2026 ICD-10-PCS Official Guidelines for Coding and ReportingFY 2026
The complete Official Guidelines for ICD-10-PCS procedure coding, section by section, with linked codes and every change from last year highlighted.
ICD-10-PCS Guideline Sections
Conventions
ICD-10-PCS codes are composed of seven characters. Each character is an axis of classification that specifies information about the procedure performe…
Medical and Surgical Section Guidelines
The procedure codes in Anatomical Regions, General, Anatomical Regions, Upper Extremities and Anatomical Regions, Lower Extremities can be used when t…
Obstetrics Section Guidelines
Procedures performed on the products of conception are coded to the Obstetrics section. Procedures performed on the pregnant female other than the pro…
Radiation Therapy Section Guidelines
Brachytherapy is coded to the modality Brachytherapy in the Radiation Therapy section. When a radioactive brachytherapy source is left in the body at …
New Technology Section Guidelines
Section X codes fully represent the specific procedure described in the code title, and do not require additional codes from other sections of ICD-10-…
Selection of Principal Procedure
The following instructions should be applied in the selection of principal procedure and clarification on the importance of the relation to the princi…
Sources and methodology
The guideline text on these pages is the official ICD-10-PCS Official Guidelines for Coding and Reporting for fiscal year 2026, published word for word. CMS updates these procedure-coding rules every year, and following them is required under HIPAA when you assign ICD-10-PCS codes.
Each October we load the new release from CMS, keep the exact wording and the original outline numbers (for example, B3.6a), and flag what changed from the year before. Then we add what a PDF can't do. Related rules link to each other, every code gets a detail card, and the whole text is searchable. The wording of the rules doesn't change.
- ICD-10 at CMSThe official U.S. home for the ICD-10-CM and ICD-10-PCS code sets and the coding guidelines. This is the release we import each year.
These pages match the CMS fiscal year 2026 release, effective October 1, 2025 through September 30, 2026. ICD List is independent. We aren't affiliated with CMS, the NCHS, or the World Health Organization.
