Medicaid / CHIP Enrollment

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services publish a monthly count of everyone enrolled in Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program with comprehensive benefits on the last day of the month, as each state and DC reports it. States send a preliminary figure first and an updated one a month later that adds late enrollments. In CMS's August 2026 release file, the updated count was the larger of the two for every month from June 2017 to April 2026. This page shows the preliminary count for every month, so months are compared like with like. Enrollment was down from 77.8 million a year earlier.

During the pandemic, states that took extra federal Medicaid funding could not end coverage for most enrollees. That continuous enrollment condition ended on March 31, 2023. States then resumed regular eligibility renewals, and people could again lose Medicaid or CHIP at renewal, a process often called the unwinding.

The count shows how many people are enrolled, not what happened to those who left. A change from one month to the next is a net figure: people who left minus people who joined or came back. Counts of people disenrolled at renewal, such as KFF's, measure something else and cannot be read from this total. The total also leaves out the U.S. territories and people in a Basic Health Program such as New York's Essential Plan.

Comparisons need care. CMS says preliminary and updated figures should not be compared with each other, and totals for past months can be restated in later releases. From March 2026, California stopped counting people with limited benefits in its Medicaid total without revising earlier months, so any comparison that spans March 2026 includes that reporting change.