On 5 August 2026 we read two robot prices within an hour of each other.
The first took a full-catalogue pull of two dealer storefronts to establish, and came back ambiguous: an EAVision J100 agricultural drone is $21,999 as an airframe, $32,995 as a flight-ready package at that dealer, and $33,995 at another one down the road. Same machine, same day, and the only reason we know why the last thousand dollars exists is that one dealer volunteered a note about tariffs.
The second took a file download: $95,081.03. That is what Medicare pays for a personal walking exoskeleton in 2026 under HCPCS code K1007. Not a range, not a starting-from, not a quote. The same figure in every state, published to the cent in a public file that anyone can download from CMS.
Medical exoskeletons are the only robots in America whose price is a matter of public record. That makes them the closest thing this industry has to a natural experiment, and it is worth being precise about what the experiment shows — because it is not what price-transparency advocates would predict.
What is actually published
The January 2026 DMEPOS fee schedule lists three powered-exoskeleton codes: K1007 for bilateral lower-limb personal exoskeletons at $95,081.03, and L8701 and L8702 for powered arm orthoses at $34,970.13 and $68,801.71. Each carries a ceiling exactly 1.20x the fee and a floor exactly 0.90x it.
Each also carries one national amount. That is not how the rest of the file works. In the same schedule, a conventional mechanical knee-ankle-foot orthosis (L2005) carries eight distinct state-level amounts, and a torsion HKAFO (L2040) carries eleven. Ordinary bracing is priced regionally off historical charge data. The powered devices had no such history, so CMS gap-filled them — and a gap-filled price is a single number by construction.
The tell
When these fees were finalised effective 1 April 2024, the amounts were $91,032, $33,480.90 and $65,871.74. Divide the 2026 figures by the 2024 ones:
- K1007: 95,081.03 / 91,032 = 1.044479
- L8701: 34,970.13 / 33,480.90 = 1.044479
- L8702: 68,801.71 / 65,871.74 = 1.044479
Identical to six decimal places. Over the intervening twenty-one months, Lifeward obtained FDA clearance for the ReWalk 7 in March 2025 and launched it in the US, Myomo grew revenue 26% to $40.9 million, and the category's installed base expanded. The published price registered none of it. It moved by the covered-item update and nothing else.
Our view: this is the finding that matters, and it cuts against the intuition that publishing a price disciplines a market. The published price here is not a summary of market conditions — it is a substitute for them. Once it exists, there is nothing for a buyer to discover and nothing for a competitor to undercut, because undercutting a fee schedule does not win business. It just leaves money on the table.
What an administered price does to the company
If you cannot compete on price, you compete on getting paid. Myomo's own reporting shows what that business looks like.
In Q4 2025 the company recognised revenue on 208 MyoPro units at an average selling price of about $54,600, on revenue of $11,353,296 and cost of revenue of $3,569,021 — $17,159 of hardware cost per unit, and a 68.6% gross margin. Medicare Part B patients were 49% of the quarter's revenue.
The more revealing line is further down: cost per pipeline add was $3,039, up 148% year over year, with 676 new candidates added in the quarter. Multiply through and Myomo spent roughly $2.05 million in one quarter acquiring candidates, against 208 units delivered — on the order of $9,900 of pipeline-acquisition spend per delivered device, or about 18% of ASP. (That ratio is our arithmetic, and it mixes cohorts: candidates added in a quarter are not the ones that convert in it. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a unit economic.)
Stack it up anyway. Roughly $17,200 of hardware and roughly $9,900 of demand generation inside a ~$54,600 price that the company did not set. Our view: in an administered-price category, the margin is not a reward for building a better device — it is the budget for the clinical documentation, fitting and prior-authorisation apparatus that converts an eligible patient into a paid claim. That is a real business, and a defensible one. It is simply not a hardware business, and investors who model it as one will misread every quarter.
The corroborating detail is that Myomo's own 2026 framing is about growing revenue from recurring patient sources and reducing "dependence on advertising-driven revenue" — the company describing its own demand-acquisition cost as the problem to solve.
The patient is the residual
Medicare pays 80% of the fee schedule amount after the deductible. On K1007 the beneficiary's 20% coinsurance is $19,016.21; on L8702 it is $13,760.34. Those are our calculations from the published fees, and they are the numbers a prospective user actually faces — yet they appear in no manufacturer's marketing, which leads with coverage rather than cost.
Our view: a transparent price that stops one step short of the patient's share is not transparency in the sense that matters. The published number tells you what the payer pays. Nobody publishes what you pay.
The market next door
Set the two prices we read that morning side by side.
The $95,081.03 exoskeleton has a price you can verify in sixty seconds, that is identical nationwide, and that has not responded to a product generation change. The $21,999 spray drone has a price that varies by $12,000 depending on which dealer and which package, that no manufacturer publishes, and that responds to tariffs, stock and dealer margin within days — we have documented the same machine at two dealers differing by a stated $1,000 tariff line, and elsewhere the same service robot at three prices spanning 52%.
Neither is a good outcome. The unpriced market produces the fabricated-number ecosystem we have been documenting all year, where AI answer layers now attribute invented prices to named dealers. The administered market produces a number that is real, checkable, and inert.
Our view: the useful lesson for the rest of robotics is not "publish your prices and the market will work." It is narrower and more testable — a published price is only informative if something can move it. The exoskeleton fee is the most transparent number in this industry and, precisely because nothing can move it, it tells you less about the state of that market than a messy dealer cart does about spray drones. What buyers actually need is not a number in a file. It is a number with a mechanism behind it, and an indexed fee schedule has no mechanism at all.
Sources
- CMS, DMEPOS Fee Schedule public use file DME26-A (January 2026), downloaded 5 August 2026: https://www.cms.gov/medicare/payment/fee-schedules/dmepos/dmepos-fee-schedule/dme26
- Myomo, Q4 and full year 2025 results (units, ASP, cost of revenue, cost per pipeline add, 2026 framing): https://myomo.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Myomo-Q425-Earnings-PR.pdf
- Myomo, CMS final Medicare DMEPOS fee schedule rate for MyoPro (April 2024 L8701/L8702 amounts): https://myomo.com/cms-posts-final-medicare-dmepos-fee-schedule-rate-myopro/
- Noridian DME MAC, powered lower extremity exoskeleton correct coding: https://med.noridianmedicare.com/web/jddme/policies/dmd-articles/2023/powered-lower-extremity-exoskeleton-correct-coding
- PDAC, MyoPro assist device correct coding (device-to-code mapping): https://www.dmepdac.com/palmetto/PDACv2.nsf/DIDC/QPJCHCVJLF~Articles%20and%20Publications~Advisory%20Articles
- Lifeward, ReWalk 7 US launch and FDA clearance: https://ir.rewalk.com/news-releases/news-release-details/lifeward-launches-sales-rewalk-7-personal-exoskeleton-us-market
- Lifeward, CMS preliminary reimbursement determination: https://ir.rewalk.com/news-releases/news-release-details/historic-move-medicare-proposes-preliminary-reimbursement-level
- AOPA, 2026 Medicare DMEPOS fee schedule update: https://aopanet.org/2026-medicare-dmepos-fee-schedule-update/
- Full figures and buying notes: medical exoskeleton price guide 2026
A note on what is fact and what is judgement here. The fee schedule amounts, the ratios between them, the Myomo unit economics and the coinsurance arithmetic are all derived from primary documents and can be reproduced. The reading that an administered price substitutes for a market, and that the resulting margin funds reimbursement navigation rather than engineering, is ours — neither CMS nor any manufacturer characterises it that way.
