Assessing Growth of BACB Certificants (1999–2019)

The authors looked at 20 years of BACB data from 1999 to 2019.

They counted how many BCBAs and BCaBAs lived in each U.S. and Canadian region.

Maps show where supervisor shortages are worst today.

Most certificants still cluster in big cities and coastal states.

Large gaps remain across the Midwest, Plains, and parts of the South.

The paper gives county-level heat maps you can open right now.

Yingling et al. (2023) zooms in deeper. It shows kids with autism outnumber RBTs in most counties. Together the two papers form a full picture: supervisors are scarce and front-line staff are even scarcer.

Zou et al. (2025) moves the lens to China. It finds similar workforce gaps in a brand-new country. The same shortage story is now global.

Thompson et al. (2025) offers a fix. Their advocacy checklist helped three states raise Medicaid rates and add telehealth. The shortage maps tell you where to lobby; the checklist tells you how.

Open the BACB growth maps before you plan supervision contracts. If you live in a red zone, start recruiting supervisees from nearby training programs. If you live in a gray zone, consider remote supervision or policy work using the Thompson checklist. Either way, use data, not guesswork, to close the gap.