What 185,054 family conversations across 120 ABA providers reveal about where providers actually lose families — and how much growth is sitting inside the funnel they already have.
All figures are computed from Carelu production data for ABA providers only (non-ABA verticals excluded), aggregated across providers and de-identified. No protected health information appears in this report; no individual family or provider is identifiable.
Nearly half of all first conversations begin on evenings, weekends, or before 8am — when most front desks are dark. These are the most motivated families in the funnel (they're researching after the kids are in bed), and for most practices they hit voicemail.
n = 185,054 conversations across 120 ABA providers, Mon–Fri 8am–6pm ET baseline
Demand for ABA services is compounding — the median provider in our same-store cohort saw inquiry volume grow 35% YoY. The bottleneck in this market isn't families finding you. It's what happens after they do.
n = 37-provider same-store cohort, 13 months of monthly counts
Nearly half of inbound demand is Medicaid — which means eligibility rules, state-specific requirements, and verification speed aren't edge cases. They're the median family. Practices staffed and scripted for commercial-only intake are misconfigured for half their funnel.
n = 17,500 inquiries with payer data
More than a fifth of inquiries arrive pre-diagnosis. Most practices turn these families away with "come back when you have the report" — losing them permanently. The providers who guide them to diagnostic partners own the relationship when the diagnosis lands.
n = 29,021 captured family leads; diagnosis status disclosed in conversation
Providers with intake wired into their CRM grew +6.5% per month versus +0.9% for those without — a 7× difference. Correlation isn't causation (organized practices do many things well), but the association between connected intake and growth is the strongest in the dataset.
n = 117 ABA providers, 13 months; observational — correlation, not causation
Families reached out from 47 states plus Washington, DC, but demand concentrates: Georgia and North Carolina alone account for 27% of it, and the top twelve states carry more than three quarters. Wherever your state sits on this list, the pattern inside the funnel — after-hours arrivals, unanswered first contacts, silent waitlists — looks the same.
n = 25,518 captured family leads with state data · share of national demand · top 12 of 48 states & DC shown
Nationally, 33% of families name Medicaid — but the plan a family actually carries is intensely local. Ohio runs on CareSource; Tennessee on TennCare and BlueCare; Georgia on Peach State, CareSource, and Amerigroup. An intake script tuned for one state's payers is misconfigured the moment you cross a border. Here's the leading payer mix families reported, in the twelve highest-demand states.
Share of families naming each payer, per state · Medicaid plans (incl. managed-care orgs) shown in green · n = 11,647 classified responses
Demand is growing 35% a year, but the machinery to receive it hasn't been built: nearly half of families arrive when no one answers, more than a fifth are still waiting on a diagnosis, and half the funnel is Medicaid. The growth most providers are buying with marketing is already sitting, unanswered, inside their own funnel.
Carelu Research, The Intake Gap: Intake Data Report №1 (July 2026). carelu.com/research/the-intake-gap. Data may be cited freely with attribution.
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