Trust & Safety Verify before you admit

Rehab Accreditation & Licensing: How to Verify a Treatment Center

What each credential actually means, which ones are mandatory, and the public tools that let you confirm any facility’s license and accreditation yourself in about ten minutes.

Go to the verification steps See the red flags

9 Credentials tracked

12,238 Credential records on file

3,245 Joint Commission accredited

3,020 CARF accredited

Medically reviewed by Daniel Okafor, PMHNP-BC Last updated September 18, 2026

Not sure whether a facility is legitimate? Talk it through confidentially, 24/7: 1-888-685-2199

Accreditation & Licensing

Why Verification Matters More in This Industry Than Almost Any Other

Most people never think to check whether a hospital is accredited. In addiction treatment, checking is not optional — it is the single most useful hour you can spend before handing over a family member, a health plan and, frequently, tens of thousands of dollars.

The reason is a documented history. Over the past fifteen years, federal and state investigators, congressional hearings and reporting in The New York Times, STAT and Florida’s Palm Beach Post have described a recurring set of abuses in parts of this sector: patient brokering, where a facility pays a “body broker” a per-head fee for delivering an insured patient; lead selling, where a call centre that looks like a treatment provider auctions your phone call to whoever bid highest; deceptive marketing that plasters accreditation seals a facility never earned onto a landing page; and billing schemes built around excessive urine drug testing rather than around care. People in the worst weeks of their lives were recruited outside twelve-step meetings, flown across the country, and admitted to programmes chosen because of what their insurance would pay, not because of what they needed.

The response has been regulatory and commercial. Congress passed the Eliminating Kickbacks in Recovery Act (EKRA) in 2018, making it a federal crime to knowingly pay or receive anything of value in exchange for referring a patient to a recovery home, clinical treatment facility or laboratory. Florida and several other states strengthened their patient brokering statutes and brought prosecutions. And after suspending addiction-treatment advertising entirely in September 2017, Google reopened it in July 2018 on one condition: advertisers must hold LegitScript certification, a third-party vetting process covering licensure, background checks on owners and ongoing monitoring of marketing conduct. Meta introduced a comparable requirement. That is why a certification most people have never heard of now appears on thousands of treatment centre websites.

None of this makes the field untrustworthy. The great majority of programmes are licensed, accredited and run by clinicians who could earn more elsewhere. It simply means the burden of a two-minute check falls on you, and that the check is easy once you know what you are looking at.

Start with the distinction that everything else on this page rests on. Licensure is mandatory. It is issued by a state agency, it is the legal permission to operate, and it represents a minimum standard — safety, staffing, record-keeping, a complaints process. A facility operating without the licence its state requires is operating illegally, full stop. Accreditation is voluntary. It is granted by an independent, non-governmental body such as The Joint Commission or CARF, it costs the provider money and takes months of preparation, and it is awarded only after surveyors inspect the programme against published standards and re-inspect on a fixed cycle. Licensure tells you a programme is allowed to operate. Accreditation tells you someone independent looked closely and thought it was run well.

Neither is a guarantee. Accredited facilities have been sanctioned; licensed facilities have closed abruptly. What the two credentials give you is a paper trail, an inspection history and an external body that will take a complaint. That is a great deal more than a photograph of a swimming pool.

Licensure vs. Accreditation

Two different things that facility marketing routinely blurs together. Ask for both by name.

Mandatory — the legal floor

State Licensure

Who issues it: a state agency — often the department of health, behavioral health, or a dedicated substance use authority. Names and scope differ in all 50 states.
What it proves: the facility met minimum requirements for physical safety, staffing, clinical records, medication handling, client rights and a complaints process.
How it is checked: periodic and complaint-triggered inspections, with the power to suspend or revoke.
What it does not prove: that treatment is good. It is a floor, not a mark of excellence.
Watch for: a licence held in a different corporate name or at a different address than the facility you are actually being admitted to.

