SCII 2026 Data Report
This page presents the findings of the State Community Integration Index (SCII) for 2026 — the first year of publication. The SCII assesses all 50 states on their commitment to disability community integration across six policy domains, producing a composite score out of 100 and a tier classification from Leading to Critical. The 2026 report covers the first 15 states in the pilot phase. The remaining 35 states will be added on a rolling basis throughout the year as data collection is completed. This page is a living document. It will be updated as new state profiles are published, as federal data sources release new figures, and as Lived Reality Survey responses are collected from advocates, professionals, and people with disabilities across the country.
All scores reflect the most current publicly available data as of the date noted in each state profile. Data sources, scoring methodology, and known limitations are documented in full on the SCII Methodology Page
2026 NATIONAL SNAPSHOT
Before examining individual states, the aggregate picture tells a story of its own.
Of the 15 states assessed in the 2026 pilot, four states achieved Tier 1 (Leading) status — a score of 80 or above reflecting substantial alignment with the Olmstead mandate. Five states ranked in Tier 2 (Progressing), demonstrating meaningful infrastructure with documented gaps. Two states fell into Tier 3 (Lagging), carrying significant structural deficits that require active reform. Four states ranked in Tier 4 (Critical), reflecting systemic failure of the community integration mandate.
The spread between the highest and lowest scoring states — 57 points separating Vermont (84) from Mississippi (27) — is not the result of resource scarcity alone. It is the result of policy choices: where states invest, what systems they build, and whether their legal obligations under Olmstead are treated as operational commitments or administrative formalities.
2026 Pilot Snapshot
| States assessed | 15 |
| Tier 1 — Leading | 4 states |
| Tier 2 — Progressing | 5 states |
| Tier 3 — Lagging | 2 states |
| Tier 4 — Critical | 4 states |
| Highest score | 84 (Vermont) |
| Lowest score | 27 (Mississippi) |
| Score spread | 57 points |
| States with active DOJ Olmstead action | 2 |
| States with judicially narrowed Olmstead protections | 3 (Fifth Circuit) |
| States that have eliminated subminimum wage | 3 of 15 |
THE 2026 RANKINGS
| Rank | State | Score | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vermont | 84 | 🟢 Leading |
| 2 | Oregon | 81 | 🟢 Leading |
| 3 | Maryland | 79 | 🟢 Leading |
| 4 | Washington | 77 | 🟢 Leading |
| 5 | Minnesota | 74 | 🟡 Progressing |
| 6 | Colorado | 68 | 🟡 Progressing |
| 7 | Pennsylvania | 63 | 🟡 Progressing |
| 8 | Georgia | 58 | 🟡 Progressing |
| 9 | New York | 57 | 🟡 Progressing |
| 10 | Illinois | 51 | 🟠 Lagging |
| 11 | Florida | 44 | 🔴 Critical (borderline) |
| 12 | Tennessee | 41 | 🔴 Critical (borderline) |
| 13 | Texas | 36 | 🔴 Critical |
| 14 | Alabama | 36 | 🔴 Critical |
| 15 | Mississippi | 27 | 🔴 Critical |
Below, you can find state profiles with domain breakdowns, important gaps, and key insights.
TIER ANALYSIS
🟢 Tier 1 — Leading States (Score: 80–100)
Vermont · Oregon · Maryland · Washington
The four leading states share a defining characteristic: community integration is not a compliance exercise — it is an embedded operational commitment. Vermont has no traditional DD waiver waitlist. Oregon and Maryland have fully eliminated subminimum wage employment by statute, with measurable post-elimination employment gains documented in peer-reviewed research. Washington is consolidating five HCBS waivers into two based on direct community feedback. In each case, the state’s approach reflects a decision to invest in community infrastructure ahead of enforcement pressure rather than in response to it.
What separates Tier 1 states from the rest is not that they have solved every problem. Vermont has rural workforce gaps. Oregon’s post-subminimum wage employment outcomes remain incomplete. What separates them is the direction of their systems and the durability of their commitments — legislative and structural rather than court-ordered and contingent.
