Who owns your fertility clinic — and does it change your odds?

Private equity has bought a large part of American fertility care, mostly without changing the name on the door. Patients notice and ask what it means for their treatment. Two peer-reviewed studies have measured it, and the answer is not the one the question usually expects.

This page reports other people's research rather than our own. Every figure below is attributed and linked, because we cannot check any of it against the federal record — the record does not say who owns anything.

How much of it has been bought

The clearest measurement is Bhargava and colleagues in Fertility and Sterility (December 2025), who matched SART registry data through 2023 against ownership records. By the end of 2023 they identified 163 of roughly 508 SART-member clinics — about 32% — as private-equity affiliated, and those clinics performed 54% of all IVF cycles in the United States.

The direction matters as much as the level: the share of clinics more than doubled over ten years, and the share of cycles more than quadrupled from 2013. Acquired practices are the busier ones.

What it appears to do to outcomes

La Forgia and Bodner, in Management Science, hand-checked ownership for every U.S. fertility clinic and linked it to CDC outcome data from 2004 to 2018. After a chain acquired a clinic they found IVF cycles rose about 27% and the live birth rate rose about 14%.

They attribute the improvement to things chains can afford and single practices often cannot: capital, revenue and marketing operations, shared protocols and training, and case review across locations. That is a finding about averages after acquisition, not a promise about any particular clinic — and it is the opposite of what most coverage of private equity in medicine would lead you to expect.

What those studies do not settle

Why we can't tell you who owns yours

We publish 422 clinics from the CDC's mandated registry and score them on a published methodology. That record contains no owner field, and the corporate parents are invisible in the one signal it does carry — the clinic's name. US Fertility owns Shady Grove and never appears under its own name; Inception, Prelude and Pinnacle own clinics that kept their local branding.

So an "independent" column built from clinic names would quietly be full of private-equity-owned clinics, and the comparison would be wrong in a direction nobody could measure. We would rather publish the gap than a number we cannot stand behind. It is also, in itself, a finding about how little of this market is legible to the person choosing a clinic.

What we can tell you instead

Our own analysis asks the question the names can answer — the big brand or the local clinic? Across the 5 multi-site brands running at least 4 U.S. locations (38 clinics between them), the spread between locations of the same brand turned out to be as wide as the gap between brands.

That is the practical answer to the ownership question too. Whoever owns it, the specific location is what the federal record measures and what varies — far more than the logo above the door. Read the brands analysis →

Sources

We have no financial relationship with any clinic, network or investor named on this page, and no clinic can pay to appear or to rank. How this site makes money.