Professional paper claim form (CMS-1500)

The CMS-1500 form is the standard claim form used by a non-institutional provider or supplier to bill Medicare carriers and durable medical equipment regional carriers (DMERCs) when a provider qualifies for a waiver from the Administrative Simplification Compliance Act (ASCA) requirement for electronic submission of claims. It is also used for billing of some Medicaid State Agencies. Please contact your Medicaid State Agency for more details.

The National Uniform Claim Committee (NUCC) is responsible for the design and maintenance of the CMS-1500 form. CMS does not supply the form to providers for claim submission. In order to purchase claim forms, you should contact the U.S. Government Printing Office at 1-866-512-1800, local printing companies in your area, and/or office supply stores. Each of the vendors above sells the CMS-1500 claim form in its various configurations (single part, multi-part, continuous feed, laser, etc).

The only acceptable claim forms are those printed in Flint OCR Red, J6983, (or exact match) ink. Although a copy of the CMS-1500 form can be downloaded, copies of the form cannot be used for submission of claims, since your copy may not accurately replicate the scale and OCR color of the form. The majority of paper claims sent to carriers and DMERCs are scanned using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. This scanning technology allows for the data contents contained on the form to be read while the actual form fields, headings, and lines remain invisible to the scanner. Photocopies cannot be scanned and therefore are not accepted by all carriers and DMERCs.
You can find Medicare CMS-1500 completion and coding instructions, as well as the print specifications in Chapter 26 of the Medicare Claims Processing Manual (Pub.100-04).