Voluntary — the higher bar

Independent Accreditation

Who issues it: non-governmental bodies, principally The Joint Commission and CARF International, plus specialised bodies for particular services.
What it proves: the programme was surveyed against published national standards covering clinical practice, governance, outcomes measurement and performance improvement.
How it is checked: on-site survey, then re-survey on a one- to three-year cycle, with interim reporting requirements.
What it does not prove: that every clinician is excellent, or that the programme suits your specific diagnosis.
Watch for: seals that are images only. A genuine accreditation is listed in the accreditor’s own public database.

Credential counts are live listing counts from the Addiction Treatment Services directory of 21,358 centers. Requirements summarised from each body’s published standards; always confirm current requirements at the source.
Credential	Type	Issued by	Cycle	Centers listing it
The Joint Commission	Voluntary accreditation	Independent nonprofit	3 years, unannounced survey	3,245
CARF International	Voluntary accreditation	Independent nonprofit	1–3 years + annual report	3,020
SAMHSA	Federal OTP certification / public listing	US Dept. of Health & Human Services	OTP certification renewed periodically	2,416
State license	Mandatory licensure	State agency	Typically annual or biennial renewal	2,376
LegitScript	Private certification (ad eligibility)	LegitScript LLC	Annual renewal + ongoing monitoring	689
NAATP	Membership + ethics code	Trade association	Annual membership	489
NARR	Recovery residence certification	National alliance via state affiliates	Set by the state affiliate	1
GuideStar / Candid Platinum	Nonprofit transparency seal	Candid (formerly GuideStar)	Refreshed annually by the nonprofit	1
HRSA health center	Federal designation	US Dept. of Health & Human Services	Ongoing, with federal reporting	1

The Credentials, One by One

What each body actually is, what it requires, and how to confirm a facility really holds it.

The Joint Commission

3,245 centers

Gold Seal of Approval — Behavioral Health Care

An independent US nonprofit founded in 1951 that accredits and certifies tens of thousands of health care organisations, from hospitals to behavioral health programmes. Its Behavioral Health Care and Human Services accreditation covers substance use treatment at every level of care. Surveyors assess care planning, medication management, staff qualifications, environment of care, infection control, client rights and performance measurement, and organisations must show they are using data to improve. Surveys are unannounced, which is exactly why the credential carries weight — a programme cannot stage-manage a visit it cannot predict. Accredited organisations display the Gold Seal of Approval.

Type: Voluntary accreditation
Cycle: Three years, with unannounced on-site surveys
Verify at: Quality Check, the Joint Commission’s public directory

Browse accredited centers Quality Check lookup

CARF International

3,020 centers

Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities

An international nonprofit accreditor founded in 1966, headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, working across behavioral health, opioid treatment, aging services and rehabilitation. CARF’s standards are explicitly person-centred: surveyors examine whether treatment plans are built with the client rather than for them, whether the person’s own goals appear in the record, and whether the organisation collects and acts on outcome data. Awards are graded — a Three-Year Accreditation is the top result, with One-Year and Provisional outcomes signalling areas of non-conformance. Accredited providers submit an annual conformance report between surveys, so the credential is not a one-off inspection.

Type: Voluntary accreditation
Cycle: One or three years, plus an annual conformance report
Verify at: CARF’s online provider search

Browse CARF-accredited centers CARF provider search

SAMHSA

2,416 centers

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

A federal agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services. It is important to read a “SAMHSA” badge carefully, because it can mean two very different things. First, SAMHSA certifies Opioid Treatment Programs — the clinics permitted to dispense methadone. OTP certification is a genuine, meaningful credential: a programme must be accredited by a SAMHSA-approved accrediting body, registered with the DEA, and approved by its state. Second, and far more loosely, a facility may simply appear in SAMHSA’s public treatment locator because it responded to the agency’s annual survey. That is a listing, not an inspection, an accreditation or an endorsement. If a centre advertises “SAMHSA approved” without being an OTP, ask precisely what it means.

