The nurse practitioner takeover
There are now 59,936 psychiatric nurse practitioners against 67,232 psychiatrists.
Psychiatric prescribers on the registry, running total
Two professions treat the same patients with the same prescription pad, and one of them grew roughly four times faster than the other. The lines have not crossed yet, but the gap is closing every year.
New registrations each year
This matters beyond bookkeeping. Nurse practitioners generally charge less than physicians, their scope of practice varies by state, and in much of the country they are the only psychiatric prescriber within reach.
How this was built
Counts are individual providers whose primary NUCC taxonomy is psychiatry, child and adolescent psychiatry, addiction psychiatry, geriatric psychiatry, or psychiatric-mental health nursing.
The running total is built from enumeration dates: it answers "how many of today's clinicians had registered by year X", so it can only rise. The registry has no field for retirement or death, so this is not net growth and the curve overstates the current workforce the further back you look.
Being on the registry is not the same as practising.
Rebuilt 2026-10-20 from the CMS National Plan and Provider Enumeration System · more experiments