2027 ICD-10 changes: plantar fasciitis gets its own code

Eleven years is a long time to bill the most common heel pain diagnosis in outpatient care under a code for a different condition. That has been the arrangement since the industry moved from ICD-9 to ICD-10 in October 2015. Plantar fasciitis codes to M72.2, plantar fascial fibromatosis: a fibrotic disorder of the same tissue, but not the thing your 7am runner limps in with. The code book itself pointed plantar fasciitis at M72.2, and coders followed it. StatPearls calls plantar fasciitis the most common cause of heel pain in the outpatient setting, roughly a million US patient visits a year. That volume has been riding on a borrowed code.

On October 1, 2026, the workaround ends. The FY2027 diagnosis files delete M72.2 outright and give plantar fasciitis a subcategory of its own.

What changes in the FY2027 ICD-10-CM update?

The FY2027 update adds 190 diagnosis codes, deletes 30 and revises 4, and the new set applies to patient encounters from October 1, 2026 through September 30, 2027. Those counts come from the addenda inside the FY2027 code files CMS posted; coding blogs are already circulating two different totals, so count from the file. Thirty-one of the additions sit in the musculoskeletal chapter, which is why this year’s update deserves more of a PT owner’s attention than most.

The boundary follows the date of service. A September 30 visit is coded from the old set and an October 1 visit from the new one, no matter when the episode started. And CMS still lists the FY2027 coding guidelines as “not yet available” as of this writing, so the code files themselves are what you plan from.

What is the new ICD-10 code for plantar fasciitis?

From October 1, plantar fasciitis is M67.A01 for the right foot, M67.A02 for the left, and M67.A09 when no side is documented. M72.2 is deleted the same day and splits into M72.20, M72.21 and M72.22 for plantar fascial fibromatosis proper. The NCHS conversion table maps all six new codes back to M72.2, an official admission that one code has been doing two jobs.

Notice what the new codes ask for that the old one never did: a side. The FY2027 tabular addendum tucks “plantar fasciitis NOS” under M67.A09, so unsided documentation still has somewhere to land. But if your therapists leave laterality out of the assessment by habit, October is when that habit becomes visible in your coding.

What else moves for PT practices?

The sternoclavicular sprain gives up its duplicate. The thorax-chapter codes S23.420A, D and S are deleted. The shoulder-girdle series survives with laterality built in: S43.61- for the right joint, S43.62- for the left, S43.60- unspecified, each with the usual seventh characters. If S23.420 lives in a shoulder template or an active plan of care, remap it now, before the first rejection does it for you.

Most of the remaining musculoskeletal additions are the M86.8X osteomyelitis series picking up laterality at each limb site, 24 of the chapter’s 31 new codes. Lower on a PT caseload’s list, but the same template logic applies.

Where stale codes hide before October 1

Three places, in practice: documentation templates and favorites lists, active plans of care for episodes that will cross the boundary, and the claim queue. The middle one is the trap. A plantar fasciitis eval coded M72.2 on September 29 is correct, and every visit under that plan in October is not, until someone updates the diagnosis. The remap is not a memo to the team; it is a pass through the schedule.

You are already watching what 2027 does to your Medicare rates. This change lands three months earlier and reaches further. CMS notes that ICD-10 applies to everyone covered by HIPAA, not just providers billing Medicare or Medicaid; every payer you work with moves to the new set the same day.

It is also the season a pre-submission scrub earns its keep. Orion builds the claim from the note the therapist already signed and scrubs it before it goes out, each finding paired with a one-click fix. A deleted diagnosis surfaces in your own queue instead of coming back from the payer as a denial. Whatever system you run, watch the denial report closely through mid-October. Our piece on claim denial benchmarks covers what normal looks like, and a code-set miss announces itself there first.

Eleven years of billing the right treatment under the wrong name ends this fall. Give the remap an afternoon in September and your October claims will read like nothing happened.