How we produce every figure
Every number on this site is computed from a dataset that carries its source and the date we read it. This page says which dataset, how it is computed, and where its edges are.
State licensing rules
There is one record for each of the 51 US jurisdictions — the states and the District of Columbia. For 37 of them we researched the state directly, and 22 of those rest on the state’s own published law or rule. The others rest on secondary reporting we have not yet been able to check against it. The remaining 14 come from the national professional body’s licensure tracker, dated 2023, and each of their pages says so.
A state page asks search engines to index it only when its record rests on the primary source. The other pages still render, and say what we checked.
Medicaid billing
We record one of four positions, always from the point of view of a lactation consultant who is not a nurse:
- Can bill directly — the state has a provider type they can enrol as and bill under.
- Only through another provider — the service can be paid for, but only billed by another enrolled provider.
- No route to bill — no provider type exists for them.
- Legislated — not verified live — a law creates a route, and we have not confirmed it is operating.
27 of 51 jurisdictions are researched so far, and 11 of those rest on the state’s own document. A state we have not researched shows “not checked”, never “no”.
The licence register
Where a state publishes its licence register as open data, we republish the currently active licences: 96 practitioners from 1 state, captured . We publish the city and the licence facts only — never a street address, postcode, phone number or email.
Access by state
Provider counts come from NPPES — National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (CMS): individuals enrolled under the two lactation consultant taxonomy codes, 163WL0100X (registered nurse) and 174N00000X (not a registered nurse), counted by state. Births come from NCHS VSRR — provisional live births by state, 2023. We publish counts only, never names. NPI provider taxonomies are self-selected at enrollment. CMS does not verify that a provider claiming a lactation taxonomy holds any lactation credential. These are counts of providers ENROLLED TO BILL for lactation services, not counts of verified IBCLCs.
How often the rules change
Counted from the effective dates in the licensure and Medicaid records since 2024-01-01. It is a floor: a state we have not researched may have changed without our knowing.
Checks that run on every build
- A data validator: internal consistency, arithmetic, that every fact carries a source and a capture date, and that no address is published.
- A scan of every built page that fails if a printed count disagrees with the list it counts, if a list of states is joined wrongly, or if a date-bound status has gone stale.
- A compliance check that every page touching health renders its disclaimers and signposts free support lines.
None of these can tell us a statute says what a record claims. Only reading the source does that, which is why confirmation against the primary document is recorded separately and decides what is indexed.
The data, to reuse
- State licensure and Medicaid positions — JSON, one record per jurisdiction, each with its sources
- Lactation care access by state — JSON, counts only
Our compilation is licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse it with attribution. Errors we have found and fixed are on the corrections page.