Whether cryotherapy is covered by insurance depends entirely on which type you’re asking about. Medical cryotherapy, such as cryosurgery to destroy cancerous tissue or remove skin lesions, is routinely covered when deemed medically necessary. Whole-body cryotherapy, the kind offered at wellness spas and recovery centers, is not covered by any major insurer and has no FDA clearance for treating medical conditions.
Medical Cryotherapy That Insurance Covers
Insurance companies draw a clear line between cryotherapy used as a medical procedure and cryotherapy marketed for general wellness. On the medical side, cryosurgery and cryoablation are well-established treatments that major insurers regularly reimburse. These procedures use extreme cold to destroy abnormal or diseased tissue, and they’ve been part of standard medical practice for decades.
Aetna, for example, considers cryoablation medically necessary for cervical precancerous changes, adrenal gland metastases up to 4 cm in size, and prostate cancer as a primary treatment alternative to surgery or radiation. Medicare covers cryosurgery of the prostate for clinically localized prostate cancer (stages T1 through T3) and also covers salvage cryosurgery for patients whose cancer returned after radiation therapy, provided the disease is still localized and meets specific clinical thresholds. UnitedHealthcare’s community plans include similar coverage for prostate procedures, with policies updated as recently as mid-2025.
Beyond cancer treatment, cryotherapy applied to skin lesions like warts, actinic keratoses, and other growths is one of the most common in-office procedures in dermatology. These treatments are billed as cryosurgery, coded and reimbursed through standard medical channels. If your doctor recommends freezing a suspicious skin spot or a stubborn wart, that’s almost always a covered service under your plan’s normal office visit and procedure benefits.
Why Whole-Body Cryotherapy Is Not Covered
Whole-body cryotherapy, where you step into a chamber cooled to extremely low temperatures for two to three minutes, occupies a completely different category. No major health insurer covers it. The reason comes down to two factors: the FDA has not cleared or approved any whole-body cryotherapy device for treating any specific medical condition, and there isn’t sufficient clinical evidence to support the health claims often made by cryotherapy businesses.
The FDA has stated directly that it has no evidence whole-body cryotherapy effectively treats conditions like fibromyalgia, migraines, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, anxiety, or chronic pain. Without FDA clearance and robust clinical trials, insurers have no basis to classify these sessions as medically necessary. For a treatment to qualify for insurance reimbursement, it generally needs to meet three criteria: it falls into a recognized benefit category, it’s reasonable and necessary for diagnosing or treating an illness or injury, and it meets all other regulatory requirements. Whole-body cryotherapy fails on all three counts.
Cryotherapy Devices for Injury Recovery
There’s a middle category that trips people up: cryotherapy devices used for sports injuries or post-surgical recovery, such as circulating cold-water systems like the Game Ready. These might seem like they’d qualify as durable medical equipment, but most insurers and workers’ compensation programs don’t cover them for home use.
Washington State’s Department of Labor and Industries, for instance, explicitly does not cover cryotherapy devices with or without compression for home use. Their reasoning: the evidence shows little benefit over standard rest, ice, compression, and elevation. Medicare similarly denies fluid-circulating cold pads with pumps as not reasonable and necessary. When cryotherapy is applied during a physical therapy session in a clinical setting, it’s typically bundled into the cost of other physical medicine services rather than billed separately. Your therapist may use ice or a cold compression device during your visit, but it won’t appear as its own line item on your bill.
Using an HSA or FSA for Cryotherapy
Health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts can reimburse medical expenses, but the IRS defines those expenses narrowly. Qualifying costs must be for the diagnosis, cure, treatment, or prevention of disease, or for affecting a specific body function. The IRS explicitly excludes expenses that are “merely beneficial to general health,” including health club dues and treatments to relieve general discomfort not tied to a diagnosed condition.
Whole-body cryotherapy is not listed in IRS Publication 502 as a qualifying expense. That doesn’t make it automatically ineligible, but it does mean you’d likely need a letter of medical necessity from a physician stating the treatment is prescribed for a specific diagnosed condition. The IRS requires that treatments at health institutes be “prescribed by a physician” who “issues a statement that the treatment is necessary to alleviate a physical or mental disability or illness.” Even with such a letter, reimbursement is not guaranteed, and your HSA or FSA administrator may deny the claim. Medical cryosurgery performed by a doctor, on the other hand, qualifies without any extra documentation since it’s a standard medical procedure.
What Whole-Body Cryotherapy Costs Out of Pocket
Since you’ll be paying entirely out of pocket for whole-body cryotherapy, here’s what to expect. A single three-minute session typically runs $40 to $100. Longer sessions of around 10 minutes cost $75 to $100. Localized cryotherapy targeting a specific area like a knee or shoulder generally falls between $40 and $75 per session. Most facilities sell packages of five to ten sessions for $200 to $600, which brings the per-session cost down significantly. If you’re considering regular sessions, packages are almost always the better deal.
Keep in mind that proponents often recommend multiple sessions per week, at least initially, so costs can add up quickly. At two sessions per week and $60 per session, you’d spend roughly $480 a month, all without any insurance offset.