New ABA practice formation, first-year survivability, and a question about training.
ABA Impact has tracked new ABA practice formation continuously since October 2023 by monitoring monthly NPI registrations under ABA-classified taxonomy codes. Across 31 months of tracking, 7,768 new practices have been registered nationally — a monthly average of 251. In parallel, we have conducted direct follow-up outreach to a sample of these new practices at 6 and 12 months post-registration. Within that sample, approximately 10% have closed before completing year one. This brief presents the tracking data, the observed survivability pattern, and the question it raises about how the BCBA credentialing path prepares practitioners for the operational realities of the field many of them enter.
Full methodology, sample definitions, and data limitations are documented in Section 6. Live tracking data appears in Section 4.
What we observe in the field.
Across the practitioners we engage with through ABA Impact's community and direct outreach, the move from clinical employment into practice ownership often occurs within the first several years post-credential. We do not currently have a representative national estimate of this transition rate, and we make no claim to one. What we can report is that, in our tracked cohort, ownership or co-ownership is common enough to constitute a meaningful operational reality for the credentialing path — not an outlier outcome.
The BACB Verified Course Sequence does not include content areas addressing practice operation, payer relationships, or business formation. The competency areas, the supervised fieldwork, and the examination are structured around clinical practice — they are not structured to prepare a practitioner to operate a practice. This is not a criticism of the VCS as a clinical credentialing instrument. It is an observation about the scope of what the credential is currently designed to certify.
In our follow-up outreach to closed practices, the failure modes we hear about cluster around operational rather than clinical concerns: missed billing windows, payer credentialing problems, hiring done without adequate legal scaffolding, and cash-flow disruptions that arrive before clinical workflows have stabilized. We do not claim these are the sole or even the predominant causes of first-year closure across the field. We report them because they recur across our outreach with notable consistency, and because they share a common feature: none of them are addressed in the path that produced the practitioners experiencing them.
The remainder of this brief presents the underlying tracking data, the survivability sample, and a proposed framework for addressing the gap.
“I knew how to write a behavior plan. Nobody taught me how to read an EOB, hire a staff member legally, or understand why my Medicaid claims were getting denied. I closed in eleven months.”
— BCBA, practice closed 2024
Illustrative quote from ABA Impact follow-up outreach. Not statistically representative.
What we have observed in the field.
What the credentialing framework currently requires.
Detailed content-area analysis in progress. ABA Impact is currently completing a structured review of the BACB 5th Edition Task List and the 6th Edition Test Content Outline (effective January 2025) for business-operations content coverage. The full analysis, with content-area-by-content-area coverage assessment and direct citations to BACB published documents, will be published here when complete.
Within the published content areas of the BACB 5th Edition Task List and the 6th Edition Test Content Outline, we do not identify required material covering financial operations, payer relationships, hiring and labor practices, or organizational management. Individual university programs may include such material at their discretion within elective coursework; this material is not addressed by the BACB framework itself.
The BACB has announced revisions to the coursework standards taking effect January 1, 2027. The forthcoming revision is the natural moment to consider whether the credentialing framework should reflect the operational realities that a meaningful share of practitioners will encounter post-credential.
Sources:
- •Behavior Analyst Certification Board. BCBA Task List (5th ed.). bacb.com.
- •Behavior Analyst Certification Board. BCBA Test Content Outline (6th ed.), effective January 1, 2025. bacb.com.
- •Behavior Analyst Certification Board. Announcement of revised coursework standards effective January 1, 2027. bacb.com.
What practitioners say about including business content in BCBA training.
In May 2026, ABA Impact conducted an informal community poll asking members of the ABA Business Challenges Facebook community whether business coursework should be part of the BCBA training path. The poll offered four response options spanning required inclusion, elective inclusion, post-credential offering, and exclusion. Results below reflect n=115 responses. The sample is self-selected and the population — members of a community focused on ABA business operations — is non-representative of all BCBAs nationally. Findings should be read as community sentiment, not as a national survey.
Selected respondent comments will be published here following respondent consent. Quotes will be anonymized and presented verbatim from the poll comment thread.
Who we are and how we know what we know.
ABA Impact is a professional community and education organization serving Applied Behavior Analysis practitioners. The community comprises 13,000+ members who are predominantly founders, owner-operators, and clinical leaders of ABA-providing organizations. The initiative documented in this brief is informed by direct, ongoing contact with this population — including new practice owners contacted at NPI registration and re-contacted at six and twelve months post-registration.
Initiative leadership. This initiative is led by Derreck Ogden, Founder & CEO, ABA Impact with operational support from Joshua Nelson, Community Administrator & CXO, ABA Impact. Editorial responsibility for the contents of this brief rests with ABA Impact. Methodology questions and requests for individual registration verification should be directed to info@abaimpact.com.
