wRVU Calculator
Productivity and physician pay are priced in work RVUs. Add your services and units to total your wRVUs from the official CY 2026 values — and price them at your own $/wRVU rate.
Work RVUs are the currency of physician productivity and compensation. Most employed-physician and many group-practice pay formulas are built on them: multiply the work RVU of every service by how often it was performed, and you have the wRVU total your compensation is priced against. Add your services below — the work RVUs come straight from the CMS CY 2026 fee schedule file — and optionally price the total at your own $/wRVU rate.
Build your wRVU total
How to read the numbers
- Work RVU measures the physician work — time, skill, effort and stress — of a service. It is the only RVU component used in wRVU productivity and compensation models.
- Total RVU (shown for context) adds practice expense and malpractice RVUs in the non-facility setting; Medicare turns it into a payment with the conversion factor ($33.4009 for CY 2026). Productivity models do not use total RVUs.
- Modifiers change wRVUs. Multiple-procedure, assistant-at-surgery and bilateral rules can reduce the work RVU credited for a line. This calculator uses the unmodified (base) values from the fee schedule file — apply your group's modifier rules on top.
- Compare like with like. CMS revises wRVUs between fee schedule years, so a wRVU total means little until you know which year's file it came from. These are CY 2026 values.
Data: CMS CY 2026 Physician Fee Schedule Relative Value File (RVU26D, October release). Want the Medicare dollar amount for a code instead? Use the Medicare Fee Schedule Calculator.
Disclaimer: This tool is for educational and estimation purposes only and does not constitute billing, coding or medical advice. Coverage, coding and payment rules vary by payer and change over time — always verify with the current CMS files and the payer's own policy before submitting claims or making financial decisions.
Frequently asked questions
What is a work RVU (wRVU)?
The work relative value unit is the component of a service's total RVU that measures physician work — the time, technical skill, mental effort and stress of providing it. Hospitals and groups use wRVUs to measure productivity and to price compensation (a $/wRVU conversion rate times the wRVUs produced).
Why does this calculator also show total RVUs?
For context. Total RVU (work + practice expense + malpractice) is what Medicare prices with the conversion factor. It is useful for comparing the overall resource cost of services, but productivity and compensation models use the work component only — which is why the headline number here is the wRVU total.
Do modifiers change the wRVU I am credited?
They can. Payment rules for multiple procedures, bilateral procedures, assistants at surgery and co-surgeons reduce the payable amount, and many compensation plans credit wRVUs on the reduced (paid) basis. This calculator uses the unmodified base values from the CY 2026 fee schedule file, so apply your plan's modifier rules to the result.