What a household pays from its own pocket for one hospital admission, after any insurance or employer reimbursement: doctor's fees, medicines, diagnostics, bed and package charges. Childbirth stays are excluded. Muslim hospital stays cost less on average, for two reasons: more Muslim patients use government hospitals, where a stay costs a fraction of what a private hospital charges, and Muslim households have less to spend on private care. Spending less does not mean getting the same care for less money.
INR 30,104out of pocket per admission, excl. childbirth(2025)
When a Muslim household has someone admitted to hospital, it pays about INR 30,104 from its own pocket, against INR 34,323 in a Hindu household. A lower bill is not good news here: it mostly reflects greater reliance on cheaper government hospitals, which in turn tracks lower incomes, rather than cheaper or better care.
How to read the chart
The chart compares out-of-pocket spending per hospital admission across communities for 2017 and 2025; childbirth is excluded, and lower is not automatically better. The Urban vs rural tab shows costs are higher in towns, where private hospitals dominate.
Why it matters
A single hospital admission is one of the commonest ways an Indian family slides into debt or poverty. What a household pays, and whether it can lean on a public hospital, says a lot about both its income and its exposure to a medical shock.
Status
Contextgap widening
Muslim INR 30,104 vs Hindu INR 34,323 in 2025, INR 4,219 lower. The gap has widened in rupee terms as all costs rose, consistent with Muslim households staying more dependent on the public system as private care grew dearer.
About this measurement
Definition. What a household pays from its own pocket for one hospital admission, after any insurance or employer reimbursement: doctor's fees, medicines, diagnostics, bed and package charges. Childbirth stays are excluded. A lower figure does not mean cheaper care: it mostly shows who uses government hospitals and who can afford private ones.
Methodology. Computed from the unit-level microdata of two NSS Household Social Consumption: Health rounds: the 75th (Sch 25.0, July 2017 - June 2018, 1.14 lakh households, via MoSPI's original fixed-width TXT distribution; the NADA copy of that round is a proprietary binary, so the build reads the surviving mirror recorded in the repo's provenance notes) and the 80th (January - December 2025, 1.40 lakh households, via the NADA CSV distribution). Out-of-pocket medical expenditure per hospitalisation case excluding childbirth is the 2025 release's own headline construct, computed identically in both rounds: medical expenditure (fees, medicines, diagnostics, bed and package charges; transport and food excluded) minus any insurance or employer reimbursement, averaged over cases of the last 365 days. The 2017-18 estimator reproduces all nine published cells of NSS Report 586 Statement 3.15 within 0.01% and the published reimbursement shares exactly; the 2025 estimator reproduces all six press-note OOPME cells within 0.01%.
Neither publication breaks expenditure down by religion. A Muslim hospital stay cost INR 30,104 against the all-India INR 34,064 in 2025 (Hindu INR 34,323), and INR 14,827 against 18,088 in 2017-18: about 12-19% less per stay. Muslims lean more on government hospitals (41.5% of Muslim hospitalisation cases in 2025 against 36.4% of Hindu cases, down from 47.6% and 41.8% in 2017-18), where the average bill runs about an eighth of a private one, and lower spending capacity does the rest; the survey cannot tell cheaper care apart from care that was needed but never bought.
Values are nominal rupees of each round; health insurance coverage roughly tripled between the rounds, so the netted reimbursement matters more in 2025. NSO unit-data rider: religion is self-reported and the survey is stratified for states, not religions, so the split is indicative with no sub-state estimates.