RTM CPT Codes Explained: 98975, 98977, 98980 & 98981

What are the RTM CPT codes?

Remote Therapeutic Monitoring is billed through a family of CPT codes that joined the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule in January 2022. For a therapy clinic they break into three jobs — setup, device supply (the monitoring platform), and clinician treatment management time — plus two rescue codes, added in 2026, that keep partial months billable.

The family runs to ten codes in total. The four not shown above are the respiratory device-supply pair — 98976 (16–30 days, $52.11) and 98984 (2–15 days, $52.11) — and the cognitive behavioral therapy pair, 98978 and 98986, which carry status indicator C and are priced by your MAC rather than nationally.

For a PT, OT, or SLP clinic running home exercise programs, the working set is 98975 + 98977 + 98980, with 98981 available in heavier review months and the rescue codes as fallbacks. If you’re new to RTM entirely, start with our complete guide to Remote Therapeutic Monitoring — this article goes deep on the codes specifically.

How much does each RTM code pay?

At 2026 national CMS fee-schedule rates, the three core codes pay $21.71 (98975, one-time), $51.44 (98977, per 30-day period), and $54.11 (98980, per calendar month). That puts a fully qualifying RTM patient at about $105.55 per month in recurring reimbursement, plus the one-time setup fee in month one.

A note on where these numbers come from, because the published figures disagree. You will find the musculoskeletal device-supply code quoted at roughly $40 in a lot of places, including some association analyses and most vendor blogs. That figure traces to Addendum B of the CY2026 Physician Fee Schedule final rule, published in November 2025, which valued 98977 at 1.20 total RVUs. The relative-value file CMS subsequently released for payment values it at 1.54 — and the January and July 2026 releases agree with each other. We also pulled 98977 from the CMS fee-schedule lookup for every Medicare locality: every one returns 1.54, because the RVU is national and only the geographic indices move the dollar amount. Since that’s what MACs adjudicate from, it’s the number we publish: 1.54 × the 2026 conversion factor of $33.4009 = $51.44. Practically, that means 98977 went up about 20% from 2025’s $43.02, not down.

What your locality actually pays

The relative value is identical nationwide, so the only thing that moves 98977 is geographic adjustment — and it moves it a lot:

The national amount sits mid-pack, with about 46% of localities below it — so treat it as a reasonable planning midpoint, not a best case or a floor. A clinic in metro California is looking at the high end; a rural jurisdiction may land near $44. Check yours on the CMS Physician Fee Schedule search tool before you build a forecast on it, and remember commercial and Medicaid rates follow their own schedules entirely.

One more standing caveat: rates are updated annually in the PFS final rule, so numbers drift year to year — and, as 2026 showed, they can move again between the final rule and the payment file.

At 20 active RTM patients, roughly $105/month each is about $2,110/month — for follow-up work most clinics already do informally. The RTM guide’s estimator lets you model your own volume.

Which RTM codes can be billed together?

In a typical month, an active patient supports 98977 and 98980 together — they measure different things (patient data days vs. clinician review minutes) and are designed to pair. In the first month of monitoring, 98975 joins them as a one-time addition.

The rules worth memorizing:

• 98975 is once per episode of care, not per month. Re-billing it requires a genuinely new episode.
• Only one practitioner can bill the device-supply code for a patient in each 30-day period — coordinate if the patient sees multiple providers.
• PT and OT cannot both be paid RTM for the same Medicare beneficiary, even across separate episodes of care. This is broader than the device-supply rule above: it applies to RTM as a whole, so one discipline has to own it.
• 98981 stacks on 98980 only in full 20-minute increments — never on 98979. Nineteen extra minutes rounds down to zero extra units.
• 98979 and 98980 are mutually exclusive in the same calendar month: bill the 10-minute code or the 20-minute code, not both.
• The same practitioner cannot bill RTM and RPM for the same patient concurrently — pick the program that fits the care.

What does each core code require?

98975 — setup and education

This covers onboarding: device setup, plus educating the patient (or, in pediatrics, the parent) on how the monitoring works, what data to enter, how often, and which exercises to perform. It documents to that level of specificity.

The 16-day threshold does not govern this code — a common and expensive misreading. The trigger for 98975 is 2 days of monitoring within the first 30-day period, and once that’s met you have a choice: bill it on the day of the second data transmission, or wait and bill it at the end of the 30-day period. Both are compliant. A claim that clinics used to hold until day 17 can now go out in the first week. In practice, the setup conversation itself fits inside a normal intake or follow-up visit.

98977 — device supply

Despite the name, “device” doesn’t mean hardware you ship. Software qualifies if it meets the FDA definition of a medical device or software as a medical device, under section 201(h) of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act — including an app the family uses on their own phone. Worth being precise here, because vendors often are not: the software does not need to be FDA-approved, cleared, or registered. It only needs to meet the definition. If you can’t tell whether a platform qualifies, ask the vendor for written confirmation.

The requirement that matters is behavioral: the patient must record or transmit data on 16 or more separate days within the 30-day period. Multiple logs on the same calendar day still count as one day.

That 30-day period runs from the RTM start date, and the next period begins the moment it ends. It is not a rolling window and not the calendar month — which matters, because the management codes below are calendar-month codes. Two different clocks, running at once.

