How many medical schools are in the US: MD and DO counts, by state, and the official lists

This page is for anyone who needs the number of medical schools in the US, and for companies that sell to them: curriculum and assessment software, simulation and lab equipment, learning resources, research tools and services. It gives the counts from the accreditors, explains why other counts differ, breaks them down by stage and state, and shows how to get the lists and who buys.

How many medical schools there are in the US

Adding the two accredited lists gives 213 medical schools, or 240 if you count each DO teaching location separately (our calculation).

Why the counts differ

• Accreditation stages. A new MD school moves through preliminary and provisional accreditation before full accreditation. The LCME's 165 includes 9 preliminary and 2 provisional programs. A count of fully accredited schools is 154.
• Schools versus campuses. A DO college can teach at several locations. Counting the 75 DO locations as schools pushes totals above 230.
• Different years. The LCME list changes every few months as schools are added. Three programs received preliminary accreditation in 2026 alone.
• Members versus programs. The AAMC's 163 is a membership count, and its data tables cover the schools that enrolled students that year.
• Puerto Rico. Four of the LCME programs are in Puerto Rico, so the count for the 50 states and DC is 161.

MD programs by accreditation stage

The list is old at the top and new at the bottom: 73 programs were accredited on or before 1942, and 20 were first accredited in 2016 or later. Five more programs are applicants or candidates for accreditation.

Medical schools by state

Florida has the most DO teaching locations (7). Idaho, Maine and Montana have DO colleges but no LCME-accredited MD program, and Alaska, Delaware and Wyoming have neither.

Students and applicants

DO colleges hold 28.8% of US medical students and a third of first-year students (our calculation from the AAMC and AACOM figures). The average MD school enrolled about 146 first-year students; AACOM's enrollment report covers 67 DO colleges and campuses.

How to get a list of medical schools

The LCME's next survey date column is the one most sellers miss. The LCME runs a survey preparation workshop about 18 months before a school's full survey visit, so a school with a 2027-28 visit is preparing now: mapping its curriculum, collecting data and fixing gaps. 31 fully accredited programs have their next survey in 2027-28 and 20 in 2028-29.

Who buys inside a medical school

As general guidance, these are the usual owners by what you sell:

Most medical schools sit inside a university, so purchases over a threshold go through university procurement and, at public universities, state bidding rules. See our list of universities for how universities buy, and selling to hospitals for the teaching hospitals they work with.

Worked example: curriculum software ahead of LCME visits

Illustrative example. The company and its rates are invented; the counts come from the LCME's accredited programs list of 14 October 2026.

The seller: Atlas Curriculum (atlas-curriculum.example) sells curriculum mapping software that produces the tables an LCME self-study needs.

1. Build the target list. Filter the LCME list to fully accredited programs with a next survey in 2027-28 (31 programs) or 2028-29 (20), 51 in all.
2. Time the outreach. Schools with 2027-28 visits are preparing now; contact them first. The 2028-29 group starts its preparation in 2027, so introduce yourself to them early in the year.
3. Do the arithmetic. If an illustrative 60% of the 51 programs aren't locked into another tool, that's 31 open accounts. Winning an illustrative one in five gives 6 customers; at $40,000 a year each, that's $240,000 in annual revenue.
4. Find the buyer. Write to the associate dean for medical education and the person who leads accreditation. Finding them and what's changed (a new curriculum, a new dean, a probation finding) is the slow part; Bebop finds the contacts and researches each school in the list.

Subject: Your 2027-28 LCME self-study

Hi [first name],

The LCME lists [school]'s next full survey for 2027-28, which usually means preparation is under way now.

The schools we work with tell us the slow part is pulling curriculum data into the tables for the standards on content and objectives, especially across clerkship sites.

We build that mapping from your existing course data. Would a 20-minute look at how [peer school type] handled it be useful before your next committee meeting?

[Your name]
[Phone number]

Next step: profile each school before you write with the account research template.