Type: Federal OTP certification, or a public directory listing
Cycle: OTP certification is renewed periodically; locator data is refreshed annually
Verify at: findtreatment.gov and the Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator

Browse SAMHSA-listed centers findtreatment.gov

State License

2,376 centers

Mandatory — the one credential no facility may skip

Every state licenses substance use treatment facilities, though the agency, the terminology and the scope vary considerably. California licenses residential programmes through the Department of Health Care Services; Florida through the Department of Children and Families; Texas through Health and Human Services. A licence specifies which levels of care the facility may deliver and at which address — which is why a licence issued for outpatient services does not authorise a residential admission, and a licence for one building does not cover a second house down the street. Most state agencies publish a searchable register that shows licence status, expiry date and, in many states, substantiated complaints and enforcement actions. That complaint history is often the most informative page on the internet about a given facility.

Type: Mandatory licensure
Cycle: Usually annual or biennial renewal, plus complaint inspections
Verify at: Your state’s behavioral health or health department register

Browse licensed centers Search centers by state

LegitScript Certified

689 centers

Required to advertise treatment on Google since 2018

LegitScript is a private certification and monitoring company. Its Addiction Treatment Certification exists because of an advertising crisis: Google suspended addiction-treatment ads worldwide in September 2017 after reporting exposed lead-selling and brokering through paid search, and reopened the category in July 2018 only to advertisers LegitScript had certified. Meta adopted a comparable requirement. Certification reviews the provider’s licensure, legal and regulatory compliance, ownership and executive background checks, and advertising and admissions practices, with ongoing monitoring rather than a single one-off audit. It is not a clinical accreditation and does not assess treatment quality — but its absence on a facility that advertises heavily online is worth asking about.

Type: Private certification (advertising eligibility)
Cycle: Annual renewal with continuous monitoring
Verify at: LegitScript’s own lookup — a real seal links to a certificate with a unique ID

Browse certified centers LegitScript lookup

NAATP Membership

489 centers

National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers

NAATP is the principal trade association for addiction treatment providers in the United States, founded in 1978. It is a membership body, not an accreditor, and that distinction matters — but membership is not nothing. Providers must meet admission criteria including appropriate licensure, and they must sign and abide by NAATP’s Code of Ethics, which addresses marketing conduct, patient brokering, referral relationships and admissions practices directly. NAATP operates a complaint and enforcement process and has expelled members for ethics violations. Treat membership as a signal that a provider has publicly committed to a marketing ethics standard, and verify it in NAATP’s own member directory rather than trusting a logo.

Type: Trade association membership with an enforceable ethics code
Cycle: Annual membership renewal
Verify at: The NAATP member directory

Browse NAATP members NAATP directory

NARR Certified Residence

1 center

National Alliance for Recovery Residences

NARR publishes the national standard for recovery residences — sober living homes and similar housing — and certifies them through affiliate organisations in individual states rather than centrally. Its framework describes four levels, from Level I peer-run houses through Level II monitored and Level III supervised residences to Level IV residences with clinical staffing. Certification covers house governance, resident rights, financial practices, safety, and how the residence handles a resident who returns to use. Recovery residences are housing, not licensed clinical treatment, and in many states they are not otherwise regulated at all, which makes NARR certification unusually informative. See our sober living guide for how these homes fit into the continuum.

Type: Voluntary certification for recovery residences
Cycle: Set by the certifying state affiliate
Verify at: Your state’s NARR affiliate register

Browse NARR-certified listings NARR affiliates

GuideStar Platinum

1 center

Candid Seal of Transparency — top tier

GuideStar, now part of Candid, awards Seals of Transparency to nonprofit organisations that voluntarily publish detailed information about themselves — leadership, governance, finances and, at the highest tier, quantified programme metrics and results. Platinum is the top of that ladder. Read it for exactly what it is: a measure of how openly a nonprofit reports on itself, not an assessment of clinical care. It is genuinely useful if you want to see where a nonprofit treatment provider’s money goes, what proportion reaches programmes, and what outcomes it is willing to publish. It tells you nothing at all about a for-profit facility, which cannot hold it.

