Ways to Pay a Medical Bill, Cheapest Money First

The best medical financing is usually not a medical financing product. Before you sign anything offered at the front desk, there are four cheaper places the money can come from — an HSA or FSA, the provider’s own payment plan, a credit union, and an ordinary 0% intro-APR card. Only after those does it make sense to look at the purpose-built lenders, and then only if you can tell which of two very different products you are being handed. That last distinction is the whole page. One of them charges you nothing if you pay on time. The other quietly accrues interest the entire time and bills you for all of it if you miss the deadline by a day.

An HSA or FSA is not financing — it is your own money, already set aside, and qualified medical expenses paid from it are not taxed. For 2026 the IRS set the HSA contribution limit at $4,400 for self-only coverage and $8,750 for family coverage, with an additional $1,000 catch-up for account holders 55 and older. The health FSA salary-reduction limit for 2026 plan years is $3,400, with a $680 carryover. If you have a balance sitting in either one, spend it before you borrow against anything.

This is the most under-asked question in American medical billing. The CFPB’s own guidance for patients who can’t pay a bill is direct: ask if the provider will accept an interest-free repayment plan. Many will. It is not advertised, because the brochure in the rack is usually for a financing company that pays the practice.

If the bill is from a nonprofit hospital, ask about financial assistance in the same call — that is a separate and potentially much larger lever than a payment plan, and it has deadlines.

NCUA’s own rate data for the fourth quarter of 2025 put the average APR on a 36-month unsecured fixed-rate personal loan at 10.64% at credit unions versus 12.00% at banks. Federal credit unions also operate under a statutory interest-rate ceiling: 15% under the Federal Credit Union Act, which the NCUA Board may temporarily raise. That temporary 18% ceiling was extended by a Board vote on February 6, 2026 and runs through September 10, 2027. Payday Alternative Loans are a separate category: NCUA’s rule permits up to 1,000 basis points above the general ceiling, which is where the familiar 28% figure comes from.

Two promotions can both be advertised as “no interest,” and they are not the same product. The CFPB draws the line clearly.

• A true 0% introductory APR: no interest accrues during the promotional window. If a balance is left over at the end, interest applies only going forward from that date. You are never billed for the period you were promised 0%.
• A deferred-interest promotion: interest accrues from the purchase date at the card's standard rate the entire time, invisibly. Pay the promotional balance in full by the deadline and it is waived. Miss it — by any amount, on any day — and all of that accrued interest, going back to the original purchase date, is added to your balance.

CareCredit is the card most likely to be handed to you in a dental or veterinary or elective-procedure office, and it is a deferred-interest product. Per Synchrony’s own account agreement, version dated March 2026, the standard purchase APR is 32.99% and the penalty APR is 39.99%, which applies if the minimum payment is missed twice in twelve consecutive billing cycles and may stay in effect indefinitely. Its “No Interest if Paid in Full” promotions run 6, 12, 18 or 24 months, and if the promotional balance isn’t cleared in time, interest is imposed retroactively from the purchase date at that standard rate.

There is a real enforcement history behind the concern. On December 10, 2013 the CFPB ordered GE Capital Retail Bank, CareCredit’s issuer at the time, to refund $34.1 million to more than 1.2 million consumers, finding that consumers believed they had signed up for an interest-free card when they had actually been enrolled in a deferred-interest product.

Cherry and Sunbit each offer a genuine 0% APR product and, separately, a product that accrues interest and then waives it. Their own legal disclosures say so, even where marketing pages suggest otherwise.

• Cherry — discloses an APR range of 0%–35.99% over 1–60 month terms, alongside a “Waived Interest Promotion” in which interest does accrue on the loan and the borrower may receive a credit for 100% of the accrued interest only if every payment is made within 15 days of its due date and the full principal is paid by the promotion's end date.
• Sunbit — discloses both a “True 0% APR” product, on which no interest is charged or accrued during the promotional term, and a separate “Avoid Paying Interest” product on which interest accrues from the purchase date and is waived only if the financed amount is paid off within the term. Disclosed overall APR range 0%–35.99%, varying by state.

Neither of these is a scam, and both offer soft-pull applications, which is a genuine advantage over CareCredit — the CFPB’s 2023 report recorded CareCredit as using a hard credit pull to apply. The point is narrower and it is the same point as section IV: two products, one brand, and you must know in writing which one you signed.

• PayZen — markets 0% interest and $0 fees on payment plans of roughly 3 to 60 months, with no hard credit inquiry. The catch isn't in the terms, it's in the access: PayZen contracts with health systems, so it's available to you only if your provider already uses it. Worth asking whether yours does.
• Prosper Healthcare Lending — a direct loan originated by WebBank rather than a broker arrangement, with a disclosed APR range of 8.99% to 35.99%, terms of two to six years, and no prepayment penalty. The bottom of that range is competitive; the top of it is not, and which end you land on is the entire question.

• Denefits — California's Department of Financial Protection and Innovation lists a settlement agreement with Denefits, LLC dated May 8, 2025 for unlawful debt-collection activity. Denefits' own marketing has separately promoted an “EZ Payment Plan with Deferred Interest.”
• AccessOne — KFF Health News reported in November 2022 that at UNC Health the share of AccessOne patients placed in its highest-interest tier rose from 9% in February 2020 to 46% two years later, and that at Atrium Health as many as half of enrollees were in one. A 2023 follow-up examining the actual hospital contracts found UNC and Atrium had redacted significant portions, including key terms.
• Walnut — no longer operates as a patient lender. It pivoted to provider-side payments software and relaunched as Arrow in 2024. If you are being offered “Walnut” financing, ask what you are actually signing.

Somebody does. When a practice offers 0% financing, the lender typically takes a merchant fee out of the payment, and that cost tends to be reflected in the sticker price. Being precise about the size of it is harder than it should be: the CFPB’s 2023 report states plainly that there are no publicly available specifics on these processing fees or how they are set. The one figure it could cite was a 2008 Consumer Reports estimate putting CareCredit’s processing fee rate at 13.5%. That is an old number and we are flagging it as one — but the structural point stands, and it is a reason to ask whether a cash price would be lower than the financed price.