Vaccine Exemption Statistics in US 2026 | States, Rates & Key Facts

Vaccine Exemption in America 2026

Vaccine exemptions in the United States are legal provisions — set at the state level, not the federal level — that allow parents or guardians to enroll a child in school or daycare without meeting the vaccination requirements that would otherwise apply. Every state in the country permits exemptions for medical reasons, typically requiring documentation from a licensed physician confirming that a specific vaccine poses a genuine health risk to the child. Beyond medical exemptions, 47 states including Washington D.C. additionally allow non-medical exemptions based on religious beliefs, personal beliefs, or philosophical objections — a far lower bar that, in many states, amounts to nothing more than submitting a signed form or completing an online educational module. This structure has long been at the heart of an ongoing public health debate in the United States: how to balance parental rights and religious freedoms against the population-level immunity thresholds that protect entire communities — including children too young to be vaccinated, cancer patients, and immunocompromised individuals — from highly contagious, vaccine-preventable diseases.

As of 2026, that debate has reached an unprecedented level of political and legal intensity. The national kindergarten vaccine exemption rate climbed to a record 3.6% during the 2024–2025 school year, up from 2.5% in 2019–2020 — representing the highest rate ever recorded in CDC surveillance history. This has occurred against a backdrop of a sweeping federal vaccine policy upheaval led by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who replaced all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in June 2025, oversaw a reduction in the federally recommended childhood vaccine schedule from 17 diseases to 11 in January 2026, and whose actions were subsequently challenged in federal court — resulting in a landmark ruling on March 16, 2026, by US District Court Judge Brian Murphy, who temporarily blocked the policy changes as likely violating administrative procedure. The consequences of these shifts are already being measured not in policy documents alone, but in lives: by March 26, 2026, the CDC confirmed 1,575 measles cases in the US in 2026 alone — on top of the 2,285 confirmed in the full year of 2025, the highest annual count since measles was declared eliminated in America in 2000. What follows is the most comprehensive, source-verified collection of vaccine exemption statistics in the US in 2026.

Key Facts About Vaccine Exemption in the US 2026

Source: CDC SchoolVaxView (July 31, 2025); KFF Health Tracking Poll (January 2025); CDC Measles Cases and Outbreaks (March 26, 2026); USAFacts / CDC data (September 2025); KFF State Health Policy (September 2025); MMWR 2024; International Vaccine Access Center, Johns Hopkins (August 2025)

The numbers above represent the sharpest and most sustained deterioration in childhood vaccination coverage in modern American public health history. The transition from a pre-pandemic 95.2% MMR coverage rate in the 2019–2020 school year to just 92.5% in 2024–2025 may appear numerically modest, but the epidemiological consequences of falling even a few percentage points below the 95% herd immunity threshold are profound. At 92.5%, the CDC’s own calculation confirms that approximately 286,000 kindergartners entered American classrooms in the 2024–2025 school year without the full protection of the MMR vaccine series — a number that represents an enormous reservoir of susceptibility in the most socially dense, communally shared environments that young children inhabit. The fact that the number of states with MMR coverage below 90% jumped from just 3 in 2019–2020 to 16 by 2024–2025 tells an even more alarming story: the decline isn’t an even statistical shift distributed across America, it’s a clustering of severe under-vaccination in specific states and communities.

What makes the 2026 vaccine exemption landscape so historically unprecedented is the convergence of multiple factors driving exemptions upward simultaneously. The long-term trend of rising non-medical exemptions — which climbed from 2.0% in 2014 to 3.4% in 2024 — was already a well-documented concern before the COVID-19 pandemic. But that trend has now intersected with the political normalization of vaccine skepticism, major disruptions to federal vaccine advisory infrastructure, and state-level legislative changes that have made non-medical exemptions easier to obtain in multiple states. The result is a country where 17 states now report exemption rates exceeding 5% — a threshold that makes reaching 95% MMR coverage mathematically impossible even if every non-exempt child were fully vaccinated on schedule.