Type: Nonprofit transparency seal (self-reported, verified data points)
Cycle: Maintained by refreshing the profile, typically annually
Verify at: The organisation’s Candid / GuideStar profile

Browse listings with this seal GuideStar profiles

HRSA Health Center

1 center

Federally Qualified Health Center designation

The Health Resources and Services Administration is the HHS agency behind the federal Health Center Program. A designated health centre — commonly called an FQHC — must serve a medically underserved area or population, must be governed by a board on which patients hold the majority, and must operate a sliding fee discount schedule and see patients regardless of ability to pay or insurance status. Many health centres now provide substance use treatment, integrated behavioral health and office-based buprenorphine. For anyone uninsured, underinsured or on a low income, an HRSA-designated centre is frequently the most affordable real clinical option available — see our payment options guide.

Type: Federal designation and funding programme
Cycle: Continuous, with federal reporting and site visits
Verify at: HRSA’s Find a Health Center tool

Browse HRSA-designated listings Find a Health Center

Step by step

How to Verify a Treatment Center Yourself

Every tool below is provided at no cost and public. Working through all nine steps takes about ten minutes and is the best-value ten minutes in this entire process.

Write down the legal name and the street address. Marketing brands, phone numbers and websites are not the entity you are checking. Ask the admissions team directly: “What is the licensed legal name of the facility I would be admitted to, and at what address?” If they will not tell you, stop there. One brand often fronts several separately licensed sites, and only one of them may hold the credential being advertised.
Check the state license first. Search your state’s behavioral health, health department or substance use authority register for that legal name and address. Confirm four things: the licence is current, it is issued to that address, it authorises the level of care you are being offered (detox, residential, PHP, IOP, outpatient), and there are no open enforcement actions. Where the state publishes complaint and inspection history, read it — it is more revealing than any brochure.
Confirm accreditation at the accreditor, never on the facility’s own site. Search The Joint Commission’s Quality Check directory and CARF’s provider search. Both are publicly accessible, and both return the accredited programme, its address and the services covered. A facility that appears in neither is not necessarily bad — accreditation is voluntary — but a facility that claims either and appears in neither has told you something important.
Cross-check the federal listing. Look the facility up on SAMHSA’s findtreatment.gov and the Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator. These show the services a facility reported to the federal government, including which medications it offers, which languages it serves and whether it takes Medicaid. Remember that inclusion is a listing, not an endorsement.
If methadone is involved, confirm OTP certification. Only a SAMHSA-certified, DEA-registered and state-approved Opioid Treatment Program may dispense methadone for opioid use disorder. SAMHSA publishes the directory of certified OTPs; a clinic offering methadone that is not on it should not be offering methadone. Our medication-assisted treatment guide explains how the different medications and settings work.
Test any seal on the website. A genuine credential is verifiable at the issuer. Click the seal: it should link out to the accreditor or to a certificate page carrying a unique identification number, an issue date and an expiry. A seal that is a flat image with no link, no ID number and no date is not evidence of anything. This is the single fastest way to catch a fabricated credential, and it takes five seconds.
Verify the individual clinicians. Ask who will actually deliver your care and what licence they hold — MD, DO, PhD, PsyD, LCSW, LPC, LMFT, RN, CADC. Every state licensing board publishes a searchable register showing licence status and disciplinary history, and the federal NPI Registry confirms a clinician’s taxonomy and practice address. “Our staff are highly qualified” is not an answer; a name and a licence number is.
Check advertising certification if they advertise online. US treatment providers running Google or Meta ads generally need LegitScript certification. If a facility markets aggressively through paid search but holds no certification, ask why. LegitScript maintains a public lookup, and legitimate certificate seals link to it with a unique number.
Search for the trouble. Put the legal name, the parent company and the owner’s name into a search engine alongside terms like “lawsuit,” “state action,” “fined,” “licence revoked” and “patient brokering.” Check your state attorney general’s consumer alerts and the state licensing agency’s enforcement page. Ten minutes here has saved a great many families a great deal of money and grief.

