OBJECTIVES: To explore the current and past methods used to account for patient-level costs in hospitals. METHODS: Literature search was performed using Medline (by PubMed), Scopus and Web of Science databases. We only included studies which assessed individual patient’s cost during an entire hospital admission. Exclusions criteria was studies which only estimated patients’ costs; only calculated mean patients’ costs; only assessed costs of a single condition, a single intervention or evaluated only few hospital’s department. RESULTS: From a total of 1,813 studies, only eight fulfilled inclusion criteria and presented no exclusion criteria. Five different costing methods were employed: Absorption Costing Method in four of them; Activity-Based Costing and Cost-to-Charge Ratios were used in two studies; Relative Value Units and Economic Costing in just one study - in two studies two methods were applied simultaneously. Patient-level costs from the hospital perspective is less explored than other perspectives. Most of hospitals analyzed were large and, in general, the applied costing methods were poorly described (especially related on how personnel, material, medicines and depreciation costs were measured and allocated per patient). A hospital can obtain the cost of each patient, regardless of type (public, private or non-profit), size (small, medium or large) and location (developed or developing country), but the costing process can be challenging, because some hospital departments may not record information with the necessary detail, systems can be expensive and a large volume of records require checking, validations and investigations. CONCLUSIONS: Despite of patient-level costs are part of the Value-based Healthcare equation, and hospitals costs are usually one of the highest in the healthcare chain, literature is scarce on this subject. More studies on this setting are urgent and should be fostered.