Relevant disclosures. ABA Impact operates the eBCBA program, a paid business-operations training offering for current ABA practitioners. The program is disclosed here for two reasons. First, it represents a financial relationship between ABA Impact and the population this brief studies. Second, the program's operational reach — direct contact with new owners through community membership and program enrollment — is the mechanism by which the field-observation data in this brief is generated. The existence of the eBCBA program does not change what we observe in the field; it is the infrastructure through which we observe it.
This initiative is not funded by, and does not solicit input from, the Behavior Analyst Certification Board or any university accreditation body. ABA Impact is funded through paid program tuition and category-exclusive vendor sponsorships from organizations serving the ABA industry.
The purpose of this brief is to inform consideration of how the BCBA credentialing framework prepares practitioners for the operational realities of the field they enter. It is not a sales channel for any ABA Impact program. The point is that this education should exist inside the credentialing path, regardless of who provides it.
A proposal for the credentialing framework.
The following proposal reflects what the field-observation data and community survey results, taken together, appear to support. It is structured around two principles. First, the credentialing framework should acknowledge that practice ownership is a common post-credential outcome and prepare for it accordingly. Second, the path to that preparation should be flexible — the survey data does not support universal mandatory inclusion, and individual programs are better positioned than the framework itself to determine instructional design. The proposal is offered as input to the BACB’s announced revision of coursework standards taking effect January 2027, and to university program faculty considering elective content.
- 01
Recognition of practice ownership as a credentialed outcome
The credentialing framework should formally acknowledge that a meaningful share of BCBAs will operate practices within the first several years post-credential. This acknowledgment alone does not require coursework changes — it is the conceptual foundation that justifies the subsequent items.
- 02
Business operations content made available within the credentialing path
Make business operations content available through the credentialing path — as elective coursework, as integrated material within existing content areas, or as a permitted concentration. The community survey data supports availability rather than universal mandate: 62% of responding practitioners favored elective inclusion, compared with 6% favoring required inclusion. Programs and candidates should retain discretion over whether and how the content is included.
- 03
Minimum competency areas, if business content is included
Where programs choose to include business operations content, the following competency areas reflect the failure modes observed in our first-year closure outreach: financial literacy for owner-operators, payer and reimbursement structures, regulatory and compliance foundations, hiring and labor basics, and operational risk management. Programs may cover these in any depth they determine appropriate. Our field experience suggests a four-to-six hour foundational module is sufficient to address the most common operational failure modes; deeper coverage is welcome but not required by this proposal.
- 04
Mentorship and field-partnership infrastructure
Where coursework is not the appropriate vehicle, formal mentorship pipelines and partnerships with established practices may serve the same preparatory function. Some practitioners and program faculty have suggested that the operational gap is better addressed through structured fieldwork or post-credential mentorship than through additional coursework. This proposal recognizes both pathways as legitimate and welcomes program-level innovation in how the gap is closed.
- 05
An evidence-collection partnership
ABA Impact contributes ongoing field data — NPI registration tracking, first-year closure outreach, and community survey results — to support continued review of curricular outcomes. We are willing to make this data available to academic partners, accreditation bodies, and BACB working groups under reasonable terms. Methodology documentation is published in Section 6.
This proposal is offered as input, not as advocacy for any specific implementation. Comments, corrections, and counterproposals are invited at info@abaimpact.com.
For academic partners and field reviewers.
This initiative is most useful when it is reviewed, challenged, and refined by the people closest to the credentialing path — program faculty, accreditation reviewers, BACB working group participants, and practitioners who have lived the operational realities this brief documents. The form below is for engagement, not enrollment in anything. We respond within one business day. Submissions that include institutional review committee questions, methodology critiques, or counterproposals will be prioritized — those are the conversations this brief is designed to invite.
Methodology, sources, and limitations.
This section documents the data sources, collection methods, sample definitions, and acknowledged limitations underlying the figures presented in this brief. The intent is to make the methodology visible enough that an external reviewer can evaluate, critique, and replicate the work where possible. Methodology questions and requests for source documentation are welcomed at hello@abaimpact.com.
6.1 NPI Registry tracking
ABA Impact monitors monthly NPI (National Provider Identifier) registrations to identify new ABA-providing organizations. The NPI Registry is maintained by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and is publicly accessible at npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov.
Tracking is conducted under taxonomy code 103K00000X (Behavior Analyst) and adjacent codes used by organizations providing ABA services. Monthly registration counts are recorded from NPI release data and stored in ABA Impact’s internal tracking database. Reported figures reflect registrations as published — including occasional retrospective batches in which NPI consolidates multiple months into a single release (most notably the May 2024 release, which included April–May registrations).
Updates: New tracking data is added monthly. The live data displayed in Section 2 is current as of May 27, 2026.
Limitations: NPI registration captures the organization, not the credentials of the individual who registered it. Whether a given registrant is a BCBA, a non-clinician founder, or an investor-led entity cannot be determined from NPI data alone — see Section 6.2.
