Bionic Hand and Myoelectric Arm Price Guide 2026

Ask a bionic hand manufacturer what its device costs and you get pointed at a clinic. Open Bionics says so on its own pricing page, quoting co-founder Joel Gibbard: "The healthcare system sets the price." Every other maker we contacted through public channels says a version of the same thing.

So we went to the healthcare system. On 6 August 2026 we downloaded the January 2026 DMEPOS fee schedule from CMS — the same public-use file we used last week for medical exoskeletons — and pulled every upper-limb prosthetic code in it. For powered arms and hands, that published allowable is not one input into the price. It is, for most patients, the price.

What Medicare pays for the hand

Terminal-device codes, January 2026, shown for the largest jurisdiction group — the 22 states and territories that include California, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington. Other regions run 2–10% higher; the full spread is below.

That last row is the whole story of bionic hand pricing. L6880 — the code whose descriptor is "electric hand, switch or myoelectric controlled, independently articulating digits, any grasp pattern or combination of grasp patterns, includes motor(s)" — is 6.8× a single-motor adult electric hand, 21× a mechanical hand and 54× a mechanical hook. Everything most people picture when they hear "bionic hand" sits in that one code. Two adder codes ride alongside it: L6881 (automatic grasp feature) at $4,913.43 and L6882 (microprocessor control) at $3,727.07.

The national spread on L6880 is narrow. Seven price tiers cover all 53 jurisdictions, from $28,715.00 in the 22-state group (AK, AZ, CA, CT, DC, DE, HI, ID, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OR, PA, RI, VA, VT, WA, WV) to $31,586.51 in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands — a 10.0% range end to end. The file also publishes a ceiling of $35,051.25 and a floor of $26,288.44 for the code, which are exactly the allowable × 1.20 and × 0.90.

What a whole arm bills at

The hand is a line item, not a prosthesis. A conventional myoelectric transradial (below-elbow) arm stacks like this:

The hand is 64.6% of it. Swap in a body-powered build at the same amputation level — L6100 socket ($2,572.24), L6706 hook ($528.35), L6620 wrist ($467.82), L6675 harness ($186.86), L6655 cable ($122.62) — and the total is $3,877.89. Powering the arm multiplies the bill 11.5×.

Go higher up the limb and the arithmetic gets worse, for a reason most buyers do not expect: the elbow costs more than the bionic hand. L7181, an electronic elbow with simultaneous control, is allowed $48,155.50 — 1.68× L6880. A shoulder-disarticulation build (L6965 socket system + L7181 elbow + L6880 hand + wrist, battery, charger, glove, and an L6646 multipositional shoulder joint) totals $104,703.65, which is more than the $95,081.03 personal lower-limb exoskeleton code we called the biggest robot number in the file last week.

Myoelectric control itself is the cheap part of the socket system: at the below-elbow level, myoelectronic (L6935, $9,866.92) is only 16.1% above switch control (L6930, $8,495.44).

What the patient pays

Under Medicare Part B, the beneficiary is responsible for 20% coinsurance after the deductible. On these numbers that is $5,743.00 for the hand alone, $8,892.06 for the transradial arm, and $20,940.73 for the shoulder-level build. No manufacturer's page we read publishes that figure.

The only manufacturer number we could source directly comes from PSYONIC, which writes that a bionic hand and prosthetic leg together "would typically be $100,000 to $150,000 in equipment and services," and which delivers both for $25,000 per recipient through its donor-funded Ability Fund. That is a package figure including services and a second limb — not comparable to a single L-code — but it is at least a number with a name attached to it.

How to use these numbers

Treat the fee schedule as a floor for what the device is worth and a ceiling for what Medicare will pay, not as a retail quote. A real episode of care adds codes this table does not include — test sockets, replacement sockets, evaluations, repairs — and private insurers negotiate their own rates against the same code set. Which code your device gets is not the manufacturer's choice either; product-to-code mapping runs through PDAC verification.

But if you want to know what a bionic hand costs in the United States in 2026, the honest answer is not the $20,000–$100,000 band the content farms keep repeating. It is $28,715.00 to $31,586.51, published, to the cent, in a file anyone can download.

Related: our medical robot and exoskeleton category pages, and the line-by-line cost analysis of this same dataset.

Sources

• CMS, January 2026 DMEPOS fee schedule public-use file (downloaded 6 August 2026): https://www.cms.gov/files/zip/dme26.zip
• CMS DMEPOS fee schedule landing page: https://www.cms.gov/medicare/payment/fee-schedules/dmepos-fee-schedule
• Open Bionics, "How much are prosthetic arms?" (Joel Gibbard quote): https://openbionics.com/how-much-are-prosthetic-arms/
• PSYONIC, "PSYONIC and Limbs for Life launch the Ability Fund": https://www.psyonic.io/news/psyonic-and-limbs-for-life-launch-the-ability-fund
• HCPCS descriptor for L6880: https://www.aapc.com/codes/hcpcs-codes/L6880
• Noridian, articulating digits and prosthetic hands correct coding: https://med.noridianmedicare.com/web/jddme/policies/dmd-articles/2021/articulating-digits-and-prosthetic-hands-correct-coding-revised

Limitations. These are January 2026 fee schedule amounts; CMS updates the file quarterly. Amounts shown are the non-rural allowable for the largest jurisdiction group — prosthetic codes in this file carry no rural differential. The stacked totals are our arithmetic on published codes and represent a typical configuration, not a quoted prosthesis. Coinsurance figures assume the annual deductible is met and no secondary coverage applies.