECT * FROM medicare_silver.medicare_conversion_factor WHERE calendar_year = '<value>' LIMIT 100")