X-ray absorption compared with hydrogen density column estimates toward CHEX-MATE galaxy clusters. Left panel: neutral atomic hydrogen density column derived from the HI4PI survey. Middle panel: total hydrogen density column estimated using the method of Willingale et al. (2013). Right panel: total hydrogen density column estimated in this work using the Planck and HI4PI surveys. XMM-Newton measurements are jointly fitted with projected temperature and metallicity of the intra-cluster gas in an annular region delimited by a cluster-centric radius range of [0.15,  0.6]×r₅₀₀. The red (black) data points indicate X-ray measurements achieved with an S/N higher (lower) than 2. The red curves depict a linear regression through red points. The labels in the lower right corner of each plot indicate the median, Med(ΔN_H/N_H), and standard deviation, σ(ΔN_H/N_H), of the relative differences separating both coordinates of each red point. The dash-dotted lines indicate the identity line that is most similar to the best-fit line in the right panel.