Your NPI record may be publishing your home address
If you hold an NPI and have never updated it, your street address is probably public. Not because anyone leaked it — because the form asked for a practice location, you had none, and you gave the address you live at.
How this happens
Every NPI application asks for a practice location, and CMS will not accept a blank one. For a clinician with a clinic that is easy. For a great many people it is not, and the honest answer is their own home.
That answer then becomes part of the NPPES Data Dissemination file — the public extract CMS publishes every month, which this site and most other healthcare directories republish. Nobody asks you again. It stays there until you change it.
Who this affects, counted
These are counts from the August 10, 2026 release, not estimates. Anyone can reproduce them from the same file.
- 352,011 students. NPIs registered under taxonomy 390200000X, for people enrolled in a training programme. They have no practice, so the address is where they live. 220,756 of them give the same address twice — once as the practice, once for post — which is what one home address looks like on this form.
- 181,020 care workers who visit clients at home. Personal care attendants, home health aides, doulas, adult companions and homemakers. The work happens in somebody else's house, so there is no practice address to give. Some enter their own home. Some enter a client's.
- 2,873,294 records untouched for ten years or more, out of 9,374,951 published. A record only changes when the person named on it files a change, and most never do.
Sometimes it is not even your address
In September 2026 a relative of a household in Ohio wrote to us. Their street address had been on this site, and on every other copy of the federal file, since 2007 — because a home health aide had given their house as her practice location when she registered. The family had never dealt with CMS, had never heard of NPPES, and found out because somebody looked up a name.
That is the sharp end of this. The people most exposed are not always the ones who filled in the form.
How to check your own
- Look yourself up in the official registry at npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov, or find your listing on this site.
- Read the practice address, and then the mailing address. They are separate fields and both are public. If either is where you sleep, it is published.
How to change it
The change has to be made at the source, at nppes.cms.hhs.gov, with the same credentials you used to apply. It is free and takes a few minutes.
CMS will not let you leave the practice location blank, so you need something to put there. A clinic, an employer, a commercial mailbox and a registered agent address are all accepted. Providers have used all four. If you have genuinely retired, deactivating the NPI is the cleaner answer, and it stops the record being republished anywhere.
Your correction reaches this site automatically at the next monthly refresh. It reaches the other directories on whatever schedule they use, and none of them will know you asked.
What we do here
We publish a copy of the federal file, so the problem above is partly ours to answer for. Three things have changed as a result of people writing in.
- We do not publish a mailing address for individual providers at all, because for a sole practitioner it is almost always a home and it adds nothing the practice address does not already say.
- Student and in-home-care records show no address, phone or map — only a town and a note saying why. There is no clinic to send anyone to, so there is nothing lost.
- Ask us and we will take yours down, whether or not you change it at CMS. Use the report link on your listing, or write to [email protected]. We answer every one, usually the same day, and we do not ask you to prove anything before removing something.