If you are in crisis, do not let verification delay care. Call 911 for a medical emergency, or 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. For confidential, non-commercial referral, SAMHSA’s National Helpline is available 24/7 at 1-800-662-4357. You can also reach our specialists at 1-888-685-2199, and verify the facility afterwards.

Warning signs

Ten Red Flags That Should Stop a Conversation

Any one of these justifies walking away. Several together describe a business model, not a treatment programme.

A guaranteed cure or a published “success rate” with no methodology. Substance use disorder is a chronic, relapsing condition. No ethical provider guarantees an outcome, and any programme quoting a 90-plus percent success rate should be asked how it defines success, who it followed up, for how long, and who verified the number.
Anyone offering you money, or being paid, to place you. Paying or receiving a fee for a patient referral to a treatment facility or laboratory is a federal crime under EKRA, and a state crime in many jurisdictions. If a “recovery coach” or acquaintance stands to earn from your admission, that is patient brokering.
Free flights, paid rent, or waived deductibles and copays as an inducement. Routinely waiving a patient’s cost share, or paying their housing, in exchange for admission is a well-documented brokering tactic and can itself be unlawful. Legitimate financial assistance is documented, needs-based and disclosed — not offered on a first phone call to close a deal.
Your insurance card is requested before a single clinical question is asked. A clinically driven intake starts with what you use, how much, your medical and psychiatric history, and your withdrawal risk. If benefits verification comes first and assessment comes later — or never — you are being underwritten, not assessed.
Vague pricing, or a refusal to put costs in writing. You are entitled to know the total cost, what it includes, what is billed separately (labs, medication, psychiatry, private-room upgrades), and what your insurer has authorised. “We’ll work with whatever your insurance pays” is not a price.
Pressure to admit today, or a bed that “expires” in an hour. Genuine clinical urgency exists — untreated alcohol or benzodiazepine withdrawal is dangerous — but it is expressed as a medical recommendation, not a countdown. Manufactured scarcity is a sales technique.
No verifiable licence number, or a licence in a name that does not match. If the state register has no record of the entity at the address you would be admitted to, treat everything else you have been told as unverified.
The address turns out to be an ordinary residential house with no licence attached. Sober living homes legitimately look like houses — but a house being sold to you as licensed clinical treatment, with therapy and detox delivered on site, is a different matter entirely. Check the address on a map and against the register.
Frequent, unexplained urine drug testing. Testing is a normal part of treatment. Daily confirmatory testing billed at high rates, or testing that continues at the same intensity for months, has been at the centre of multiple federal fraud prosecutions. Ask how often you will be tested and how it is billed.
A blanket refusal to allow medication for opioid or alcohol use disorder. Buprenorphine, methadone and naltrexone are the best-evidenced treatments available, and forcing a taper off an effective medication to enter a programme raises overdose risk. A programme entitled to its philosophy is not entitled to withhold the standard of care without telling you.

Our standards

How This Directory Vets Its Listings

And the limits of what a directory can and cannot tell you.

We publish credential data for more than 21,000 treatment centers, so it is only fair to explain where it comes from and what it is worth.