🟡 Tier 2 — Progressing States (Score: 60–79)
Minnesota · Colorado · Pennsylvania · Georgia · New York
Tier 2 states are defined not by failure but by the gap between intention and execution. Minnesota has strong policy infrastructure but has not converted Employment First principles into statutory 14(c) elimination. Pennsylvania has made real progress — driven largely by the Benjamin consent decree — but progress that is litigation-dependent rather than systemically embedded. Georgia completed the behavioral health provisions of its Olmstead settlement in February 2026 after 15 years of court-monitored implementation, yet 541 individuals with IDD remain in institutional transition. New York enacted the HALT Solitary Confinement Act — then violated it so systematically that a federal injunction was required to stop the rollback.
Tier 2 is not a comfortable resting place. It is a fork: states here will either build on their progress and move toward Tier 1, or allow the structural gaps to widen and slide toward Tier 3.
🟠 Tier 3 — Lagging States (Score: 40–59)
Illinois
Illinois occupies a particularly instructive position in Tier 3. The state has real infrastructure: active consent decrees, a functioning P&A organization, and an administration that has publicly committed to deinstitutionalization. Yet in March 2025, the DOJ launched a new wide-ranging investigation into Illinois’ treatment of people with IDD — not despite these commitments, but alongside them. Nearly 1,600 people remain in state developmental centers. Two years after the governor announced transitions out of Choate, 160 residents remain. A federal judge rejected the state’s motion to end the Williams consent decree, finding more work remained.
Illinois illustrates the most important pattern in Tier 3: the gap between announced intention and operational follow-through. When that gap persists long enough, it is no longer a capacity problem. It becomes a policy problem.
🔴 Tier 4 — Critical States (Score: Below 40)
Florida · Tennessee · Texas · Alabama · Mississippi
The four Tier 4 states in this pilot share a structural condition: they have not built the community infrastructure that would make Olmstead compliance operational, and in most cases face no enforcement pressure compelling them to do so. Florida has 22,372 individuals on its DD waiver waitlist — many waiting over a decade — with no comprehensive Olmstead plan. Tennessee has 1,185 on its DD waitlist with an average national IDD wait time of 50 months and no active DOJ oversight. Texas maintains 13 State Supported Living Centers while its HCBS interest lists number in the tens of thousands. Alabama is still auditing settings under the CMS HCBS Settings Rule that function institutionally despite their community classification.
Mississippi stands alone at the bottom for a reason that goes beyond service gaps: the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court’s finding of Olmstead violations in 2023, effectively eliminating the federal enforcement mechanism within its jurisdiction. Mississippi is not merely failing to implement Olmstead — it is operating in a legal environment where Olmstead has been judicially narrowed to the point of near-irrelevance.
DOMAIN ANALYSIS
Domain 1: Institutional Population Burden
The most striking pattern in this domain is the relationship between HCBS waitlist length and institutional population size. States with the longest waitlists consistently show the highest institutional population counts — not because the people on those lists are being institutionalized while they wait (though some are), but because long waitlists are a symptom of the same underlying condition: insufficient investment in community infrastructure. Florida’s 22,000-person DD waitlist and its continued nursing facility population among working-age adults are not two separate problems. They are the same problem measured at two different points in the same pipeline.
Domain 2: HCBS Infrastructure
The single most revealing indicator in this domain is whether a state screens applicants for eligibility before placing them on a waiver waitlist. Texas does not — meaning that some individuals wait years only to be denied at the top of the list. This practice functions as a structural discouragement: families who learn how the system works stop applying. The official waitlist number understates the true unmet need. States that screen before placement at least ensure that every person waiting has a reasonable expectation of eventual enrollment.
Domain 3: Olmstead Compliance
The most significant finding in this domain is the distinction between litigation-driven and legislatively-embedded compliance. Pennsylvania’s progress exists because of the Benjamin consent decree. Georgia’s behavioral health transformation took 15 years of federal monitoring. Both represent real change — but change that required external pressure to produce. Vermont and Oregon, by contrast, have embedded community integration into their operating systems through legislative and administrative decisions that do not depend on ongoing court oversight. The durability of reform differs significantly between these two pathways.
Domain 4: Criminal Justice Diversion
The 2025 corrections officers’ strike in New York produced one of the most direct demonstrations of this domain’s importance: when HALT Act protections were suspended, individuals with mental illness were immediately placed in near-solitary conditions. The crisis response infrastructure — or its absence — does not remain abstract in emergencies. It determines what happens to the most vulnerable people in the system within hours of a disruption. States without mobile crisis coverage, without 988 capacity, and without pre-arrest diversion are not merely behind on a policy timeline. They are one crisis away from systematic harm.
