Records desk / CMS service area file, county roll-up
Certified home health coverage by county, St. Louis metro, 2026
The typical zip code in St. Louis County has 27 Medicare-certified home health agencies reporting service to it. The typical zip code in Calhoun County, Illinois, has 3. This page rolls the 262 zip codes of the fifteen county St. Louis metro up to their counties so the thin end of certified coverage can be seen whole, with the lowest and highest zip in each county printed beside the median so the median cannot hide them.
A figure in this file is a count of agencies that told CMS they serve a zip code. Rolled up to a county, it describes how many certified agencies claim territory across that county's zip codes: at the typical zip, at the thinnest, and at the thickest.
It describes no capacity, no staffing level, no willingness to take a new patient and no travel to any particular street. And it counts only Medicare-certified home health agencies, the clinical category. Providers of non-medical care at home file no service area with CMS, so a county with a median of 3 here may have many of them or none, and this file cannot say which.
Methodology
- Unit
- The county. The 262 metro zip rows already published on the zip code file, grouped by the county named for each zip. Nothing was added to the file; it was folded.
- Metric
- Median count of certified agencies per zip code, computed across the county's own zip rows. Where a county holds an even number of zips the median is the midpoint of the two middle values, which is why St. Charles County reads 23.5 and Macoupin County reads 6.5.
- Companion columns
- Zip codes in the county, the lowest per-zip count, the highest per-zip count, and how many of the county's zips are served by 3 or fewer agencies. Each is read straight off the same rows. No other figure on this page is derived.
- Source file
- Home Health Care Zip Codes m5eg-upu5, HH_Zip_Jul2026.csv, CMS release July 2026. The metro portion holds 3,563 agency to zip rows.
- Pull date
- 2026-09-10.
- County assignment
- Census Bureau 2020 ZCTA to county relationship file; a zip that straddles a boundary is assigned to the county holding the largest share of its land. A zip is counted once, in one county.
- Sort
- Median descending, then number of zips descending, then county name.
- Licence
- United States federal government work, public domain.
| # | County | State | Zips | Median agencies per zip | Lowest zip | Highest zip | Zips at 3 or fewer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | St. Louis County | MO | 43 | 27 | 2 | 34 | 2 |
| 2 | St. Louis city | MO | 18 | 26 | 12 | 30 | 0 |
| 3 | St. Charles County | MO | 14 | 23.5 | 3 | 29 | 1 |
| 4 | Jefferson County | MO | 20 | 18 | 1 | 31 | 3 |
| 5 | St. Clair County | IL | 27 | 13 | 5 | 16 | 0 |
| 6 | Madison County | IL | 27 | 12 | 8 | 15 | 0 |
| 7 | Franklin County | MO | 22 | 8 | 2 | 17 | 2 |
| 8 | Lincoln County | MO | 13 | 8 | 2 | 15 | 2 |
| 9 | Warren County | MO | 8 | 8 | 2 | 18 | 1 |
| 10 | Macoupin County | IL | 22 | 6.5 | 2 | 11 | 2 |
| 11 | Clinton County | IL | 14 | 6 | 2 | 10 | 2 |
| 12 | Monroe County | IL | 9 | 6 | 2 | 12 | 2 |
| 13 | Jersey County | IL | 8 | 6 | 3 | 11 | 1 |
| 14 | Bond County | IL | 10 | 5 | 3 | 9 | 1 |
| 15 | Calhoun County | IL | 7 | 3 | 1 | 4 | 6 |
15 rows, rolled up from 262 zip codes. Source: CMS m5eg-upu5, July 2026 release, pulled 2026-09-10.
How thin it gets
The median across all 262 metro zips is 11 agencies. 6 counties sit at or above that line: St. Louis County, St. Louis city, St. Charles County, Jefferson County, St. Clair County and Madison County. The other 9 sit below it, and every one of the eight Illinois counties except St. Clair and Madison is among them.
25 metro zip codes are served by 3 or fewer certified agencies. Calhoun County holds 6 of them among its 7 zips. Jefferson County holds 3, and its lowest zip has a single agency. The 2 zips in the whole metro with exactly one agency reporting service are in Calhoun County and Jefferson County.
A county median hides as much as it shows, which is why the lowest zip is printed next to it. St. Louis County's zips run from 2 to 34; Jefferson County's from 1 to 31. A household in the thin zip of a well covered county is in the same position as a household in a thin county: the reported list is short, and a short reported list becomes an empty one the moment the agencies on it have no capacity. Call outside the immediate area early, and remember that the other category of provider is not in this file anywhere.
The per-zip counts this page is folded from are all published on the zip code file, so any median here can be recomputed by hand. If the recomputation disagrees with this page, the zip rows are right and this roll-up is wrong.
A county figure this table cannot include
Every count on this page is a Medicare-certified home health agency reporting territory to CMS. New Plan Care reports nothing to CMS because it is not a certified agency. It provides non-medical care at home, meaning day to day help with personal care, meals, errands, company, transportation and support for a person living with dementia, and that category has no federal service area file. It publishes its own list of Missouri towns served, and that list, not any row above, is where to check whether it reaches an address.
New Plan Care pays for this box and is a client of OwnersFirm, which publishes Home Care Check. The publisher and the client are separate businesses. No county rank above was affected by the payment, and none is for sale.
Call New Plan Care at (314) 405-0887.
Related files
The 262 zip rows this page is built from: certified agencies by zip code. Who the agencies are and how CMS scores them: the star ratings file. On the Missouri side, which counties the state-certified agencies say they serve, from a different file: the Missouri directory counts.