As part of our reporting into growing vaccine hesitancy in the U.S., the Washington Post is sharing cleaned, standardized data reflecting kindergarten vaccination rates. This data was used in reporting published in the Post on December 31, 2025. If you use this data, please credit The Washington Post.
U.S. vaccination rates are plunging. Look up where your school stands.
There are five files included in this repo. Details on how the data was obtained, cleaned and filtered can be found in the methodology below. There are no plans to update this data.
- County-level vaccination rates: vaxrates_counties.csv
- School-level vaccination rates: vaxrates_schools.csv
- Kansas: kansas.geojson
- Data Dictionary: data_dictionary.csv
- Data Sourcing: data_sourcing.csv
To investigate vaccination rates at U.S. schools, reporters sought out school-level MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccination rates and exemption data for kindergartners from all 50 states and D.C. To analyze how the pandemic affected rates, we examined the academic years 2018-2019, 2019-2020, 2023-2024 and 2024-2025. Data was gathered from publicly available government websites or through public records requests filed with state and local agencies.
Thirty-four states and D.C. provided school-level vaccination data. Two states — Texas and Kansas — provided district-level public school data, which creates an undercount because even the largest districts were counted as a single school in the analysis. When a state did not provide MMR-specific figures, an overall vaccination rate reflecting students up-to-date on all required vaccines was used. MMR rates reflect two doses of the vaccine, and in some states represent the vaccination for measles specifically.
There are several reasons certain schools are not found in the data. Many states suppressed data for schools with low student enrollment (typically less than 10 or 20 students). Some schools did not report data to the state. Also, reporters removed data reported for online or virtual schools based on school names. Vaccination rates could also be impacted by missing records for students.
The exemption rates reported for schools are not just for the MMR vaccine and in some cases reflect exemptions students received for other vaccines.
Forty-four states and D.C. provided county-level vaccination data. In states where county-level data was not made available, individual county vaccine rates in our database reflect a county average that is weighted by enrollment, with non-reporting schools dropped from the calculation. If student enrollment data was not provided, reporters collected it from National Center for Education Statistics databases. In some cases, the state provided data based on geography other than counties; reporters translated these to county-equivalent regions for mapping and analysis. Although student enrollment typically refers to the number of kindergarten students per school, some states reported total school enrollment instead.
For county and school-level data, “post-pandemic” typically refers to the 2024-2025 school year, but some states provided only 2023-2024 data. “Pre-pandemic” years include school years starting in 2018 or 2019. Some states’ rates did not differentiate between kindergartners and students in other grades; when grades above kindergarten are included, that is stated in the state-specific notes in the interactive map. Many schools did not fall cleanly into a “public” or “private” school type category, and one additional category, “other” (which can include charter, tribal, special education, independent and collaborative schools among others) is included in the underlying data.
For statewide vaccination and exemption rates, reporters used CDC data from 2018 and 2024, with the exception of Montana (no post-pandemic data), Alaska (pre-pandemic year is 2017), the District of Columbia (pre-pandemic year is 2015) and West Virginia (post-pandemic year is 2023). The CDC’s reported vaccination rates are based on a survey of a representative sample of schools in each state. When individual states reported vaccine exemption data for students, that data typically fell into one of three categories: (1) medical exemptions, (2) religious exemptions and (3) personal exemptions, which includes philosophical exemptions. Some states only reported nonmedical exemptions, which could include religious or personal exemptions.
County-level or school-level kindergarten vaccination rates were considered to be below herd immunity if they were less than 95 percent. To calculate the number of kindergarten-age children in counties that fell below herd immunity, reporters used the Census Bureau’s current population estimates for 5- and 6-year-olds. To measure the political split of counties, reporters used 2024 presidential vote margins. To calculate the number of schools below herd immunity, we used the most recent year provided by each state.
