Place of Service 10: When a Telehealth Session Is in the Client's Home

The session was on video. The client was on their couch. The claim said the telehealth happened somewhere other than home.

Place of service 10 is the code for that couch. CMS calls it telehealth provided in the patient's home. POS 02 is also telehealth. The only difference is that the patient was not at home.

Bill the client's location. The room you were sitting in does not pick the code.

What Place of Service 10 Tells the Payer

The official description is specific. Place of service 10 is the location where health services are provided or received through telecommunication technology, and the patient is in their home. Home means a private residence. It does not mean a hospital or another facility where the patient receives care.^[1]

The code has been in the national set since January 1, 2022, and Medicare has accepted it since April 1, 2022.^[1] If a template has not been touched since the pandemic, it may still be using an older telehealth place of service for every video visit.

You follow the patient, not the clinician. A therapist who works from an office in St. Paul, while the client joins from an apartment in Minneapolis, bills place of service 10. The fact that you were in an office is not POS 11. POS 11 is for an office visit when you are in the room together.

Write the location in the note in ordinary words. "Video. Patient at home." That sentence is what supports the code if anyone asks.

POS 02 vs POS 10 in an Ordinary Week

POS 02 means telehealth provided other than in the patient's home. The patient is receiving the service through technology, and they are not at home.^[1] Medicare has used that revised description since April 1, 2022.

Use this split on real sessions:

• The client's house or apartment: place of service 10
• A school, a workplace, a car, or a day program: POS 02
• A hospital, nursing facility, or residential program where they receive care: POS 02, even if they sleep there
• You and the client in your office: POS 11, and it is not a telehealth code at all

A hotel or a friend's house is not automatically "home." If you would not call it the patient's home, use POS 02.

A CTSS clinician in the Twin Cities can hit both codes in one day. A session while the child is at school is POS 02. An evening video session from the family's apartment is place of service 10. Same service family, different location, different code.

The habit to retire is "all video is POS 02." That was a shorthand. It is the wrong shorthand now. POS 02 vs POS 10 is a location question you can answer before you save the note.

Why the Code Changes What Medicare Pays

Since January 1, 2024, Medicare pays covered telehealth billed with POS 10 at the non-facility rate on the Physician Fee Schedule.^[2] That is the higher office-style rate, because the practice is carrying the overhead.

POS 02 does not get that home rate. A claim can pay, look clean, and still be priced as facility telehealth. You will not always get a denial to warn you. You will get a smaller allowance.

Do not guess the dollar gap from a national blog. Locality and the year's fee schedule set the numbers. Pull your MAC's rate for the CPT code at each place of service and compare it to the EOB.

Commercial plans and Medicaid do not have to copy that Medicare payment rule. Some do. Some price both telehealth places the same. Some still want an older code. The clinical definition can be right and the contract can still differ.

A solo practitioner in Duluth billed POS 02 for a year of home video sessions. Almost nothing denied. Underpayment recovery started when someone compared a home visit to the non-facility rate and saw the pattern. The place of service had been quietly taxing every Tuesday.

What to Put on the Claim, and What to Leave Off

Document where the patient was. If you did not ask, you are guessing, and a guess tends to become whatever the scheduler defaulted.

On a professional claim, the CMS-1500 your practice sends, use POS 10 or POS 02 and stop there. Do not append modifier 95. That modifier is for certain institutional claims. On a professional claim it is not required, and it can cause the claim to process wrong. CMS tells professional billers to report these two place of service codes for telehealth as of January 1, 2024.^[3]

Audio-only behavioral health is a modality question, not a reason to change the location rule. If the patient is at home, the place of service is still 10. Medicare does allow audio-only for behavioral health telehealth, and the patient is in the home for that service.^[3] If a payer wants a modality modifier for a phone session, that is separate from POS 02 vs POS 10.

An Illinois group discovered their scheduler stamped POS 02 on every telehealth appointment, including clients who confirmed they were home. Fixing the default fixed the next week. The claims already out the door needed a review, not a new clinical workflow.

Denial tracking will catch the ones a payer returns as an invalid place of service. It will not catch every underpayment. Payment posting has to sit next to it.

Check the Payer Before You Freeze the Template

Medicare does not limit behavioral health telehealth to rural counties, and the patient's home is an allowed site.^[4] That is the federal baseline. It is not a Minnesota Medicaid manual, and it is not your commercial contract.

Cigna is the commercial exception people trip on. Its commercial medical virtual-care page, dated August 23, 2022, tells providers to bill POS 02 for every virtual visit under that policy, including visits in the patient's home. Cigna says POS 10 will process, and it still asks practices not to send POS 10 until further notice.^[5] That page does not govern Evernorth Behavioral Health or Cigna Medicare Advantage. Those plans keep their own telehealth instructions. A therapy practice that copies the medical POS 02 rule onto every Cigna card will miscode the behavioral health ones. Read the entity on the card before you change the template.

Look up the current place of service instruction for each plan you bill, especially Medicaid in the states where your clients live. A Twin Cities group corrected Medicare in January and left one commercial plan on POS 02 for home visits for another two quarters. The clean claim rate looked fine. The allowed amount did not.

A recently paid remittance is the practical test. If that payer accepted POS 10 for a home video session and priced it the way your contract describes, keep doing that. If the remittance disagrees with the manual you remember from 2022, believe the remittance and then confirm it.

One wrong default does not spoil a single claim. It spoils the telehealth day, and then the next one, until somebody reads a location instead of a habit.

Final Thoughts

Place of service 10 means the client received telehealth at home. POS 02 means they received telehealth somewhere else. POS 11 means you were in the room. Ask where they are, write it down, and let the claim say the same thing.

A dedicated coordinator can treat a bad default as a pattern in the monthly review, while the underpayment is still a recent week and not a closed year.

If your video claims are paying short, or you are not sure which location your system has been sending, BreezyBilling is here to help.

Sources

1. Place of Service Code Set — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
2. Billing and Payment for Telehealth Services with Place of Service (POS) 10, Transmittal R12671CP — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2024
3. MLN901705: Telehealth & Remote Monitoring — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
4. Medicare Telehealth FAQ — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, updated February 26, 2026
5. Virtual Care — Cigna, page dated August 23, 2022