Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA)

A geographic area, population group, or facility that HRSA has designated as having too few clinicians relative to a federal shortage threshold. This portal reports three shortage tracks present in the retained HRSA file: primary care, mental health, and dental.

Providers needed

HRSA's modeled count of additional full-time clinicians required to lift a designated HPSA above its designation threshold. Because each designation is measured independently, state and national sums are additive and do not require an overlap correction.

Designated status

Only rows with status designated enter these rankings. Proposed, withdrawn, or otherwise inactive records are excluded so the gap reflects currently recognized shortages in the portal's source-vintaged snapshot (2026).

What these figures are not

Providers needed is not a job-vacancy count, an appointment wait-time measure, or a judgment about the quality of care available to residents who already reach a clinician. It is a supply-side structural estimate tied to federal designation rules.

It is tempting to rank healthcare shortage by counting designations, but a raw count of Health Professional Shortage Areas hides how big each shortage actually is. A state can carry hundreds of small facility designations and still need fewer clinicians than a state with a handful of large geographic designations covering whole rural regions. HRSA's providers-needed estimate solves that problem: for every designated area it models how many additional full-time clinicians would have to start practicing for the area to clear its designation threshold, and because each area is measured independently the figures add up cleanly across a state without the double-counting that plagues population-based shortage measures. That makes the provider gap the closest thing to an apples-to-apples national yardstick for the size of the workforce problem.

The gap also points directly at the policy levers that can close it. The same designations that generate these provider-needed estimates are the gatekeepers for the recruitment programs built to fill them: National Health Service Corps loan repayment and scholarships, the J-1 visa waiver that keeps internationally trained physicians practicing in underserved communities, Medicare bonus payments for clinicians who work inside a shortage area, and the Federally Qualified Health Center and Rural Health Clinic programs that stand up safety-net practices where the market alone will not. A state at the top of this ranking is not simply worse off; it is also where each additional recruited clinician removes the most unmet need, which is why federal placement dollars are weighted toward the highest-scoring areas. Reading the gap alongside the designation counts in the table above shows both how deep a state's shortage runs and how concentrated the remedy needs to be.