In roughly two dozen states where exact school addresses weren’t provided, reporters geocoded each building in the following manner: First, schools were matched to National Center for Education Statistics data. Those without a close match were then searched for location details using Google and Geocodio tools. Those that still didn’t match to a street address were checked by hand. In several states, a number of schools listed no exact addresses, were not included in federal datasets and did not appear in web searches. Those were geocoded to the center of the nearest geography provided — either a street, city or county. In some cases, schools may be geocoded imprecisely, i.e., to a local county office, PO box or out-of-date location, or to the location of another school. This is largely due to some schools in the same county having similar names, and the quality or availability of school addresses provided by the states. In hundreds of cases, reporters identified and manually fixed geocoding issues.
- Alaska: Data was provided for large economic regions, so reporters translated these to county-equivalent census areas and boroughs.
- Connecticut: Available data represented counties prior to 2024 and planning regions after, so reporters mapped school addresses from 2018 to the planning regions.
- D.C.: In the county map data, the pre-pandemic year is 2015, not 2018 or 2019, as no comparable data was otherwise available.
- Hawaii: State health officials noted that they could not clearly distinguish between students that were not vaccinated from those who were missing immunization records in part because of state immunization registry issues and staffing shortages. School-level rates reflect all students from grades K-12 who are compliant with vaccine requirements.
- Iowa: School-level data includes all schools across grades K-12. County-level data reflects kindergarten-specific rates.
- Kansas: Only school-district-level data was provided, so that data is available here as a separate file with that school district geography as “kansas.geojson”.
- Kentucky: Initial county and school-level data provided for Jefferson County’s vaccination rate appeared to be extremely low (under 60 percent). When reporters asked about these rates, local officials sent dramatically updated school-level data for Jefferson County alone from 2018-2019 through the 2024-2025 school year – the latest rate was about 94 percent on average. Local public health experts cited a top healthcare provider not reporting data as a reason for the discrepancy and later told reporters that The Post’s inquiry helped them find a major multistate data infrastructure flaw that also impacted the data’s accuracy. Reporters replaced school and county-level data for Jefferson County in this data, but it is unclear the extent to which these problems officials cited impact other local data in Kentucky.
- Montana: No recent statewide (latest is from 2020-2021), county (latest is from 2019-2020), or school-level (latest is from 2018-2019) data was available. In a statement to The Post, a health department official wrote that “the Department no longer collects data from schools after the passing of HB 334 in 2021.”
- Nebraska: Data was provided for health department districts, so reporters translated data for these to counties.
- New York: School-level data includes all schools, not just those with kindergartens. It does not include any individual public schools in the five boroughs of New York City – those are reported at the borough level.
- South Carolina: County-level data represents students across grades K-12.
- Texas: Data represents individual private schools and public school districts, which were each counted as one school in the analysis. In the school-level dataframe, public school districts are geocoded as centroids for school districts.
- Vermont: School-level data includes all schools, not just those with kindergartens.
- West Virginia: West Virginia did not provide any data following multiple requests. Only CDC data was used to report statewide rates.
- Wisconsin: State health department officials noted that the methodology for calculating statewide rates changed before and after the pandemic from a stratified, two-stage cluster sample (for measles and exemption data), to a census sample (since 2020-2021).
- Wyoming: The state switched reporting for the number of doses from two to one dose of the MMR vaccine in 2023 and also shifted how it defines kindergarten-age children from different ages to kindergartners specifically. County-level data was not included in the reporting, as it was not possible to compare this data either over time or with other states.
Reporting by Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert. Data analysis by Caitlin Gilbert. Graphics by Dylan Moriarty. Development by Junne Joaquin Alcantara. Graphics editing by Tim Meko and Javier Zarracina. Design editing by Betty Chavarria. Photos by Joshua Lott. Photo editing by Maya Valentine. Editing by Christopher Rowland and Meghan Hoyer. Additional editing by Juliet Eilperin and Lynh Bui. Copy edited by Gaby Morera Di Núbila.
