Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Public Use File Details

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MEPS HC-254F: 2024 Outpatient Visits File

Release date: July 2026

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This public use file is one in a series of event-level public use files drawn from the 2024 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) Household Component (HC). Released as an ASCII file with SAS, SPSS, STATA, and R programming statements, a SAS transport file, a SAS V9 file, a XLSX file, and a Stata file, the Outpatient Visits File provides detailed information on outpatient visits. Data are gathered from a nationally representative sample of the civilian, noninstitutionalized population of the United States and can be used to make estimates of outpatient utilization and expenditures for calendar year 2024. Each record comprises data for one household-reported outpatient visit collected during Rounds 3-5 of Panel 28 and Rounds 1-3 of Panel 29, corresponding to the rounds for the MEPS panels covering calendar year 2024. The Outpatient Visits File contains data on several characteristics associated with each outpatient visit, including the date of the visit, whether or not a doctor was seen, types of care and services received, expenditures, and sources of payment. To append person-level information such as demographic or health insurance coverage to each event record, data from this file can be merged with the 2024 MEPS HC Full-Year Consolidated File using the person identifier, DUPERSID. For more details on loading MEPS PUFs into R, SAS, and Stata, please visit the MEPS GitHub page

Documentation

File type

Documentation	PDF (431 KB) / HTML
Codebook	PDF (183 KB) / HTML*
SAS Programming Statements	TXT (43 KB)
SPSS Programming Statements	TXT (12 KB)
STATA Programming Statements	TXT (16 KB)
R Programming Statements	TXT (8.5 KB)

Data	File type**

Data File, ASCII format

ZIP (608 KB)

Data File, SAS transport format

ZIP (715 KB)

Data File, SAS V9 format

ZIP (815 KB)

Data File, Stata format

ZIP (707 KB)

Data File, XLSX format

ZIP (2.9 MB)

Questionnaires — see Survey Questionnaires
The PDF version of the codebook is recommended for printing; the HTML version is database driven and lets you navigate quickly to details on each variable. *Right-click on the data file link, then select Save Target As or Save Link As to download the file.

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