Domain 5: Housing and Economic Self-Determination
The withdrawal of the federal DOL proposed rule to phase out subminimum wage (14(c)) in July 2025 is the most consequential development in this domain in the 2026 reporting period. Of the 15 states assessed, only three — Oregon, Maryland, and Washington — have fully eliminated 14(c) by state law. Colorado completed its phase-out on July 1, 2025, the same month the federal rule was withdrawn. The remaining 11 states now have no federal floor compelling movement on this issue. States that were monitoring federal action before moving legislatively have lost their catalyst. The 14(c) divide is likely to widen in 2027 and beyond.
Domain 6: Voice, Oversight and Civil Rights
This is the most consistently scored domain across all 15 states — because federally protected funding floors for Protection and Advocacy organizations and Independent Living Centers create a baseline that no state falls entirely below. But baseline is not leadership. The states that score highest in this domain have gone beyond federal floors: state-level disability civil rights statutes with private rights of action, adequately funded ombudsman programs, and disability representation on state boards and commissions with actual rulemaking authority. The states that score lowest meet the federal minimum and nothing more — which means that when federal funding erodes, as it is currently doing through ACL restructuring and SSA staffing cuts, their civil rights infrastructure erodes with it.
KEY FINDINGS
These are the five findings that cut across all 15 states and carry the strongest implications for policy, advocacy, and reform.
Finding 1: The subminimum wage divide is the strongest single predictor of overall state performance.
Every state that has eliminated Section 14(c) subminimum wage employment scores in Tier 1 or Tier 2. Every state that has not is Tier 2 or below. This is not coincidental. Subminimum wage elimination requires sustained political will, employer engagement, supported employment investment, and cross-agency coordination — the same capacities that produce strong performance across every other domain. A state willing to do the work of eliminating 14(c) is a state building the infrastructure that community integration requires. The federal DOL rule withdrawal in July 2025 makes state-level legislative action the only remaining pathway. This should be the top legislative priority for disability advocates in every state not yet moving on this issue.
Finding 2: The Fifth Circuit’s 2023 reversal in Mississippi is the most dangerous development in Olmstead jurisprudence in a generation.
When the Fifth Circuit reversed the district court’s finding of Olmstead violations in United States v. Mississippi, it did not merely affect one state. It narrowed the Olmstead mandate for every state within its jurisdiction — Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi — by holding that the integration mandate does not reach people at risk of institutionalization, only those already institutionalized. This interpretation, if it spreads to other circuits or is adopted by the Supreme Court, would eliminate the most important preventive tool in disability rights enforcement. It would require advocates to wait until a person is already in an institution before challenging the conditions that put them there. The legal implications of this ruling deserve sustained national attention that they have not yet received.
Finding 3: Enforcement absence is a policy condition, not a neutral state.
Florida scores lower than Illinois despite having fewer active violations — because Illinois has enforcement mechanisms, however imperfect, while Florida has no mechanism compelling change at all. A state can have a large waitlist, a non-existent Olmstead plan, and a pattern of institutional placement — and face no federal scrutiny whatsoever if it has not been the subject of prior litigation or investigation. The absence of a DOJ action is not evidence of compliance. In several Tier 4 states, it is evidence of an enforcement gap. Advocates in Florida, Tennessee, and Alabama should be building the evidentiary record needed to attract federal attention.
Finding 4: Court-ordered compliance and legislatively embedded compliance produce different outcomes with different durability.
Pennsylvania and Georgia have made real progress — but progress that required decades of litigation and federal monitoring to produce. Vermont and Oregon made comparable progress through legislative and administrative decisions that do not depend on ongoing court oversight. When a consent decree ends, the compliance obligation does not automatically transfer into the state’s operating culture. Georgia’s behavioral health settlement provisions were terminated in February 2026 — a genuine milestone — but the infrastructure built under court order now has to sustain itself without the accountability mechanism that built it. The lesson is not that litigation is ineffective. It is that litigation alone is insufficient. Legislative embedding of community integration commitments is what converts court-ordered change into durable reform.
Finding 5: The current federal dismantling of disability infrastructure affects all states — but Tier 4 states are most exposed.