What we do

We check licensure before a listing goes live. Every provider that applies to be listed is matched against its state licensing register by legal name and address. A facility we cannot find in a state register is not published.
We record accreditation from the accreditor. Joint Commission and CARF status is taken from those bodies’ own public directories, not from a provider’s marketing copy or a supplied logo.
We re-verify on a rolling cycle, and immediately whenever we receive a credible report that a listing is wrong, that a programme has closed, or that a licence has lapsed or been revoked.
We label paid placement. Sponsored and featured listings carry a visible badge in the interface. Paying for placement does not exempt a facility from the same verification standards, and organic results are not reordered to favour advertisers.
We decline listings from unlicensed operations, from anyone advertising guaranteed cures, and from any operation we find engaged in patient brokering.

What we do not do — and will not claim

We do not accredit, certify, endorse or rank any facility. Appearing in this directory is not a quality judgement and must never be read as one. We are not an accrediting body and have no authority to act as one.
We do not inspect facilities. We record what the licensing and accrediting authorities publish. Only those bodies conduct site surveys.
We cannot guarantee a listing is current. Licences lapse, programmes are sold and services change between our verification cycles. Always confirm directly with the state register before you admit, using the steps above.
We do not provide clinical advice. Nothing here substitutes for an assessment by a licensed clinician.

Report a concern

If you believe a listing is inaccurate, that a facility has lost its licence, that it has closed, or that it is engaged in patient brokering or deceptive marketing, tell us. Use our contact form and include the facility name, the city and state, and what you observed. We acknowledge reports promptly, verify against the licensing authority, and correct or unpublish the listing where the report is substantiated.

Serious misconduct should also go to the authority with the power to act on it: your state licensing agency can investigate and sanction a facility; your state attorney general’s consumer protection office handles deceptive marketing and brokering complaints; the accrediting body will take a complaint about an accredited programme; and insurance fraud can be reported to your insurer’s special investigations unit. Read more about our editorial and listing policies on our editorial standards page.

Accreditation & Verification: Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a licensed and an accredited rehab?

Licensure is mandatory and governmental; accreditation is voluntary and independent. A state agency issues a licence, which is the legal permission to operate and represents a minimum standard of safety, staffing and record-keeping — operating without one is illegal. Accreditation from a body such as The Joint Commission or CARF is something a provider chooses to pursue, pays for, and earns only after independent surveyors inspect the programme against published national standards and return on a fixed cycle. In short: licensure tells you a facility is permitted to operate; accreditation tells you an outside expert examined how it operates and thought it met a higher bar. Check the licence first, because it is compulsory, then treat accreditation as the meaningful differentiator between licensed programmes.

Is Joint Commission or CARF accreditation better?

Neither is categorically better and both are widely respected; they emphasise different things. The Joint Commission comes from a hospital and health-system tradition and conducts unannounced surveys on a three-year cycle, with heavy attention to safety systems, medication management and environment of care. CARF comes from a rehabilitation tradition and is explicitly person-centred, examining whether the client helped build their own treatment plan and whether the organisation measures and acts on outcomes; it grades its awards, with a Three-Year Accreditation being the strongest result, and requires an annual conformance report between surveys. Plenty of programmes hold both. The practically important question is not which logo appears, but whether the accreditation is current, covers the specific programme and address you would attend, and appears in the accreditor’s own public database.

Is being “SAMHSA approved” an accreditation?

Usually not, and this is one of the most common misunderstandings in treatment marketing. SAMHSA is a federal agency, and it does one narrowly defined certification: it certifies Opioid Treatment Programs, the clinics licensed to dispense methadone for opioid use disorder. That certification is real and demanding — it requires accreditation by a SAMHSA-approved accrediting body, DEA registration and state approval. Everything else is different. Most facilities that reference SAMHSA are simply listed in the agency’s public treatment locator because they responded to its annual national survey. A locator listing involves no inspection and confers no approval or endorsement. If a facility advertises “SAMHSA approved” and is not an OTP, ask exactly what they mean, then verify the credential that actually matters: the state licence and any independent accreditation.

How do I check if a rehab is legitimate?

