Pediatric Occupational Therapist: how many are there, and how many are in private practice?

National totals

What this specialty covers

Occupational therapists provide services to infants, toddlers and children who have or who are at risk for developmental delays or disabilities. Occupational therapy is concerned with a child's ability to participate in daily life activities or "occupations." Occupational therapists use their unique expertise to help children with social-emotional, physical, cognitive, communication, and adaptive behavioral challenges and to help children to be prepared for and perform important learning and school-related activities and to fulfill their rule as students. Through an understanding of the impact of disability, illness, and impairment on a child's development, plan, ability to learn new skills, and overall occupational performance, occupational therapists design interventions that promote healthy development, establish needed skills, and/or modify environments, all in support of participa

Reading the sole-proprietor share

For this specialty, the sole-proprietor share is the portion of active records whose primary taxonomy is Pediatric Occupational Therapist and whose NPPES sole-proprietor field is marked yes. It can help describe how records are categorized, but it is not a direct count of pediatric occupational therapists working in private practice because the field is self-reported and may not capture employment, ownership, contracting, or group-practice arrangements.

By state

New NPI registrations by year

Counts reflect the year each NPI was first issued, among records still active today. The final year is partial: this data covers through 2026-01-11.

Data notes

• The sole-proprietor field is self-reported by the provider in NPPES and is an imperfect proxy for private practice.
• A sole-proprietor count shown as <11 is suppressed: the true value is below 11, which could include zero.
• These figures count active NPI records with Pediatric Occupational Therapist as the primary taxonomy; they are not a complete census of people or practices.
• Enumeration-year counts describe when NPIs were first issued, not necessarily when clinicians began practicing, and reporting or record updates can affect comparisons.
• Providers are counted once, by their primary taxonomy code only.

Source: CMS National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) Data Dissemination file, FOIA-disclosable public data under CMS-6060-N. Aggregated by Hero EMR on 2026-08-03; deactivated NPIs excluded; specialty assigned from the primary taxonomy code (NUCC 25.1). Counts below 11 are suppressed. Individual providers are never published. All provider data pages.

Common questions