What is RARC (Remittance Advice Remark Code)?
A supplementary code that adds the specific detail a CARC alone does not carry.
Definition
RARCs supplement CARCs. Where the CARC says a class of thing went wrong, the RARC names the specific element — which field was missing, which policy applied, which document is required. They appear as MA-prefixed, M-prefixed, and N-prefixed codes in the remittance.
For the highest-volume denial in United States healthcare — CO-16, "claim lacks information" — the CARC is genuinely uninformative on its own. The RARC is the entire actionable content of the denial. A denial workflow that captures reason codes but discards remark codes will show CO-16 as its largest bucket and be unable to do anything about it.
Why it matters
Denial reporting without RARCs cannot resolve the biggest denial category it will find. Capturing remark codes is what makes CO-16 and CO-A1 workable.
Denial codes to know
Related terms
See this in your own numbers
PayerVista turns the remittance files your payers already send into a live view of claims, denials, payer performance, and outstanding AR — in minutes, with no implementation project.