•Pulmonary artery diastolic pressure (PADP) may approximate pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (PCWP).•The strength of this association has not been well described in cardiogenic shock (CS).•We observed a moderate correlation between PADP and PCWP in most patients with CS.•Right ventricular CS was the only CS phenotype in which the correlation was poor.•A PADP ≥ 24 mmHg infers a PCWP ≥ 18 mmHg with ≥ 90% confidence in most patients with CS. It is common for clinicians to use the pulmonary artery diastolic pressure (PADP) as a surrogate for the pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (PCWP). Here, we determine the validity of this relationship in patients with various phenotypes of cardiogenic shock (CS). In this analysis of the Critical Care Cardiology Trials Network registry, we identified 1225 people admitted with CS who received pulmonary artery catheters. Linear regression, Bland-Altman and receiver operator characteristic analyses were performed to determine the strength of the association between PADP and PCWP in patients with left-, right-, biventricular, and other non-myocardia phenotypes of CS (eg, arrhythmia, valvular stenosis, tamponade). There was a moderately strong correlation between PADP and PCWP in the total population (r = 0.64, n = 1225) and in each CS phenotype, except for right ventricular CS, for which the correlation was weak (r = 0.43, n = 71). Additionally, we found that a PADP ≥ 24 mmHg can be used to infer a PCWP ≥ 18 mmHg with ≥ 90% confidence in all but the right ventricular CS phenotype. This analysis validates the practice of using PADP as a surrogate for PCWP in most patients with CS; however, it should generally be avoided in cases of right ventricular-predominant CS.