CHEERS 2022 Checklist: Reporting Economic Evaluations

The CHEERS 2022 checklist (Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards) is the reporting guideline for economic evaluations of health interventions — cost-effectiveness analyses, cost-utility analyses, cost-benefit analyses, and cost-minimisation or budget-impact studies. It specifies what a completed study must document so that readers, reviewers, and anyone trying to reuse the analysis in a health-policy or health-technology-assessment (HTA) decision can evaluate its methods and assumptions. CHEERS was developed under the EQUATOR Network and ISPOR (the professional society for health economics and outcomes research); the current version — CHEERS 2022, led by Don Husereau and colleagues and published simultaneously across 14 journals including Value in Health, BMJ, and PharmacoEconomics — updates and replaces the original 2013 statement.

Last verified 2026-08-16 against the EQUATOR Network’s CHEERS reporting-guideline page.

The CHEERS 2022 Checklist

CHEERS 2022 comprises 28 reporting items organized into seven sections that follow the structure of a typical economic-evaluation manuscript, from title through funding disclosure — up from 24 items across six sections in the original 2013 checklist. The table below summarizes what each section covers; use it to sanity-check a draft manuscript, but complete the actual numbered checklist from the official source before submission, not from this summary.

Section	What It Covers
Title	Identify the study as an economic evaluation and specify the interventions compared.
Abstract	A structured summary covering objectives, perspective, setting, methods, results, and conclusions.
Introduction	The study’s objective and its policy or clinical context, including why the economic question matters.
Methods	The largest section — target population and subgroups, study setting and location, comparators, time horizon, discount rate, analytic perspective (e.g., healthcare payer vs. societal), outcome and cost measurement, valuation of preference-based outcomes, the model used (if any) and its assumptions, analytics and statistical methods, and characterization of heterogeneity and uncertainty.
Results	Study parameters, incremental costs and outcomes, characterization of uncertainty (e.g., sensitivity analysis, cost-effectiveness acceptability curves), and characterization of heterogeneity across subgroups.
Discussion	Study findings, limitations, generalizability, and how the results should inform decision-making, in the context of current evidence.
Other	Sources of funding and any role the funder played, plus conflict-of-interest disclosures for authors.

CHEERS 2022 expanded on the 2013 checklist to explicitly cover a wider range of study designs — including decision-analytic model-based evaluations that are not tied to a single clinical trial — and to sharpen items on distributional and equity considerations, which had become more central to health-economics methodology since 2013. The official, authoritative version of the checklist — including the exact numbered item wording authors are expected to complete and submit — is maintained by EQUATOR at its CHEERS reporting guideline page, which also links to a Shiny web tool for generating a completed checklist as a Word or PDF document to accompany a manuscript submission.

Who Needs to Use CHEERS 2022

• Authors of economic evaluations. Any study that compares the costs and outcomes of two or more health interventions — cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), cost-utility analysis (CUA, typically reporting cost per quality-adjusted life-year), cost-benefit analysis (CBA), and cost-minimisation analysis — falls within CHEERS’s scope.
• Trial-based and model-based evaluations alike. CHEERS applies whether the economic evaluation is conducted alongside a clinical trial (a “within-trial” analysis) or is a standalone decision-analytic model (e.g., a Markov model or discrete-event simulation) synthesising evidence from multiple sources.
• Submissions to journals that require it. Many health-economics, health-policy, and general medical journals list CHEERS as a submission requirement in their Instructions for Authors, and reviewers increasingly check a manuscript against it directly during peer review, similar to how CONSORT or PRISMA checklists are used for other study types.
• HTA and reimbursement submissions. Health technology assessment bodies and payers that evaluate cost-effectiveness evidence for coverage or pricing decisions commonly expect CHEERS-consistent reporting, even outside a journal-submission context.

How CHEERS Relates to Other Reporting Guidelines

CHEERS is one of more than 400 reporting guidelines catalogued in the EQUATOR Network’s library, and it sits alongside — not in competition with — guidelines for other study designs. A single research programme may need several: a trial’s clinical findings are reported against CONSORT, while a trial-based economic evaluation nested inside that same trial is reported separately against CHEERS. Observational cost data draws on STROBE principles for the underlying study design, and a systematic review synthesising multiple economic evaluations would itself be reported against PRISMA 2020. For a general map of which guideline applies to which study design, see CASRAI’s EQUATOR Network guide. Background on how a reporting guideline differs from methodological guidance, and on the broader landscape of clinical study design types, is covered on those pages respectively.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does CHEERS stand for?

Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards. “2022” refers to the current version of the checklist, which replaced the original CHEERS 2013 statement.

How many items are in the CHEERS 2022 checklist?

28 items organized across seven sections: Title, Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Other. That’s up from 24 items across six sections in the 2013 version. For the exact numbered item list and wording, use the official checklist maintained on the EQUATOR Network’s CHEERS page rather than a summary.

Is CHEERS required to publish an economic evaluation?

It depends on the journal, the same way it does for CONSORT or PRISMA. Many health-economics and health-policy journals list CHEERS as a submission requirement in their Instructions for Authors and ask for a completed checklist alongside the manuscript. Always check the specific target journal rather than assuming.

What is the difference between CHEERS 2013 and CHEERS 2022?

CHEERS 2022 updates the original 2013 statement to more explicitly cover decision-analytic model-based evaluations (not just trial-based analyses), and sharpens items addressing distributional and equity considerations in economic evaluation, reflecting how the methodology has developed since 2013.

Does CHEERS apply to cost-effectiveness models as well as trial-based studies?

Yes. CHEERS 2022 was explicitly broadened to cover both trial-based economic evaluations and standalone decision-analytic models, so a Markov model or similar simulation-based cost-effectiveness analysis is within its scope, not just analyses conducted alongside a clinical trial.

Where can I find the official CHEERS 2022 checklist to complete?

On the EQUATOR Network’s CHEERS reporting-guideline page, which hosts the checklist itself and a web tool for generating a completed Word or PDF checklist to accompany a manuscript submission.

Related reading: STROBE Checklist — The complete 22-item STROBE checklist for reporting cohort, case-control, and cross-sectional studies, organized by section, with the four items that differ by design.

See also: PRISMA checklist — PRISMA’s 2026 revision adds AI-assisted screening, living review checklists, and machine-readable flow diagrams.