Psychiatrists per capita, state by state

The short version

Every state licenses and reports psychiatrists, but they are not spread evenly across the population. Measured as psychiatrists per 100,000 residents, or its mirror image, residents per psychiatrist, the country splits into a well-supplied Northeast and a thinly-supplied interior and rural West and South. The national average sits at about one psychiatrist for every 5,737 people. That average is real, and also close to useless on its own, because the states at the extremes are almost ten times apart.

Psychiatrists per capita, all 50 states and DC

Ranked from the fewest psychiatrists per resident to the most. Higher "residents per psychiatrist" means thinner supply.

Figures reflect KFF physician-specialty counts and US Census population as compiled in early 2025 (national total 59,281 psychiatrists as of January 2025). Per-100,000 and residents-per-psychiatrist are computed from those two numbers. We update this table as new workforce data is published.

The states with the fewest psychiatrists

The bottom of the table, worst access first, is Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, Indiana, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, Alabama. Idaho sits last, with roughly one psychiatrist for every 13,710 residents, more than double the national ratio. These are mostly large, rural, low-density states where there is no major academic medical center to train and retain psychiatrists, so the workforce never pools there. The shortage is not evenly felt inside these states either; it concentrates in the counties farthest from the few cities that do have clinicians.

The states with the most psychiatrists

The top of the table, best access first, is District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Rhode Island, Maine. The District of Columbia leads by a wide margin at one psychiatrist per 1,442 residents, which reflects its dense, entirely-urban population and its concentration of hospitals and training programs. Among the 50 states, Massachusetts is highest at one per 2,543, followed by Vermont, New York, and Connecticut. The pattern is consistent: supply pools in the Northeast corridor and around academic centers, because psychiatrists tend to settle near where they trained.

What this number does and does not tell you

Per-capita supply is the cleanest single way to compare states, but read it with three limits in mind. First, it counts psychiatrists by their state of record, not where patients can actually reach them; within any state, psychiatrists cluster in metro areas, so a mid-ranked state can still have rural counties with none. Second, it counts psychiatrists specifically, not the psychiatric nurse practitioners and physician assistants who deliver a growing share of care, so it understates total prescriber supply. Third, definitions of a "practicing" psychiatrist vary between data sources, so treat the ranking as a strong relative comparison rather than an exact census. The direction of the gap is stable across sources; the decimal is not.

What actually expands access

Because the gap is geographic, the levers that move it are the ones that stretch a scarce clinician across distance. Telepsychiatry lets a psychiatrist licensed in a state see patients anywhere in it, which matters most exactly where local supply is thinnest. The collaborative care model lets one psychiatrist support many primary-care patients they never meet directly. Loan-repayment and federal shortage-area incentives try to steer new graduates toward underserved places. None of these puts a psychiatrist in every county, but each brings care to places that have few. This is the case for multistate telepsychiatry in particular: shrinkMD, the network's clinical practice, offers exactly that in a growing list of states.

How we built this

The psychiatrist counts come from the Kaiser Family Foundation's compilation of physicians by specialty; the population figures come from the US Census Bureau's state estimates. Residents per psychiatrist is population divided by psychiatrists, and per 100,000 is psychiatrists divided by population times 100,000. Nationally there were about 59,281 practicing psychiatrists as of January 2025. Federal shortage designations from the Health Resources and Services Administration and workforce data from the Association of American Medical Colleges tell the same story with different methods. Workforce numbers move year to year, so we date this page and refresh it as new figures land.