What your state actually gives you when feeding goes wrong
In most of the United States anyone may call themselves a lactation consultant, no lactation credential is required to do it, and whether anyone can bill your insurance for it depends on rules your state wrote and nobody explains. We read those rules, publish what we find with the date we checked, and say plainly where we have not looked.
The three things that decide what help you can get
Does the title mean anything here?
5 states require a licence, 1 runs an optional state certification, and Georgia passed a law that was struck down. Everywhere else the words are unregulated.
Can anyone bill for it?
Federal law says most plans must cover lactation support with no copay. The catch is the in-network rule — and in Florida, North Carolina a board-certified consultant who is not a nurse cannot bill Medicaid at all.
Is there anyone near you?
27.9 lactation providers per 10,000 births nationally — but Vermont has 11.9× as many per birth as Mississippi.
What the published lists get wrong
The national professional body’s own licensure tracker is dated 2023 and is wrong four separate ways: it lists Georgia, whose law was struck down in 2022; it describes New Mexico as IBCLC-only licensure when it accepts several certifications; and it misses Connecticut, Massachusetts and Washington entirely. Two of those went into effect in the last two years.
See all 51 jurisdictions, with sources →
What we do not pretend to be
We are not a national directory of lactation consultants, and we will not become one — the certifying board’s registry answers exact-match lookups only, so nobody can build a verified national list, us included. Where a state publishes its own licence register we republish it and say when we checked: 96 currently-licensed practitioners in Connecticut. Everywhere else, the honest answer is that you can check a credential yourself in about a minute and do not need us to do it.
Free: a week of feeding and sleep log pages
Printable, one page per day, designed to be filled in one-handed at 3am. Track feeds, nappies and sleep so you have something concrete to show your pediatrician or IBCLC.
Opt-in not wired yet. Set site.kit.formId in src/lib/site.ts from Kit → Grow → Landing Pages & Forms. Until then this block renders no form rather than a dead one.
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If you are a lactation consultant
The same two questions decide where you can practise and whether you get paid, and the answers are scattered across fifty-one agencies. What we have checked so far, state by state →