a procedureLiver transplant

A diseased liver is removed and replaced, either with a whole organ from a deceased donor or with a lobe cut from a living one. The graft is joined to the recipient's hepatic artery, portal vein, inferior vena cava and bile duct, and the bile duct is where most of the later trouble comes from. The recipient takes immunosuppressant drugs for as long as the graft works. A living donor has healthy liver tissue removed, gains nothing clinically, and keeps the scar.

The law comes before the price on this page, for the same reason it does on the kidney page: two people go to theatre and only one of them is ill.

The standing international text is the Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism, agreed in Istanbul in April 2008 and revised in Madrid in July 2018. It defines the neutral act plainly — "Travel for transplantation is the movement of persons across jurisdictional borders for transplantation purposes" — and then separates it from the two things it is routinely confused with, the trafficking of organs and the trafficking of people for organ removal. Its fourth principle sets the line the statutes are drawn against: "Organ donation should be a financially neutral act." The World Health Organization put the same rule in its Guiding Principles, endorsed by the World Health Assembly in May 2010, which allow reimbursement of a donor's verifiable expenses and forbid donation "without any monetary payment or other reward of monetary value".

National law then splits on two questions that are easy to run together. Whether a non-resident may be transplanted in the country at all. And whether a living donor who is not related to the recipient may donate, and on whose authority — a committee, a court, a ministry. Some countries permit both under conditions, some permit residents only, and purchase is prohibited nearly everywhere: in the United States the National Organ Transplant Act makes it unlawful to transfer a human organ "for valuable consideration" where the transfer affects interstate commerce, while putting the donor's travel, housing and lost wages outside that phrase. One instrument, one date, one jurisdiction at a time, the reading sits on this directory's transplant prohibition page rather than here.

What the published follow-up records is specific to this organ and it is not encouraging. A 2021 review in the World Journal of Hepatology found "improper pre-and post-transplant infectious screening, inadequate opportunistic infection prophylaxis, and loss to follow-up" among patients who had travelled. It carries a Saudi series comparing grafts obtained in China with domestic ones — sepsis 9.5% against 0.83%, acquired hepatitis B 5.4% against 0%, biliary complications 32.4% against 11.7% — and a Taiwanese survival comparison, domestic against abroad, of 89.2%, 79.5% and 75.2% at one, five and ten years against 79.8%, 62.3% and 49.9%.

Inference — those figures count patients who came home and presented somewhere that published. A recipient who died abroad is in nobody's series.

General anaesthesia and a long operation; the recipient is opened, the old liver dissected off the vena cava, the graft implanted and four sets of plumbing joined. Intensive care follows, then a ward stay measured in weeks rather than nights: PSRI Hospital in Delhi, which publishes a price, tells patients to expect 10-15 days in hospital and a few months at home. Immunosuppression starts immediately and does not stop. Where the donor is living, a second team operates on a healthy person the same day, and that person's own recovery, complications and lost earnings sit outside every package price read for this record.

Two published prices were read for this record on 17 September 2026 and they are not comparable. Milliman's actuarial table puts estimated average US billed charges for a liver transplant at 1,017,800 dollars against 446,800 for a kidney, with 10,916 liver transplants estimated for 2025. PSRI Hospital in Delhi publishes 18-20 lakh rupees for a living-donor transplant and 30-35 lakh for deceased-donor and complex cases, prose inclusions and no validity date. No third country's provider page carrying a liver transplant price was found for this batch, and no page found anywhere states a price for a non-resident specifically. A directory can report that absence; it cannot fill it.

This page describes an operation and reports what named instruments and published studies say about it. It is not medical advice and it is not legal advice, and it does not tell anyone what to do.