Two free, official databases (the CDC and SART) let you look up almost every fertility clinic in the country and see their real outcomes. Not every clinic shows up though. CDC reporting is required by law but carries no penalty. Around 90% report, which leaves roughly 40 to 50 clinics that either don’t self-report or don’t approve their data. SART is also voluntary, so a minority aren’t in there.
The success rates and numbers are easy to misread though. Even the CDC tells people not to use their data to personally rank clinics, that comparing clinics on its numbers “may not be meaningful,” because a clinic’s success rate depends on who it treats. We discuss further how to read those numbers on our What Sets Clinics Apart page. This page here is two things: where to find the databases, and how to read them.
The two databases
The CDC (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) publishes success rates for essentially every clinic that reports, which is federally required of them. You can search by zip code, state, or a map, then open any clinic’s page to see who they treat and their outcomes broken out by age and egg source.
SART (the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology) is the professional body most US fertility clinics belong to. Its Find a Clinic tool lets you search by location and pull up the listed clinics’ success-rate report. SART usually posts newer data than the government.
Most clinics show up in both. It’s worth checking each, since they present the data a little differently and one is sometimes clearer than the other.
How to read them without getting fooled
We assumed the practice with the biggest number was the best one. It took us a while to learn that isn’t how it works, and longer still to realize these databases existed at all.
The databases are only useful if you read them the way the people who built them tell you to.
- Don’t rank clinics by the headline number. Both the CDC and SART say, in writing, not to use their data to compare clinics against each other. A clinic’s overall rate reflects who they treat as much as how good they are.
- Compare apples to apples. If you do compare, stay inside the same category: your own age group, and the same egg source (yours vs. donor eggs which have a higher success rate).
- Look at live-birth rate per cycle started, not per transfer. Per transfer only counts embryos transferred. It leaves out the cycles that never made it that far, which flatters the clinic.
- Trust big, steady gaps more than small ones. A couple of points between two clinics is usually just chance. The CDC spells this out: the fewer cycles a clinic does, the more its rate bounces around from year to year, and a very small clinic can read 0% or 100% in a category off a single cycle. A gap that stays wide across several years is the one likelier to be real.
- The data is a couple of years old. Both databases wait until pregnancies have finished before publishing. So take the data as history, not forecast.
- The clinic’s rate isn’t your rate. None of these numbers know your history. For your own odds, SART’s predictor tool asks about your specifics and estimates from there.
Where is the clinic located
Once you can read the numbers, next consider distance. During stimulation, you go in for monitoring every day or two, early in the morning. A cheaper clinic 90 minutes away might not be worth it once you weigh it against a pricier one 15 minutes from home.
On the CDC and SART databases, pull the clinics within a sane drive. If you’re able to, maybe visit the clinics that make your cut.
What your state and plan will cover
Some states require certain insurers to cover fertility treatment. And the ones that do vary a lot in what’s covered. Also, state mandates generally do not apply to self-funded employer plans, the kind a lot of larger companies use. So you can live in a state with a strong law and still have none of it reach you.
- RESOLVE keeps a state-by-state guide, plus a list of questions to ask your employer.
- KFF also has independent state coverage data.
If you pay for your own insurance or on Medicaid, IVF will probably not be covered. We dive deeper into how insurance works on our Insurance & Coverage page.
The bottom line
None of this happens in one sitting. The databases can help narrow down a vast internet of options. Once you have two or three places that fit your situation, schedule a consult and go see the place in person. A big part of IVF isn’t the numbers and logistics, it’s the emotional weight of it. Pay attention to how you’re treated and notice how you feel once you leave. That can tell you a lot more than numbers can.
Sources
- CDC, “ART Success Rates (find clinics by location)”
- CDC, “How to Interpret ART Success Rates”
- Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART), “Find a Clinic”
- RESOLVE, “Insurance Coverage by State”
- KFF, “Mandated Coverage of Infertility Treatment”