Benchmark
Indian hospital operating benchmarks
The operating numbers India's listed hospital chains actually publish — ARPOB, occupancy and length of stay — with the source of every figure named and graded. It is a short table, and it is short on purpose: these are the figures that can be traced to a publisher. The ones that cannot are listed too, further down, because a benchmark page that hides its gaps is worth less than one that admits them.
Published figures come almost entirely from hospital chains of 500 beds and up. For a 20-bed hospital they describe a different business, not a target to aim at.
- Figures in the table
- 5, each individually sourced
- Best-sourced metric
- ARPOB, FY24 — government-backed
- Smallest hospital covered
- None under ~100 beds
- Estimated or modelled values
- None
The data
What is actually published
| Metric | Period | Organisation | Value | Change | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ARPOB per day | FY24 | Max Healthcare | ₹76,000 | +12% YoY | IBEF |
| ARPOB per day | FY24 | Fortis Healthcare | ₹60,887 | +10.7% YoY | IBEF |
| ARPOB per day | FY24 | Apollo Hospitals | ₹57,488 | +11.3% YoY | IBEF |
| Occupancy | FY25 | Fortis Healthcare | 69% | up from 65% in FY24 | Trade press |
| Average length of stay | Q2 FY25 | Fortis Healthcare | 4.2 days | flat QoQ | Trade press |
How to read it
Why these numbers are not your target
Every figure above comes from a hospital chain running hundreds of beds across multiple cities, with a case mix weighted towards tertiary and quaternary care — cardiac surgery, oncology, transplants. ARPOB of ₹76,000 a day is a statement about that case mix far more than about efficiency.
A 20-bed hospital doing obstetrics and paediatrics is not an underperforming version of that business. It is a different one. Reading down from ₹76,000 and concluding you are failing by a factor of ten is the single most common misuse of these numbers, and it is why we publish the caveat in the same place as the table rather than in a footnote.
What these figures are genuinely good for is direction. All three chains grew ARPOB by 10–12% in one year, which tells you something real about pricing and case mix across Indian private healthcare. Your own ARPOB, measured consistently month over month, tells you far more than the gap between it and Max Healthcare's ever will.
One more thing worth knowing: Apollo has proposed discontinuing ARPOB in its own quarterly reporting. Metrics that look permanent are not, and a benchmark series can simply stop.
Gaps
What we could not verify
Published rather than omitted, because the gaps are the most useful thing on this page for a small hospital:
- ARPOB, occupancy or length of stay for any hospital under about 100 beds, anywhere in India. No published series exists that we could find.
- Occupancy and length of stay for Apollo and Max on the same basis as Fortis — reported, but not on a comparable definition we could confirm.
- Any figure at all for a single-specialty nursing home, which is what most of India's private capacity actually is.
The practical consequence: a small Indian hospital has no external benchmark to measure itself against. There is no published series for facilities of its size. That is not a gap in this page; it is a gap in the sector's statistics, and the honest response is to measure yourself against your own previous month rather than against a number that describes somebody else's business.
Method
How this page is put together
Each row names its publisher and grades it: government-backed for a government or government-established body, company reporting for a company's own filings, trade press for analysts or journalists summarising either. Where only trade press was available, the row says so rather than borrowing authority it does not have.
Nothing is estimated, modelled, averaged across sources or interpolated between years. A figure appears here only if a named publisher printed that figure. The metric definitions themselves follow the WHO indicator definitions linked below, which are also what the calculators on this site implement — so a number you compute here is defined the same way as a number you read above.
Official references
- Top Indian private hospital chains announce major expansion in FY25 (ARPOB by chain, FY24) ↗India Brand Equity Foundation — a trust established by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry
- Average length of stay, all hospitals — indicator definition ↗WHO Regional Office for Europe, European Health Information Gateway
- Bed occupancy rate, acute care hospitals only — indicator definition ↗WHO Regional Office for Europe, European Health Information Gateway
Figures are as published on the dates shown and are not restated when a company revises them. Confirm current figures with the publisher before relying on them.
Measure your own
Work out your own figures
- ARPOB calculatorAverage revenue per occupied bed per day, from inpatient revenue and occupied bed-days.Read more →
- Bed occupancy calculatorOccupancy from occupied bed-days against available bed-days, on the WHO definition.Read more →
- ALOS calculatorAverage length of stay from discharges and inpatient days.Read more →
These three numbers, without the spreadsheet