Top US States by HRSA Shortage Area Count
US states and territories ranked by total HPSA designations across all three discipline tracks: primary care, mental health, and dental.
Research period:
Research question
Among the 56 US states and territories tracked by the HRSA Bureau of Health Workforce, which carry the highest count of Health Professional Shortage Area designations, and how do designation counts distribute across the primary care, mental health, and dental discipline tracks?
Methodology
This ranking shows the top 10 US states and territories by total Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA) designations, broken out by primary care, mental health, and dental discipline tracks. 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 or territory with a missing or zero designation count 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.
This total collapses three legally distinct designation types, geographic, population-group, and facility, into a single count, so two states with a similar total can have very different underlying shortage profiles. HPSA severity scores (0 to 25 for primary care and mental health, 0 to 26 for dental) are not weighted into this count; a state's total reflects how many areas are designated, not how severe each one is.
The secondary chart below the limitations panel shows the same states' HRSA Medically Underserved Area (MUA) designation counts, a related but distinct federal shortage measure, so readers can compare the two designation systems side by side.
See the methodology page for the full data sourcing and update process.
Top 10 US States by HRSA Health Professional Shortage Area Count
Current HPSA designation counts as of your visit
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 | Total HPSAs | Primary care | Mental health | Dental |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 1,623 | 559 | 518 | 546 |
| 2 | Texas | 1,119 | 394 | 387 | 338 |
| 3 | Alaska | 988 | 330 | 330 | 328 |
| 4 | Missouri | 925 | 340 | 259 | 326 |
| 5 | Michigan | 793 | 274 | 257 | 262 |
| 6 | Illinois | 731 | 296 | 185 | 250 |
| 7 | Kentucky | 701 | 245 | 210 | 246 |
| 8 | Arizona | 649 | 227 | 212 | 210 |
| 9 | Washington | 640 | 219 | 217 | 204 |
| 10 | Florida | 637 | 229 | 204 | 204 |
Source: Health Resources & Services Administration, HRSA Bureau of Health Workforce HPSA and MUA designation files, used in this source-vintaged portal snapshot.
Findings
Top entity in the ranking
The top-ranked record in this dataset is California, with a value of 1,623 total HPSA designations. 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 (1,623) and the 10th-ranked record (637) 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 total, what the combined total is across all of them, and what the average per-state value looks like. States with a missing or zero total 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 HPSA and MUA designation files. 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
HRSA HPSA designations follow Title 42 CFR Part 5 criteria and involve three designation types, geographic area, population group, and facility, that this aggregate count collapses into a single state total. Alaska's elevated designation count concentrates in a small population (~1.83 million residents) reflecting vast geography and low provider density across remote regions; the count is not directly comparable to high-population states like California. HPSA scores vary from 0 to 25 for primary care and mental health and 0 to 26 for dental shortages, aggregate counts do not weight by severity. Designation status changes over time as demographics shift, facilities close or open, and provider recruitment efforts succeed or fail. A high designation count does not imply a lower quality of care for residents who do reach a provider; it indicates that the per-capita supply of providers falls below the HRSA threshold across a measurable share of the state's geography or population.
Secondary cut from the same source
Top 10 states by HRSA Medically Underserved Area designation count
Sources
- Health Resources & Services Administration, Bureau of Health Workforce, Shortage Area Designation Files - https://data.hrsa.gov/topics/health-workforce/shortage-areas
- HRSA Data Warehouse, HPSA & MUA Public Search Tools - https://data.hrsa.gov/
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 designated HPSA count (primary care, mental health, and dental combined). See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, review the public data changelog, or report a data issue for this page.