State-by-State Vaccine Exemption Statistics in the US 2026

Source: CDC SchoolVaxView (July 31, 2025); USAFacts / CDC data analysis (September 2025); KFF State Health Policy (September 2025); International Vaccine Access Center, Johns Hopkins (August 2025); KFF Health News / Governing.com (January 2025)

The state-by-state vaccine exemption data reveals a picture that is as geographically stark as it is policy-driven. The contrast between Idaho — with a 15.1% non-medical exemption rate and an MMR coverage rate of just 78.5%, the lowest in the country — and Connecticut — where non-medical exemptions sit at an almost negligible 0.1% and MMR coverage reaches 98.2% — is not a random difference in community values. It is the direct and measurable consequence of different state policies. Connecticut eliminated non-medical exemptions in 2021; Idaho not only maintains both religious and philosophical exemptions but has actively transferred control of required vaccines to its state legislature and restricted medical mandates, further weakening enforcement of what requirements remain. Vermont and Colorado provide equally instructive natural experiments: both states implemented procedural barriers to non-medical exemptions and recorded the largest decade-over-decade decreases in exemption rates in the country.

The trajectories of Georgia and Florida are particularly sobering given their large populations. Georgia’s MMR coverage fell from 93.1% in 2019–20 to 88.4% in 2023–24, and Florida’s dropped from 93.5% to 88.1% over the same period — some Florida counties reporting local non-medical exemption rates as high as 50% at the school or district level, driven largely by the state’s broad and easily accessible religious exemption process. And the January 2025 executive order signed by West Virginia’s governor — allowing religious and personal belief exemptions for the first time in a state that previously maintained one of the strictest medical-only exemption policies in the nation and, correspondingly, one of the highest vaccination rates — is a development that public health experts have warned will produce measurable coverage declines in the 2025–2026 and 2026–2027 school year data, when those impacts become visible in CDC surveillance reports.

Non-Medical vs. Medical Vaccine Exemption Statistics in the US 2026

Source: CDC SchoolVaxView (July 31, 2025); USAFacts / CDC (September 2025); KFF Health Tracking Poll (January 2025); International Vaccine Access Center, Johns Hopkins (August 2025); CDC parental attitudes survey (2024)

The medical vs. non-medical exemption breakdown is one of the most important — and most revealing — distinctions in the entire vaccine exemption data landscape. Medical exemptions have remained at a rock-steady 0.2% since 2014, with virtually no year-over-year variation, and no state reporting a medical exemption rate above 0.8%. This consistency makes scientific sense: the proportion of children who have genuine medical contraindications to standard childhood vaccines — such as severe allergies to vaccine components, certain immunodeficiency conditions, or a history of severe adverse reactions — is small and biologically stable. It does not fluctuate based on political trends, media coverage, or administrative changes at the federal level. Non-medical exemptions are an entirely different story. Their growth from 2.0% in 2014–15 to 3.4% in 2024–25 is entirely a product of social, cultural, and policy factors — and the fact that they now account for more than 93% of all vaccine exemptions in the United States makes clear that the exemption crisis is not a medical phenomenon. It is a policy and trust phenomenon.

The data on parental attitudes deepens this picture considerably. The 2024 CDC parental survey finding that 8.3% of US parents — roughly 1 in 12 — actively disagree that school vaccination requirements are important or necessary puts a meaningful floor under how far exemption rates could rise if current trends continue unchecked. And the KFF January 2025 poll finding that parents who believe or remain open to the false claim that MMR vaccines cause autism are four times more likely to delay or skip vaccines for their children identifies the precise mechanism through which vaccine misinformation converts into real-world vaccination gaps. The persistence of this debunked claim — first published and subsequently fully retracted and discredited after its author lost his medical license — continues to serve as a primary driver of non-medical exemptions in states where obtaining one requires nothing more than a parent’s signature.

