Data Changelog

When a number, a label, or a claim on this site changes, it is recorded here with the date it changed. Publishing federal data means occasionally getting something wrong in public, and the honest response is to fix it in public. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National ART Surveillance System documentation, the reported figures themselves are revised only between annual releases; everything below is a change on our side, not the CDC's.

8 corrections logged, most recently on August 15, 2026. Found something that looks wrong? Report a data error, it is read by the people who maintain the pipeline, and see the methodology for how the figures are produced.

  1. Method

    Metro pages now show CDC age-band means, not only the blended overall rate

    Metro pages told readers to compare clinics inside one CDC age band, then published only the blended overall live-birth rate. They now assemble the four CDC bands (under 35, 35-37, 38-40, over 40) as the metro clinic mean against the national clinic mean, each with its own denominator. A band with fewer than three reporting clinics shows no metro mean and says why. This uses the metro_id join fixed the same day — before that join, a metro band mean would have been the whole-state figure under a metro heading. The clinic-table footnote that still said clinics were "in the same state as this metro" was corrected to name CITY_TO_METRO.

  2. Correction

    Clinics are now compared with their own age group

    In the success-rate finder, the "vs National" column compared a clinic's rate for the selected age band against the national average for ALL ages. Because live-birth rates fall steeply with age, that made clinics look worse than they are in the older bands and better than they are in the youngest: California's strongest over-40 clinic reports 25.0% against a national over-40 average of 8.8%, but was shown as 9.0 points below national. Each view now benchmarks against the national average for the same age band, and names how many clinics that average covers.

  3. Correction

    Age bands now match what the CDC actually publishes

    For own-egg cycles the CDC reports four patient-age bands: under 35, 35-37, 38-40, and a single band for everyone over 40. It does not report 41-42 and 43+ separately. Several pages had described those as two distinct brackets, labelled the over-40 figure "ages 41-42", and pointed readers to per-clinic data for a 43+ band that does not exist in this dataset. Every age label on the site now names the band the CDC actually publishes. The underlying figures did not change; what they were called did.

  4. Correction

    State and metro averages now name the clinics they cover

    A state page reported its average live-birth rate "across" every CDC-reporting clinic in the state, but the average is computed only over clinics that publish a rate. In California that was 29.0% over 67 clinics, presented as covering 91. State and metro pages now state the population each figure belongs to.

  5. Correction

    Coverage count corrected from 52 states to 51

    "52 States covered" counted every row in the reference table, including one state with no reporting clinics whose page we deliberately do not publish. The site now reports 51 everywhere, matching the sitemap and the pages that actually exist.

  6. Correction

    Each national average now carries its own clinic count

    The homepage compared an under-35 average with an over-40 average while naming one clinic population for both. Of the 406 clinics reporting an overall rate, 399 publish an under-35 figure and 303 an over-40 figure, so the two averages do not cover the same clinics. Both now show their own count.

  7. Correction

    Trust footer no longer overstated how figures are produced

    A page footer said no figure on the page is typed in by an editor, while a summary rail on that page used hand-entered totals. The wording now describes those counts accurately as imported NASS figures.

  8. Correction

    Removed a claim about data we do not hold

    The methodology page said per-clinic service indicators included preimplantation genetic testing and embryo banking. Only donor-egg availability and gestational-carrier services are imported, and only those are shown. The claim was removed rather than the data invented.

  9. Correction

    Over-40 ranking stopped describing itself as a 41-42 ranking

    The over-40 clinic ranking titled and described itself as covering ages 41-42, a narrower band than the figure it ranked on. This was corrected again on 13 August 2026, when the underlying column was renamed after the bracket it actually holds so the mislabel cannot recur.

How corrections are handled

Reports are checked against the source dataset before anything changes. Where a figure is wrong we fix it at the point it is produced, so the corrected value flows to every page that shows it rather than being patched on the page where it was noticed. Where a label or a claim is wrong, we correct the wording and, where the wording was wrong because the underlying data model invited it, we change the model too. Material changes are listed on this page. Our full editorial and corrections policy sets out the process in detail.

Download the state clinic-inventory extract: clinic-inventory-by-state.csv (same CSV as the homepage Dataset, government-works).

Every figure on PlainFertility is rendered directly from CDC National ART Surveillance System source data, no number is typed in by an editor. This page lists changes to PlainFertility's own presentation of CDC data; the CDC's published figures are unchanged. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, every correction we have published, or report a data error on this page.