How to read a clinic's numbers
Success rates are the most quoted and least understood figures in fertility. Here is what the CDC publishes, what it does not, and the three traps that make clinic comparisons misleading.
This is the entire clinical case for donor eggs in one picture. Egg quality falls with age and almost nothing else about fertility treatment changes that. A donor egg resets it.
The three traps
1. A high percentage on a small number of transfers means almost nothing. A clinic reporting 4 live births from 5 donor transfers shows as 80%. A clinic reporting 190 from 400 shows as 47.5%. The second is overwhelmingly the more reliable signal, and the first will bounce around wildly from year to year. This is why every list on this site shows the transfer count next to the rate, and why our default sort is by volume rather than by percentage.
2. Clinics choose their patients. A clinic with strict acceptance criteria - turning away harder cases - will report better numbers than one that takes everybody, without being better at medicine. The CDC data cannot adjust for this. Ask any clinic directly what its acceptance criteria are and how many patients it declines.
3. The measure has to match. “Success rate” can mean per cycle started, per retrieval, per transfer, or per patient. Per transfer always looks best, because it excludes everyone who never reached transfer. Every figure on this site is live births per embryo transfer, the same measure for every clinic, so the comparison is fair even where it is imperfect.
A live birth per transfer is the only outcome worth comparing. Pregnancy rates and implantation rates are both higher, both quoted more often in marketing, and neither is what you are trying to buy.
What the CDC does not tell you
- Cost. Nothing in this dataset is about price, and prices vary enormously.
- Waiting times, donor availability, or how long matching takes.
- How the clinic treats you, which is the thing most patients say mattered most in hindsight.
- Anything at all where the clinic ran too few cycles - those cells are suppressed, and we show them as 'not reported' rather than inventing a zero.
A reasonable way to use this site
- Start with the clinic list sorted by volume, filtered to your state or the states you could travel to.
- Shortlist clinics doing real donor volume with a rate at or above the national 45.1%.
- Then stop using the numbers and start asking questions: acceptance criteria, what happens if the first transfer fails, total cost including medication, and who you actually see at each appointment.
All figures from the CDC Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) Success Rates, 2022 final release, covering 457 clinics. We republish the federal record and do not adjust, weight or rank it beyond what is described in our methodology. No clinic pays to appear here or to move.