6.2 Founder verification (in progress)
ABA Impact’s CRM captures the name and contact information of the individual who registered each NPI we track. This allows us to verify clinician versus non-clinician founder status through direct outreach. Founder verification is conducted as part of our broader new-owner outreach (see Section 6.3) and is recorded against each registration in our internal records.
Founder verification has not been completed across the full tracking cohort. Founder credentialing is not always identifiable from registration data alone and requires individual contact to confirm. A formal analysis of founder profile across the cohort is in development. Aggregate findings will be published in this section when the analysis is complete.
Verification on individual registrations is available on request.
6.3 First-year closure outreach
ABA Impact contacts new ABA practice owners at NPI registration as part of community outreach. Practices in the tracked cohort are re-contacted at six and twelve months post-registration to determine operational status. Outreach is conducted by phone and supplemented with email and email-verification checks where phone contact is not successful.
A practice is recorded as “closed” when one of the following is verified: confirmed dissolution of the business entity, confirmed closure of the LLC, or sustained inability to reach the practice through any contact channel combined with confirmation that the practice is no longer operating (verified through public records, insurance directories, or community reports).
The ~10% first-year closure rate reported in Section 2 reflects the rate observed within the sub-set of the cohort we have successfully reached for follow-up. Sample size for the closure outreach is approximate and is being documented as the cohort matures.
Limitations: This is qualitative, observational data, not a census. Practices we cannot reach at follow-up are not counted as either closed or operating — they are recorded as unverified, and our closure rate is calculated against the verified portion of the sample. Non-response bias is possible: practices that have closed may be systematically harder to reach than practices that remain operating, which could mean the true closure rate is higher than what we observe, not lower. The reported 10% figure should be read as a lower-bound estimate of first-year closure within the cohort, not a population-level closure rate.
6.4 Community survey data
The community survey referenced in Section 2 (Sub-section C) was conducted via Facebook poll in the ABA Business Challenges Facebook community, May 2026. The community comprises 13,000+ members, with approximately 50% identifying as owners or decision-makers. The poll was open to all members; n=115 responses were recorded.
The poll asked: “Should business coursework be required as part of BCBA training?” Four response options were offered:
- Yes — required coursework, same as the clinical content
- Yes — but as an elective or optional track, not required
- No — but it should be offered separately after credentialing
- No — business training isn’t the school’s job
Limitations: The sample is self-selected and the population — members of a community focused on ABA business operations — is non-representative of all BCBAs nationally. Facebook’s polling platform allows respondents to add additional response options to a poll after it has been published; one such option was added during the response window and received 0% of votes. It is excluded from the reported results because it was not part of the original instrument. Margin of error on the n=115 sample is approximately ±9 percentage points at 95% confidence; comparisons between adjacent response options should be interpreted with this margin in mind.
6.5 VCS framework analysis (in progress)
ABA Impact is currently completing a structured review of the BACB 5th Edition Task List and the 6th Edition Test Content Outline (effective January 2025) for business-operations content coverage. The completed analysis will document, content-area by content-area, the extent to which each published framework addresses or omits business operations material, with direct citations to BACB published documents.
Until the analysis is published, the statements in Section 2 (Sub-section B) regarding curriculum coverage are limited to the general observation that the BACB framework does not include required content areas covering financial operations, payer relationships, or organizational management. Detailed coverage assessment, content area by content area, is forthcoming.
Sources to be cited in the completed analysis: Behavior Analyst Certification Board, BCBA Task List (5th ed.); BCBA Test Content Outline (6th ed.), effective January 1, 2025; announcement of revised coursework standards effective January 1, 2027. All BACB documents are publicly available at bacb.com.
6.6 General limitations
Beyond the limitations noted within each sub-section, three general limitations apply across the brief:
Generalizability. The community and outreach data presented here reflect the population ABA Impact has direct contact with — predominantly U.S.-based ABA-providing organizations, predominantly serving Medicaid and commercial insurance markets. Findings may not generalize to ABA practitioners or organizations operating outside these conditions.
Self-selection. Both the Facebook community population and the new-owner outreach respondent pool are shaped by self-selection. Practitioners who join ABA Impact and respond to outreach are not a random sample of the field. This is documented rather than corrected; correction would require resources and access we do not currently have.
Causation vs. observation. Where the brief describes failure modes associated with first-year closures, it does so descriptively. We do not claim that the failure modes we observe in our outreach are the sole or even the predominant causes of closure across the field. The brief documents what closing practitioners tell us — not what objectively caused their closure.
ABA Impact welcomes critique and correction from academic reviewers, program faculty, and BACB working group participants. Methodology questions, requests for source documentation, and counter-evidence are encouraged at hello@abaimpact.com.
This brief is a living document. Last revised: May 27, 2026. Material revisions are logged in the revision history below.
Revision history
- [May 27, 2026] Brief published. Sections 1–6 live; Sub-section B (VCS analysis) published as work-in-progress; founder verification analysis in development.