Vaccine Exemption & Measles Outbreak Consequences in the US 2026

Source: CDC Measles Cases and Outbreaks page (March 26, 2026); CDC MMWR (April 24, 2025); WHO Disease Outbreak News (2025); Public Health Communications Collaborative (March 2026); PMC / NIH (2025); Los Angeles County Department of Public Health

The 2025–2026 US measles outbreak is the most direct and devastating consequence of the vaccine exemption trend documented in this article. The CDC’s own data, published March 26, 2026, confirms that from January 2025 through March 2026, a combined 3,637 confirmed measles cases were recorded across 46 states and jurisdictions — a scale of sustained domestic transmission that public health experts say puts the United States at genuine risk of losing its measles elimination status, first achieved in 2000. That status — which requires that no measles transmission chain continues for more than 12 months — has never previously been threatened since its declaration. The four confirmed deaths, including the first measles-related deaths of American children in a decade, are not statistical abstractions: the two children who died in Texas were both unvaccinated, had no underlying health conditions, and lived in counties where MMR coverage for kindergartners had been below 90% for multiple consecutive years.

The epidemiological pattern of the 2025–2026 outbreak is a textbook illustration of what happens when exemption rates cross critical thresholds. 92–93% of all 2025 cases occurred in individuals who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown. The 48 outbreaks recorded in 2025 — more than triple the 16 outbreaks in 2024 — confirm that measles was not being brought in from abroad and contained; it was spreading domestically through clusters of susceptible individuals concentrated in communities with high exemption rates. Several West Texas counties at the epicenter of the largest outbreak had kindergarten MMR coverage rates of 70.5% to 88.1% — far below the 95% threshold — for multiple consecutive years before the 2025 outbreak ignited. The data makes the causal chain impossible to dispute: high exemption rates produced low coverage, low coverage created susceptible clusters, and susceptible clusters produced the largest US measles outbreak in more than three decades.

Public Trust, Vaccine Hesitancy & Exemption Opinion Statistics in the US 2026

Source: KFF Health Tracking Poll (January 2025 and February 2026); Pew Research Center (2023, updated 2025); Gallup; KFF State Health Policy (September 2025)

The public trust data surrounding vaccines and vaccine exemptions in 2026 paints a picture of institutional erosion that goes well beyond any single political moment. The finding that fewer than half of all US adults — just 47% — now trust the CDC to provide reliable information about vaccines represents a collapse in confidence that was virtually unthinkable just a decade ago, and its speed is remarkable: among Democrats alone, trust in the CDC for vaccine information has plummeted from 88% in September 2023 to just 55% in February 2026 — a 33 percentage point drop in roughly 29 months, driven by the disorienting spectacle of a federal health apparatus being actively restructured by an appointee with a documented history of vaccine misinformation. The data from the February 2026 KFF poll reflects precisely the period following the January 2026 CDC childhood vaccine schedule reduction from 17 to 11 diseases — a unilateral policy change that the American Medical Association described as arrived at without “a robust, evidence-based process” and that was subsequently blocked by a federal judge in March 2026.

The partisan dimension of vaccine hesitancy is striking but should not obscure the broader reality that vaccine concern is not exclusively a Republican phenomenon. While Republican-leaning parents are nearly twice as likely as Democratic-leaning parents to delay or skip children’s vaccines, the fact that 17% of all US parents now report delaying or skipping shots — up from 10% just two years earlier — means a meaningful and growing share of the non-Republican parent population is also disengaging from the recommended childhood vaccination schedule. The Pew Research finding that 88% of Americans still say the overall benefits of MMR vaccines outweigh the risks — a figure that has barely changed since before the pandemic — suggests that the crisis is less about firm anti-vaccine conviction and more about an erosion of institutional trust and clarity of public messaging that leaves genuinely persuadable parents susceptible to doubt. The #1 trusted source for vaccine information remains the individual doctor or pediatrician — a finding that both highlights the irreplaceable role of the clinical relationship and points to where public health communication efforts most urgently need to be concentrated.