The gutting of the Administration for Community Living, the largest SSA staffing cuts in history, and the withdrawal of the federal 14(c) rule are not state-level events. They are federal-level changes that shift the baseline for every state simultaneously. But their impact is not distributed equally. Tier 1 and Tier 2 states have built community infrastructure that can absorb some degree of federal erosion — their HCBS systems, their legislative protections, their ILC networks function independently of federal leadership signals. Tier 4 states have not built that infrastructure. When federal funding shrinks, when SSA offices close, when ACL programs are eliminated, the people in those states have the least to fall back on. Federal dismantling and state-level failure compound each other. That compounding effect is where the most serious harm is occurring right now.
STATE PROFILES — 2026 PILOT
Brief reference summaries for all 15 states. Full profiles including domain-by-domain scores, data sources, critical gaps, and key insights are published as individual state profile posts linked below.
| State | Score | Tier | Defining Characteristic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vermont | 84 | 🟢 Leading | No DD waiver waitlist; community integration embedded in §1115 framework |
| Oregon | 81 | 🟢 Leading | Full 14(c) elimination (2023); Lane v. Brown employment settlement |
| Maryland | 79 | 🟢 Leading | First state to produce documented employment gains post-14(c) elimination |
| Washington | 77 | 🟢 Leading | Active waiver consolidation from 5 to 2 based on 1,800+ community comments |
| Minnesota | 74 | 🟡 Progressing | Strong HCBS architecture; Employment First without statutory 14(c) elimination |
| Colorado | 68 | 🟡 Progressing | 14(c) phase-out completed July 1, 2025; transition outcomes being tracked |
| Pennsylvania | 63 | 🟡 Progressing | Benjamin consent decree drives progress; compliance litigation-dependent |
| Georgia | 58 | 🟡 Progressing | Behavioral health settlement terminated Feb 2026; IDD provisions ongoing |
| New York | 57 | 🟡 Progressing | HALT Act enacted and then systematically violated; federal injunction required |
| Illinois | 51 | 🟠 Lagging | New DOJ probe March 2025; 1,600 in state developmental centers |
| Florida | 44 | 🔴 Critical | 22,372 on DD waitlist; no comprehensive Olmstead plan; Baker Act overuse |
| Tennessee | 41 | 🔴 Critical | 1,185 on DD waitlist; 50-month average IDD wait; no active enforcement |
| Texas | 36 | 🔴 Critical | 13 State Supported Living Centers; tens of thousands on HCBS interest lists |
| Alabama | 36 | 🔴 Critical | Still auditing settings under HCBS Settings Rule for institutional characteristics |
| Mississippi | 27 | 🔴 Critical | Fifth Circuit reversed Olmstead violations finding (2023); no enforcement mechanism |
Vermont · Oregon · Maryland · Washington · Minnesota · Colorado · Pennsylvania · Georgia · New York · Illinois · Florida · Tennessee · Texas · Alabama · Mississippi
LIVED REALITY SURVEY DATA
What People with Disabilities and Advocates Are Reporting
Official data describes policy on paper. The Lived Reality Survey describes policy in practice. This section presents responses collected directly from people with disabilities, family members, advocates, and disability professionals across the country. Survey responses are reported alongside — not merged into — the composite SCII score, so that readers can see where official metrics and lived experience align, and where they diverge.
Survey responses are currently being collected.
The Lived Reality Survey opened in 2026 and is accepting responses on a rolling basis. This section will update automatically as new responses come in. If you have direct experience with disability services in any state, your response strengthens the Index.
Take the Lived Reality Survey →
The data table below updates automatically from the SCII Lived Reality Survey response database. Response counts and aggregate findings refresh as new submissions are received.
WHAT COMES NEXT
The 2026 SCII pilot covers 15 states. The work is not finished — it is beginning.
Remaining 35 states will be added on a rolling basis throughout 2026 and into 2027, completing the first full national ranking. States will be grouped regionally as they are added, with priority given to states where advocacy organizations have expressed the greatest interest in data.
The Equity Sub-Index — examining how community integration outcomes are distributed across race, ethnicity, LGBTQ+ status, and language access within states — is currently in development. Aggregate state scores can obscure significant internal disparities. A state that performs well on average may be producing those averages by serving some populations well while others remain in institutional settings at disproportionate rates.
Annual updates will be published each year, with each state’s prior-year score reported alongside the current score so that trajectory — advancing, stalled, or regressing — is visible over time.
The Lived Reality Survey remains open permanently. As response volume grows, state-level findings will be published alongside official scores, and the gap — or alignment — between the two will become one of the Index’s most important findings.
