GLP-1 & Weight Loss Care Access by State (2026)

This access report is part of Weight Loss Rankings' living editorial database. It joins three verifiable sources — the CMS NPPES provider registry, US Census population estimates, and our own verified GLP-1 telehealth provider dataset — into one state-by-state table you can download, cite, and re-derive.

Where you live still determines how easy it is to see a weight-loss clinician in person. We filtered the CMS National Provider registry to every active clinic and practitioner with an obesity-medicine, endocrinology, bariatric, or weight-management-adjacent taxonomy — 31,083 NPI-verified records across all 50 states and DC — and divided each state's count by its Census population estimate.^[1] The result: Maryland has 18.15 relevant clinics per 100,000 residents, while Iowa has just 5.24 — a 3.5× gap between the best- and worst-served states.

The second half of the story is that the gap matters less than it used to. Our verified telehealth dataset counts 119 GLP-1 telehealth providers with published pricing, 70 of which serve all 50 states — so every state, including the thinnest in-person markets, has at least 75 verified telehealth options. The full methodology, including exactly what this dataset does not claim, is below the table.

The headline numbers

The full state table

One row per state, plus Washington, D.C. “Clinics” counts every active, NPI-verified practice relevant to medical weight management; “specialist-primary” is the subset whose primary NPPES specialty is obesity medicine, endocrinology, or bariatric practice. “Telehealth providers” and the cheapest verified compounded prices reflect only providers that publish which states they serve. “Adult obesity %” is the CDC BRFSS 2024 prevalence estimate for adults 18+, and the Care Gap Index compares that burden to the state's clinic supply — it gets its own section below the table. Click any state name to browse that state's clinic directory, or download the full table at the bottom of this page.

Highlighted rows mark the highest (Maryland) and lowest (Iowa) clinics-per-100k jurisdictions. CDC did not publish a 2024 obesity estimate for Tennessee, so its obesity and Care Gap cells show an em dash. Snapshot: July 2026. The same rows are downloadable as CSV/JSON in the “Cite this data” section below.

Access deserts and best-served states

The thin end of the table is dominated by the Upper Midwest and the islands: Iowa, Minnesota, Hawaii, North Dakota, Nebraska all sit at or below 5.78 clinics per 100,000 residents. These are large-area, lower-population states where specialist care concentrates in one or two metro systems — an honest reading is “fewer specialist doors to knock on,” not “no care at all,” since primary-care prescribing isn't captured here (see methodology).

At the dense end, Maryland, District of Columbia, New Jersey, Connecticut, West Virginia lead the country. The corridor around Maryland and DC benefits from an unusual concentration of academic medical centers and endocrinology practices relative to population; compact high-income states like New Jersey and Connecticut show the same pattern.

Set the two halves of this table side by side and a clear pattern emerges: telehealth coverage compensates almost exactly where in-person density is thinnest. Every state on the “deserts” list still has 75+ verified GLP-1 telehealth options — Iowa, last in clinics per capita, has 100 verified telehealth providers, more than many dense states — because 70 of the 119 verified providers serve all 50 states. For medication access specifically — compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide pricing — the state you live in now changes your options far less than it did before telehealth. Our state-by-state telehealth pages list which providers serve each state, and the state Medicaid GLP-1 checker covers the public-coverage side of the same question.

The Care Gap Index — where obesity burden outruns specialist supply

The Care Gap Index is the ratio of a state's adult obesity prevalence to its weight-loss clinics per 100,000 residents, each measured against the national median — 1.00 means burden and supply are balanced, and anything above 1.00 means the state carries more obesity burden than specialist supply. By that measure, Iowa is the most under-supplied state in the country at 1.74: an adult obesity rate of 36.6% served by just 5.24 relevant clinics per 100,000 residents.

The pattern is starkly regional: the Upper Midwest — Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota — fills the entire worst-five list, pairing above-median obesity rates with some of the thinnest specialist coverage in the country. The best-supplied end is the inverse: District of Columbia (0.38), Maryland (0.45), Colorado (0.54) combine dense clinic networks with below-median obesity prevalence. The index measures specialist in-person density, not overall access — primary-care prescribing isn't counted, and telehealth fills part of the gap: every state on the largest-gaps list still has 92+ verified GLP-1 telehealth options.

Methodology

Every number on this page comes from one of four public sources:

1. In-person clinics: CMS NPPES bulk registry, filtered to obesity-medicine, endocrinology, bariatric, and weight-management-adjacent taxonomies (relevant tiers only; secondary-tier mismatches excluded).^[1] Each record is an active NPI. We report the total alongside the specialist-primary subset (12,736 of 31,083 records nationally) so that facility and adjacent-generalist records are never conflated with dedicated specialist practices.
2. Telehealth coverage and prices: WeightLossRankings.org verified provider dataset — GLP-1 telehealth providers with at least one verified ongoing compounded monthly price and published state coverage. A provider counts toward a state only when its published coverage includes that state; the cheapest verified semaglutide/tirzepatide columns are the lowest verified ongoing monthly price among providers serving that state.
3. Population denominators: US Census Bureau NST-EST2024 state population estimates (POPESTIMATE2024).^[2]
4. Adult obesity prevalence: CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) 2024 — percent of adults aged 18+ with obesity, total stratification, via data.cdc.gov.^[3]

The Care Gap Index is (state adult obesity prevalence ÷ national-median prevalence) ÷ (state clinics per 100,000 ÷ national-median clinics per 100,000). A value of 1.00 means a state's obesity burden matches its specialist supply; above 1.00, burden outruns supply. Tennessee has no published 2024 BRFSS estimate, so it carries no prevalence value and no index.

What we do not claim. This dataset contains no insurance-acceptance data — an NPI record tells you a clinic exists and what it practices, not whether it takes your plan. It contains no self-reported telehealth flags: NPPES telehealth fields are voluntary and inconsistently maintained, so we ignore them entirely and count telehealth only from our own verified provider dataset. And it does not capture GLP-1 prescribing by general primary-care physicians outside the taxonomy allow-list, so it measures specialist in-person access, not every possible prescriber. Only registry-verified and price-verified fields appear in the table.

Explore the data further

• GLP-1 Compounded Pricing Index — the monthly price medians behind the “cheapest verified” columns.
• The clinic directory — browse the full 31,083-record roster by state and city.
• The provider comparison table — every verified telehealth provider, side by side.
• State Medicaid GLP-1 checker — whether your state's Medicaid program covers GLP-1s.
• Medicaid GLP-1 Spending by State — quarterly Medicaid spending and prescriptions per state, and the 2026 obesity-coverage cliff.
• Best semaglutide providers — our ranked, scored list of the telehealth options counted above.