Federal Vaccine Policy Changes & Exemption Law Statistics in the US 2026

Source: AJMC (January 2026, March 2026); STAT News (January 2026); Fierce Pharma (January 2026); US District Court, District of Massachusetts, Judge Brian Murphy ruling (March 16, 2026); NPR (March 2026); KFF State Health Policy (September 2025); CDC; NBC News; Axios

The federal vaccine policy upheaval of 2025–2026 constitutes the most significant disruption to the American childhood immunization system since the modern vaccine schedule was established. The January 2026 reduction of the federally recommended childhood vaccine schedule from 17 to 11 diseases — carried out by a CDC acting director without a formal ACIP vote, at the direction of HHS Secretary Kennedy — was described by the American Medical Association as putting children “at unnecessary risk of preventable disease.” The court’s finding that the action was likely “arbitrary and capricious” and that Kennedy’s 13 replacement ACIP appointees included only 6 individuals with meaningful vaccine expertise — in a body whose own charter requires vaccine expertise — underscores the procedural as well as substantive concerns that led six major medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, to mount the legal challenge that produced the March 16, 2026 ruling.

At the state level, the legislative shifts represent a parallel and compounding force. West Virginia’s January 2025 executive order adding religious and personal belief exemptions in what had been the strictest vaccine-requirement state in the country is the most symbolically significant single state change, because West Virginia’s pre-2025 data consistently showed that strict medical-only exemption policies produced among the highest vaccination rates and lowest exemption rates nationally. That natural experiment — replicated in California, Connecticut, Maine, and New York — provides the clearest possible policy evidence that exemption law design directly determines vaccination coverage outcomes. The American Academy of Pediatrics’ decision to publish its own independent childhood vaccine schedule — essentially declaring the federal ACIP process no longer scientifically credible under its current composition — is without precedent in the organization’s history, and reflects the depth of the institutional rupture that has defined the vaccine exemption landscape in America in 2026.

COVID-19 Vaccine Exemption and Adult Vaccination Statistics in the US 2026

Source: Pew Research Center; KFF Health Tracking Poll (July–August 2025); AJMC (2025–2026); CDC / CMS; Contemporary Pediatrics (July–August 2025); NBC News; US District Court ruling (March 2026)

The COVID-19 vaccine exemption and adult vaccination picture in 2026 reveals that the hesitancy documented in childhood vaccination data extends robustly into adult immunization behavior as well. The finding that only ~28% of US adults received the updated 2024–25 COVID-19 vaccine — and that even among Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries aged 65 and older, a group at extremely high risk of severe COVID outcomes, the uptake rate was just 27.8% — indicates a near-universal disengagement from COVID-19 vaccination that goes well beyond political identity. The removal of the COVID-19 vaccine recommendation for healthy children and pregnant women in May 2025 — carried out by Kennedy without a formal ACIP vote and challenged in court by six leading medical organizations — created precisely the kind of confusion that the July–August 2025 KFF poll captured, with many parents reporting they were confused and uncertain about whether the COVID-19 vaccine was even recommended for their healthy children anymore.

The influenza vaccination data adds another layer of concern. With 253 influenza-related pediatric deaths reported by June 21, 2025 — and 42.7% of those deaths occurring in children with no high-risk medical condition — the backdrop of declining flu vaccination rates since 2020 is not an abstract policy concern. The HHS decision to remove thimerosal from all influenza vaccines — signed by Kennedy despite decades of safety evidence showing the mercury-based preservative at vaccine doses posed no health risk — reflects how deeply anti-vaccine ideology has embedded itself in formal federal health policy in 2026. Public health experts have warned that each of these individual policy changes, communication disruptions, and institutional trust collapses is individually harmful; taken together in the same two-year period, they represent a compounding force with consequences for vaccination rates, exemption rates, and preventable disease outcomes that will be measured in CDC surveillance data for years to come.

Disclaimer: This research report is compiled from publicly available sources. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is given as to the completeness or reliability of the information. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions, losses, or damages of any kind arising from the use of this report.

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