Top US States by Population in a Shortage Area
PlainHealthAccess ranks US states by the total population residing in at least one HRSA-designated health professional shortage area, using the portal's source-vintaged HRSA dataset.
Research period:
Research question
Among the 56 US states and territories in HRSA shortage-area data, which carry the largest total population residing in at least one designated health shortage area, and how does population-in-shortage compare across high-population and low-population jurisdictions?
Methodology
This ranking shows the top 10 US states by total population residing in at least one HRSA-designated health professional shortage area. Values are calculated from this portal's source-vintaged HRSA snapshot; the visible vintage identifies the data release behind the comparison.
Health Resources & Services Administration occasionally suppresses values for reasons of confidentiality, sample size, or quality control. A state with a missing or zero population-in-shortage figure is excluded from this ranking rather than shown as a zero, since treating a suppressed value as zero would misrepresent it. A later agency revision is reflected here only after a verified portal refresh; use HRSA's official tools when current designation status matters.
Population-in-shortage measures residents living within the boundary of at least one designated shortage area; it does not distinguish between primary care, mental health, and dental shortages, and it measures geographic overlap rather than unmet need directly. See the limitations panel below for the full caveat.
The second chart on this page shows total HPSA designation counts for the same top-10 states, a related but distinct measure, so readers can compare population reach against raw designation counts.
See the methodology page for the full data sourcing and update process.
Top 10 US States by Population in Health Shortage Area (HRSA)
Current population-in-shortage figures as of your visit
HPSA Designations Across Those Same Top-10 States
Active Health Professional Shortage Area designations per state in this source-vintaged portal snapshot
The ranked top 10
The table below shows all 10 ranked states from this source-vintaged portal snapshot. Check HRSA directly when a current designation status matters.
| # | State | Population in shortage | Pct of state pop | Total HPSAs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 23,154,916 | 58.563 | 1,623 |
| 2 | Texas | 9,612,468 | 32.981 | 1,119 |
| 3 | Washington | 7,448,553 | 96.668 | 640 |
| 4 | Arizona | 7,151,502 | 100 | 649 |
| 5 | Illinois | 6,386,526 | 49.846 | 731 |
| 6 | Indiana | 4,321,570 | 63.688 | 366 |
| 7 | South Carolina | 4,294,043 | 83.894 | 267 |
| 8 | New Jersey | 3,785,277 | 45.424 | 127 |
| 9 | Colorado | 3,712,434 | 64.299 | 309 |
| 10 | Ohio | 3,702,797 | 31.381 | 495 |
Source: Health Resources & Services Administration, HRSA Bureau of Health Workforce shortage area population coverage statistics, used in this source-vintaged portal snapshot.
Findings
Top entity in the ranking
The top-ranked record in this dataset is California, with 23,154,916 residents in a shortage area. The full top-10 set is shown in the table above. Each value is calculated from the portal's source-vintaged dataset rather than hand-entered. A new Health Resources & Services Administration release requires a verified portal refresh before it appears here.
Distribution shape
The gap between the top-ranked record (23,154,916) and the 10th-ranked record (3,702,797) characterizes how concentrated the top of the distribution is. Where the top value is many multiples of the median value of the visible set, the population is highly concentrated, a small number of entities accumulate the bulk of the measured quantity. Where the top and bottom of the visible set are close together, the distribution is relatively flat across the top end. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.
Aggregate context
These figures situate the top-10 ranking against the full population of qualifying states: how many states have a reported population-in-shortage figure, what the combined total is across all of them, and what the average per-state share looks like. States with a missing or zero figure are excluded from this aggregate, consistent with the ranking above.
Source provenance
The records in this ranking originate from Health Resources & Services Administration, specifically the HRSA Bureau of Health Workforce shortage area population coverage statistics. PlainHealthAccess preserves a stated source vintage rather than claiming a real-time agency lookup. The methodology page documents the source URL, vintage, and processing limits.
Why this ranking matters
Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranked metric is calculated at the source.
What this analysis cannot tell us
Population-in-shortage measures the number of residents living within the geographic boundary of at least one designated HRSA shortage area. The metric does not distinguish between primary care, mental health, and dental shortages; a single resident may live within a designated area for one discipline and not for another. A 100 percent coverage value in this metric typically indicates that the entire state population resides in at least one shortage area at one discipline level, not that every resident lacks access to care. Population-in-shortage does not measure unmet need directly, it measures geographic overlap between residential population and designation boundary. Many residents inside a designation area have established care; many outside such areas face access challenges that the geographic designation system does not capture.
Sources
- Health Resources & Services Administration, Bureau of Health Workforce - https://data.hrsa.gov/topics/health-workforce/shortage-areas
Every figure on PlainHealthAccess is rendered directly from HRSA source data, no number is typed in by an editor. This ranking sorts states by total population residing in a designated shortage area, live from the dataset. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, review the public data changelog, or report a data issue for this page.