How to read a clinic's CDC IVF success rates
What CDC's clinic numbers measure, why they can't simply be ranked, and how to use them before a consultation.
Every clinic in the United States that performs in vitro fertilization and related procedures — together called assisted reproductive technology, or ART — is required by the Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act of 1992 to report its cycles to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC collects those reports through its National ART Surveillance System and publishes clinic-by-clinic results. They are the most complete public record of how US clinics' patients fared. They are also easy to misread. This guide explains what the numbers on each clinic page mean and how to use them well.
What the numbers describe
A clinic's success rate describes what happened to that clinic's patients in one reporting year — here, cycles started in 2022. It is not a prediction of your chance. CDC says so directly: clinic success rates do not reflect any one patient's chance of success, which depends on factors such as age, the cause of infertility, and ovarian reserve. Your own doctor can estimate your chance using your history; the clinic numbers tell you about the clinic's recent track record with groups of patients.
Every figure on our pages comes from CDC's 2022 Final ART Success Rates dataset, shown exactly as CDC reports it. We use CDC's “all diagnoses” view, so each rate includes patients with every kind of infertility diagnosis the clinic treated.
Start with your age group
Age is the single strongest influence on IVF outcomes when a patient uses her own eggs, so CDC reports own-egg results in four age groups: under 35, 35–37, 38–40 and over 40. Comparing a clinic's under-35 rate with another clinic's all-ages rate would be meaningless. On every clinic page, read across the row for the column that matches your age.
For scale, CDC's national figures for 2022 show how steep the age gradient is. Among new patients using their own eggs, 53.4% of those under 35 had a live birth after one intended egg retrieval, compared with 25.4% of those aged 38–40 and 8.5% of those over 40. Next to every clinic figure we print CDC's national figure for the same measure so you can see where a clinic sits relative to the US total.
New patients versus all patients
CDC reports two groups of own-egg patients. New patients are those with no prior ART cycle. Their results are the cleanest view of a clinic, because the group excludes people who have already had unsuccessful IVF elsewhere. CDC reports the share of new patients who had a live birth after one intended retrieval, after one or two, and after all intended retrievals — a cumulative measure that counts every transfer made from the eggs retrieved, including frozen embryos transferred later.
All patients includes everyone, including those on their third or fourth attempt. A clinic that takes on many patients with previous unsuccessful cycles may show lower all-patient rates for that reason alone.
Why CDC warns against ranking clinics
CDC cautions that comparing success rates across clinics may not be meaningful because clinics differ in their patient populations and treatment methods. The main reasons are practical:
- Patient mix. A clinic that accepts patients with low ovarian reserve or repeated failures will have lower rates than one that treats mostly straightforward cases, even if its care is as good or better.
- Treatment approach. Some clinics freeze all embryos and transfer them in a later cycle, or bank eggs over several retrievals. These choices move results between measures and years.
- Small numbers. A clinic with a few dozen cycles in an age group can swing widely from year to year by chance. CDC shows a fraction such as 3/12 instead of a percentage when fewer than 20 cycles stand behind a rate, and suppresses counts of 1 to 4 (shown as an asterisk) to protect privacy.
- Time. Clinic data are published years after the cycles. Staff, laboratory practice and ownership may have changed since.
This is why we don't rank or score clinics. We order clinics in each city by how many cycles they reported — a measure of size, not success.
Per retrieval or per transfer?
The same clinic can look very different depending on the denominator. A rate per intended egg retrieval counts every cycle that began with the plan to collect eggs, including cycles cancelled before retrieval and cycles that produced no transferable embryo. A rate per transfer counts only cycles where an embryo was actually placed in the uterus. Per-transfer rates are always higher, and they can flatter a clinic that transfers only its best-prognosis patients. Our guide to the measures goes through each one.
Look at the quality of births, not only the number
CDC also reports how many births were a single, term, normal-weight baby. Twins and triplets carry higher risks of preterm birth and complications for both mother and babies. A clinic whose live-birth rate is propped up by multiple births will show a noticeably lower single, term, normal-weight rate. Professional guidance from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine encourages transferring fewer embryos, often one, particularly for younger patients with a good prognosis.
How to use the numbers in a consultation
- Write down the clinic's figures for your age group, and the national figure beside them.
- Ask how the clinic's patients in your age group compare with its typical patient — diagnoses, previous cycles, egg banking.
- Ask whether the clinic usually transfers one embryo, and what share of its transfers are frozen.
- Ask for its more recent results. Clinics that are members of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) have newer data published at sartcorsonline.com.
- Ask for a written estimate of cost per cycle, including medications, embryo testing and storage.
Used this way, CDC's numbers are a strong starting point: they tell you which questions to ask, and they make it harder for any clinic to answer vaguely.