www.cms.gov: Readability — week 2026-W40

What these mean

Words per page

Main-content word count. Median 976

Reading ease (Flesch)

0–100; higher is easier. ~60+ is plain language; below ~30 is very hard. Median 41

Grade level (Flesch-Kincaid)

US school grade needed to read it; aim for ~8 or lower for the public. Median 14

Scored

A reading grade is only meaningful on running prose, so we score a page only when it has enough of it. Pages that are mostly links or cards (too little text) or mostly tables and data (not prose) are left unscored — a grade there would be misleading, no matter how many words they contain. 268 of 536 scored

Heuristics for triage and trends, not authoritative linguistics. They flag pages worth a human plain-language review.

Per-page readability

Unexplained acronyms

Acronyms used without an on-page expansion (e.g. "Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)"), by pages affected. Download: CSV · JSON.

• ICD — 238 page(s)
• API — 202 page(s)
• ID — 192 page(s)
• PDF — 183 page(s)
• CM — 178 page(s)
• CMS — 166 page(s)
• CPT — 158 page(s)
• UB — 153 page(s)
• XVIII — 118 page(s)
• PCS — 108 page(s)
• NOT — 107 page(s)
• PM — 105 page(s)
• HCPCS — 100 page(s)
• LLC — 94 page(s)
• DO — 86 page(s)

Possible misspellings

Main-content words not found in the dictionary or the project allowlist, by pages affected. Government and medical jargon may be false positives — add real terms to config/spelling-allowlist.txt. Download: CSV · JSON.

• LCDs — 125 page(s)
• www — 82 page(s)
• Noridian — 80 page(s)
• NCDs — 76 page(s)
• cms — 72 page(s)
• https — 52 page(s)
• hhs — 45 page(s)
• pre — 37 page(s)
• ama — 36 page(s)
• Transmittals — 35 page(s)
• MolDX — 35 page(s)
• http — 34 page(s)
• NCAs — 34 page(s)
• CALs — 34 page(s)
• Wellpoint — 34 page(s)
• cpt — 33 page(s)
• procurements — 31 page(s)
• merchantability — 31 page(s)
• MexicoNorth — 28 page(s)
• TAs — 27 page(s)
• HampshireNew — 27 page(s)
• JerseyNew — 27 page(s)
• MCDs — 26 page(s)
• Novitas — 26 page(s)
• navbar — 25 page(s)