Get the facility’s legal name and street address, then confirm it in three independent places. First, your state’s licensing register — is the licence current, at that address, and does it authorise the level of care being offered? Second, the accreditor’s own database: The Joint Commission’s Quality Check or CARF’s provider search. Third, SAMHSA’s findtreatment.gov for the services the facility reported to the federal government. Then apply the seal test — click every credential badge on their website; a genuine one links to a certificate with a unique ID and an expiry date, while a fake one is a flat image that links nowhere. Finally, search the legal name and the owner’s name alongside “lawsuit,” “licence revoked” and “patient brokering,” and check your state attorney general’s consumer alerts. The full nine-step walkthrough is above on this page.

What is LegitScript certification and why does it exist?

LegitScript is a private certification and monitoring company, and its addiction treatment certification exists because of an advertising scandal. In September 2017 Google suspended addiction treatment advertising after investigations showed that paid search was being used to sell patient leads to the highest bidder. Google reopened the category in July 2018 on the condition that advertisers hold LegitScript certification, and Meta introduced a similar requirement. Certification reviews licensure, regulatory compliance, ownership and executive background checks, and admissions and marketing conduct, with ongoing monitoring rather than a single audit. It is not a clinical accreditation and says nothing about the quality of therapy you would receive. But because it is a prerequisite for advertising, its absence at a facility that advertises heavily online is a reasonable question to raise.

What is patient brokering, and how would I recognise it?

Patient brokering is paying, or being paid, to deliver a patient to a treatment facility or laboratory. The Eliminating Kickbacks in Recovery Act of 2018 made it a federal crime, and several states, notably Florida, prosecute it under their own patient brokering statutes. In practice it looks like this: someone you met at a meeting or online offers to “get you into” a specific programme and is vague about why; a facility offers to fly you across the country at no cost, pay your rent, or waive your deductible and copay; a “free helpline” that appears independent turns out to route every caller to one operator. The tell is that the choice of facility is being driven by money moving between third parties rather than by your clinical needs. If you suspect it, contact your state attorney general’s consumer protection office, and let us know via our contact form if the facility is listed here.

Does accreditation mean my insurance will cover the treatment?

Accreditation helps but does not decide it. Many insurers require a facility to be licensed and, for higher levels of care, accredited before they will contract with it or reimburse at in-network rates — so accreditation is often a precondition of coverage. It is not the same as coverage. Whether your specific treatment is paid for depends on your plan’s network, whether the facility is in it, whether the level of care is judged medically necessary under criteria such as ASAM, and whether pre-authorisation was obtained. An accredited but out-of-network facility can still leave you with a very large bill. Verify benefits in writing before admission — our insurance guide walks through the process, and payment options covers sliding-scale, Medicaid and self-pay routes.

Does Addiction Treatment Services accredit or endorse the centers it lists?

No. We are a directory, not an accrediting body, and we have no authority to certify, endorse, rank or vouch for any treatment provider. What we do is verify that a facility appears in its state licensing register before we publish it, record accreditation status from the accreditors’ own public databases rather than from provider marketing, re-verify on a rolling cycle, label paid placements clearly, and decline or remove listings that fail our standards. Inclusion in this directory is therefore evidence that a licence existed when we checked — nothing more, and it should never be read as a quality judgement. Always confirm a facility’s current licence and accreditation yourself using the public tools listed on this page before you admit anyone.

Do sober living homes need to be licensed or accredited?

In most states, no — and that is precisely why it matters when one is certified. Recovery residences provide substance-free housing with rules, curfews and peer accountability, but they do not deliver licensed clinical treatment, so many states do not license them at all. The National Alliance for Recovery Residences fills that gap with a national standard, applied through state affiliate organisations, which certifies homes across four levels from peer-run to clinically staffed. Certification covers governance, resident rights, finances, safety and how the house responds when a resident returns to use. If a home is not certified, ask directly about the house rules, the fee structure, what happens to your deposit if you leave, and whether medication for opioid use disorder is permitted. Our sober living guide goes through this in detail.