Our Data

FindKidTherapy tracks 198,859 NPI-registered pediatric therapy providers across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This page explains exactly where that number comes from, what it does and does not mean, and how to download and cite the underlying dataset. We publish it openly because parents, journalists, researchers, and policy analysts keep asking the same question — how many pediatric therapists are there near me? — and the honest answer requires showing our work.

Where the data comes from

Every provider record in our directory originates in the NPPES National Provider Identifier (NPI) registry, the public database maintained by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Every healthcare provider who bills insurance in the United States must hold an NPI, and the registry records each provider's name, practice address, and taxonomy — the standardized code describing what kind of care they deliver. It is the same source of record that insurers and Medicare use. We do not scrape private directories, buy marketing lists, or estimate.

From the full registry we select providers whose primary taxonomy falls in one of four pediatric therapy groups: Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Speech-Language Pathology, and Applied Behavior Analysis. Records are deduplicated by NPI — one provider, one row — and rolled up by state and specialty. The result is the table below and the downloadable dataset it summarizes.

How we count, step by step

1. Start from the registry. We ingest the public NPPES registry export and keep the fields the directory needs: NPI number, provider or organization name, taxonomy, and practice address. No private or purchased data enters the pipeline.
2. Filter to the four pediatric therapy groups. Taxonomy codes map cleanly onto physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech-language pathology, and applied behavior analysis. A provider whose primary taxonomy falls outside those groups — a pediatrician, a psychologist, a general counselor — is not counted here, even though children may see them.
3. Deduplicate by NPI. One NPI, one row. A therapist who appears in the registry with multiple address updates over the years still counts once.
4. Roll up by state and specialty. The published table is the full result: 51 rows (50 states plus the District of Columbia), four specialty columns each, summing exactly to the national total. No sampling, no modeling, no extrapolation — these are counts, so there is no margin of error to disclose, only the registry's own lag.
5. Freeze a quarterly release. Each quarter we snapshot the rollup, publish it as versioned CSV and JSON files, and record the date the underlying records were last refreshed from NPPES. The files never change after release; the next quarter gets new files.

How this compares to other sources

If you have seen different therapist counts elsewhere, the difference is almost always in what is being counted. Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational data measures employment — jobs held — not registered providers, and does not isolate pediatric practice. State licensing boards count licenses, which are issued per state, so a therapist licensed in three states appears three times across board tallies but once in ours. Commercial directories count listings, which mix in duplicates and stale entries with no public methodology. The NPI registry is the one national, public, uniformly-defined source, which is why we build on it — while being explicit that it measures registrations, not active caseloads.

Reading the numbers responsibly

Raw counts reward big states: California and Texas top most columns simply because they are large. For access questions — is it hard to find an ABA provider here? — the count per child matters more than the count, and even then the state level hides the real story, which is urban concentration. A state can look well-served in aggregate while entire rural counties have no registered pediatric speech therapist at all. Our city pages break the same registry data down further; for research use, pair the state table with census child population data before drawing access conclusions.

What "NPI-registered" means — and what it doesn't

We deliberately say NPI-registered rather than "verified." An NPI registration is a fact we can check against a federal registry: this provider exists, holds this taxonomy, and lists this practice address. It is not a claim that we have independently vetted all 198,859 providers, that each one is currently accepting new patients, or that any particular provider is right for your child. Registration also lags reality in both directions: a provider who recently retired may still appear, and a newly licensed one may not appear yet. Where our directory shows richer detail — accepting-new-patients status, credentials with verification links — those signals are documented separately on How We Vet Providers. Nothing on this page is a clinical recommendation.

Known limitations

• Feeding and sensory-integration counts are not separate rows. Feeding therapy (800 records) and sensory integration (1,199 records) are tracked as sub-categories within Occupational Therapy and Speech-Language Pathology. Breaking them out as additional specialty rows would double-count providers against the 198,859 total, so they stay documented here as non-additive subsets.
• No Medicaid or telehealth breakdowns — yet. The NPPES registry does not record whether a provider accepts Medicaid or offers telehealth, and we will not publish numbers we cannot source. Those columns will be added only when a verifiable source (such as state Medicaid enrollment files) is integrated.
• Counts reflect practice location of record. A provider is counted in the state of their registered practice address, which for multi-state practices may differ from where they see the most patients.
• A count is availability of registrations, not open appointment slots. Waitlists in pediatric therapy are real and vary by city and specialty far more than raw counts suggest.

Provider counts by state and specialty (2026Q3)

All figures below are rendered directly from the published dataset — the same numbers you get in the CSV and JSON downloads. As one example of reading the table: Florida has 6,095 NPI-registered pediatric therapy providers — 1,636 in ABA, 1,481 in occupational therapy, 1,343 in physical therapy, and 1,635 in speech-language pathology.

Update cadence

The dataset is released quarterly (2026Q3 is the current release) and the underlying provider records were last refreshed from NPPES on 2026-07-01. Within a quarter the directory itself keeps updating nightly, so the live counts you see on state and city pages can drift slightly ahead of the published quarterly snapshot; the downloadable files are the citable, fixed release.

One reconciliation worth stating plainly: the NPPES registry rollup in this release counts 198,859 providers, while the live searchable directory currently includes 196,712 whose records have been imported to date. Both figures are accurate in their own frame — the rollup measures the registry, the searchable count measures what you can browse on this site today — and the gap closes as imports catch up to the registry.

License and citation

The dataset is free to use under CC BY 4.0— use it in articles, research, or apps, with attribution. Suggested citation:

FindKidTherapy. "Pediatric Therapy Provider Availability by State and Specialty — 2026Q3." findkidtherapy.com/about/our-data.

This is aggregated, derived data — not a re-publication of the NPI registry. For the registry itself, go to npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov. For record-level questions or corrections, email [email protected].

Changelog

• 2026Q3 — Initial public release. State × specialty counts for the four core pediatric therapy specialties (198,859 providers, 51 states + DC, refreshed from NPPES 2026-07-01). Feeding and sensory-integration documented as non-additive OT/Speech subsets. Medicaid and telehealth columns deliberately omitted pending a verifiable source.

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