One detail worth knowing, from APTA’s practice advisory: a log reporting a missed session may still count as a day of transmission — data showing a lack of engagement is still data, provided you follow up on it in a timely way. So teach families to log the days that didn’t go well, not just the wins, and document what you did in response. It protects the day count and tells the clinician exactly where to intervene.

98980 and 98981 — treatment management

These pay for clinician work: logging in, reviewing and interpreting incoming adherence data, updating the RTM program, and communicating with the family. 98980 requires at least 20 minutes in the calendar month plus at least one interactive, real-time communication.

That communication requirement is where clinics leave money on the table, because most explanations of it are incomplete. Three formats qualify:

• An audio-only phone call. Video is not required.
• Two-way audio-visual — FaceTime, Zoom, Google Meet.
• In person, face to face. Talking through the RTM program during a clinic visit counts — provided that time is not also counted toward the billable in-person visit. No double-dipping, in either direction.

What doesn’t qualify: email, text messages, and portal messages. None are real-time and synchronous, which is CMS’s minimum bar — a live two-way audio interaction, capable of being enhanced with video or other data.

One useful clarification from the 2026 final rule: the interactive communication contributes to your total RTM time, but it doesn’t have to account for all of the time you report. The rest of the month’s review work counts too.

Every additional full 20 minutes is one unit of 98981.

98985 and 98979 — the rescue codes

Before 2026, RTM was all-or-nothing: 15 days of logging or 19 minutes of review paid $0. The 2026 fee schedule fixed that. 98985 covers device supply when the patient transmits data on 2–15 days in the 30-day period, and 98979 covers treatment management when the month lands at 10–19 minutes of clinician time — with the same live-communication requirement. If the patient clears the full thresholds, bill 98977 and 98980 instead; the rescue codes exist for the months that fall short.

On payment: the 10-minute management code pays roughly half of 98980, but 98985 is valued at exact parity with 98977 on the 2026 fee schedule — both codes share a single practice-expense RVU, which is precisely why they pay the same. A partial-logging month doesn’t shrink the device-supply payment. Payer adoption of new codes varies, so verify coverage and your locality’s rates before building them into projections.

How do the codes fit into a monthly rhythm?

RTM billing follows the care loop, not the other way around:

1. Month 1: consent and onboarding (98975), the family starts logging, the clinician reviews and gives feedback. If thresholds are met, bill 98975 + 98977 + 98980.
2. Every month after: the family keeps logging (98977), the clinician keeps reviewing and communicating (98980, sometimes 98981). Bill the pair when thresholds are met.
3. Discharge: monitoring ends with the episode of care.

One wrinkle that catches new programs: the two clocks don’t line up. Device-supply codes are billed at the end of each 30-day period counted from the RTM start date; management codes are billed at the end of each calendar month. So a patient who starts on March 26 has a first 30-day period ending April 24 — but the calendar month ends March 31. You will often bill 98979 or 98980 on March 31, days into the program, before 98977 or 98985 is billable at all. That’s correct, not an error.

What paperwork does each code need?

Documentation is where audits are won, and it differs by code:

• 98975: the type of device (respiratory, musculoskeletal, or CBT); the education and training you provided to the patient or caregiver; and the specific instructions given — what data to enter, how to enter it, how often, and which exercises to perform.
• Device-supply codes: whether the device was supplied by the practice or patient-owned (in therapy it’s almost always practice-supplied); the number of data-access or transmission days in the period; and the data itself. A decent platform captures all three automatically.
• 98979 / 98980 / 98981: the date and duration — in minutes and seconds — of every clinician login session, the cumulative monthly total, the date and duration and content of each interactive communication, and any changes you made to the RTM program or plan of care as a result. Platforms that auto-start and auto-stop a timer on login make this a non-event; reconstructing it by hand at month-end does not survive scrutiny.

The clinics that make this sustainable are the ones that don’t track any of it by hand — qualifying days and review minutes are counted automatically, and the claim is assembled from a report rather than a spreadsheet. That’s exactly the job Sulo was built for in pediatric clinics.

What are the most common RTM billing mistakes?

The denials we hear about almost always trace back to one of these:

• Billing 98977 in a period where the patient logged fewer than 16 days — at 2–15 days, the rescue code 98985 applies instead.
• Billing 98980 with 20 minutes of review but no interactive communication — or assuming a portal message counted as one.
• Omitting the therapy modifier (GP for PT, GO for OT, GN for SLP).
• Omitting CQ or CO when a PTA or OTA furnished part of the service. These attach to 98975, 98979, 98980 and 98981 only — never to the device-supply codes, since those represent the patient transmitting data rather than work the assistant performed.
• Two providers billing device supply for the same patient in the same period — or PT and OT both billing RTM for the same beneficiary, which Medicare doesn’t allow at all.
• Billing against a lapsed plan of care. Certification and recertification must be current for RTM to be payable, even in a month with no in-person visits.
• Counting general documentation time toward the 20 minutes when it isn’t RTM data review or patient communication.
• Measuring the 16 days against a rolling window or the calendar month instead of the 30-day period running from the RTM start date.

Each of these is preventable with threshold tracking and a clean audit trail — which is a systems problem, not a clinical one.