Six Codes Came Off Cigna's Prior Authorization List This Year

Cigna's October policy update went up on its provider site at 18:51 GMT on Friday. Twenty-six pages, one of them the precertification section, and inside it one sentence that matters:

"For 10/1/2026, Cigna added 20 CPT and 17 HCPCS codes to prior authorization."

Those codes went live on October 1. The notice is dated the 16th.

So for fifteen days, thirty-seven services needed an authorization nobody outside Cigna had been told about.

And the sentence announcing it does not say which thirty-seven. The section it sits in carries an asterisk, and page one of the same document explains what the asterisk means: "Log-in is needed for policy update sections marked with an asterisk."

The ledger nobody keeps

We pulled all ten of Cigna's 2026 monthly policy updates and all twelve from 2025, extracted the precertification section out of each, and added it up. Twenty-two documents, all public, all at a predictable URL, and as far as we can find nobody has ever totalled them.

Here is 2026, by Cigna's own counts:

• January 1: 75 CPT and 20 HCPCS newly released codes added. On January 28, two more existing codes added and two removed.
• April 1: 24 HCPCS added. April 10, nine existing CPT codes added.
• May 14: nine CPT added, three removed.
• July 1: 18 CPT and 20 HCPCS added.
• September 25: one HCPCS removed.
• October 1: 20 CPT and 17 HCPCS added.

February, March, June and August say in terms that nothing moved.

That is 214 codes added to prior authorization this year and six taken off (chart below). The ratio is 35.7 to 1.

Now, the catch, and it runs the other way. Seventy-nine codes did leave the 2026 list, and Cigna books every one of them on a separate line: "CMS/AMA deleted/terminated."

So the list does shrink when the AMA retires a code, which is a coding calendar doing its work.

Cigna deciding on its own that a service no longer needs an authorization happened six times.