The NPI registry, counted
Every US health care provider who bills insurance has a National Provider Identifier, and CMS publishes the whole registry as a public file. This site republishes it, which means we had to load all 9,726,865 records and look at them. These are the counts. They are counts, not estimates, and every one of them is reproducible from the same public file.
How long since CMS last heard from the record
An NPI record changes when the person named on it files a change. CMS does
not re-ask, does not expire the record, and does not verify it — the
registry says so itself: Issuance of an NPI does not ensure or validate
that the Health Care Provider is Licensed or Credentialed.
So the
Last Update Date on a record is the last time anybody
confirmed anything about it.
| Last updated | Records | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Within the last 5 years | 4,442,425 | 45.7% |
| 5 to 10 years ago | 2,055,982 | 21.1% |
| 10 to 15 years ago | 1,355,426 | 13.9% |
| More than 15 years ago | 1,521,121 | 15.6% |
| No date at all | 351,911 | 3.6% |
| Ten years or more | 2,876,547 | 29.6% |
2,876,547 records — 29.6% of the registry — have not been confirmed with CMS for ten years or more. Of those, 617,750 still carry a date from 2007, the year NPPES opened: they have never been updated once in the registry's entire existence. The oldest date in the file is July 8, 2007.
Deactivated, and still published
CMS deactivates an NPI when a provider asks, or when it learns the provider has died. 370,737 records have been deactivated at some point, and 351,911 of them have never been reactivated — yet they are still in the file every month, and so on every site that republishes it. Only 84 of all 9,726,865 records point at a replacement NPI.
There is a quirk worth recording, because it lets you arrive at the same
number two ways: CMS clears Last Update Date when it
deactivates. No update date
and deactivated and never
reactivated
are the same 351,911 rows, with zero
exceptions across all 9,726,865. Which also means the age table above
describes live records only.
Addresses that cannot be a place of business
Every NPI application asks for a practice location and CMS will not accept a blank one. For 541,065 records there is no practice to give, so the field holds a private house instead. This is inferred from the registered taxonomy, not from reading the address.
- 352,011 training records (taxonomy 390200000X) — people enrolled in a programme, holding no licence and no practice. 352,010 of them carry an address, and 220,756 give the same one twice, as both practice and post, which is what a single home address looks like on this form.
- 189,054 care workers who work in the client's home — personal care attendants, home health aides, doulas, adult companions, homemakers. There are no premises at all: the work happens in somebody else's house. Some enter their own address. Some enter a client's, who never dealt with CMS and does not know.
Addresses that do not check out
These four are our findings, not CMS's. They come from checking each address line against the ZIP code and city written beside it. CMS makes no claim about address quality and should not be read as endorsing these numbers.
| ZIP belongs to a different city than the one on the record | 71,684 |
|---|---|
| Address line too incomplete to locate | 357,845 |
| Partial — locatable to the street, not the building | 44,368 |
| A PO box given as the place patients visit | 10,049 |
Organisations registered as people
NPPES types every record as an individual or an organisation, and separately asks for a taxonomy from the NUCC code set. The two can disagree. 816,084 records typed as organisations carry a taxonomy naming a role only a person can hold, so the registry asserts that a company is a chiropractor.
This one rests on a judgement about which names denote a person, so here is the judgement rather than just its result. A name counts if it ends in a role suffix:
(ist|yst|ian|cian|er|or|ant|ent|aide|nurse|midwife|student)$and does not contain a word denoting a facility or an organisation:
clinic|center|centre|agency|facility|hospital|supplier|laborator|
pharmac|home|unit|program|service|transport|equipment|suppl|group|
company|organization|team|department|institut|school|college|
university|bank|warehouse|store|shop|office|practice
The second pattern matters more than it looks. Without it,
Clinic/Center
ends in -er and counts as a person,
which put our first attempt at this number 40% too high. With it, the ten
commonest matches are:
- Chiropractor
- Family Medicine Physician
- Internal Medicine Physician
- Mental Health Counselor
- Optometrist
- Physical Therapist
- Dentist
- Specialist
- Professional Counselor
- Behavior Analyst
Method
- Source. NPPES Data Dissemination File, published by U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, download.cms.gov/nppes. CMS release of August 10, 2026. The file is a US Government work and in the public domain.
- Scope. All 9,726,865 records in that release. No sampling, no exclusions, no rounding. Where a count covers only live records it says so.
- Reproducing it. Every figure comes from one SQL file
run against the loaded release,
etl/41_data_quality.sql, which emits exactly the JSON this page renders. It is regenerated with each weekly CMS incremental, so the numbers here always describe the data being served — no figure on this page is typed by hand. - Ours versus CMS's. Everything under addresses that do not check out and organisations registered as people is our inference. Everything else is a direct count of a CMS field.
Using these numbers
Take them. They describe a public file and we claim nothing over them. A link back is welcome and not required; what we would ask is that you quote the release date with the figure, because 2,876,547 is true of August 10, 2026 and will be a different number next year.
Suggested form: 29.6% of the 9,726,865 records
in the US National Provider Identifier registry had not been confirmed
with CMS in ten years or more (NPI Guide analysis of the August 10, 2026 NPPES release).