School Counselor: how many are there, and how many are in private practice?

National totals

Reading the sole-proprietor share

For School Counselor records, 1,877 of 5,852 active records, or 32.1%, are flagged as sole proprietors in NPPES. For a specialty that can be associated with school-based employment as well as other organizational arrangements, this figure should not be treated as a direct count of counselors in private practice. The flag is a self-reported NPPES field, so it is an imperfect proxy that may reflect enrollment structure and may not capture a provider's actual work setting.

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 are active NPI records with School Counselor as the primary taxonomy, not a census of people, jobs, or service volume.
• NUCC has no published official definition for this taxonomy, so its classification boundaries may be unclear.
• First-enumeration counts show when NPIs entered NPPES, not when a counselor began practicing or opened a practice.
• 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