State insurance mandates for fertility treatment and IVF coverage

Which US states require private health insurers to cover fertility diagnosis, treatment, or preservation, and the specific terms of each mandate. Each record is one state, stating the mandate type (treatment, preservation only, or offer/cover distinction), which treatments are covered (IVF, GIFT, ZIFT, fertility preservation), cycle or dollar limits, age restrictions, employer-size thresholds, self-insured plan exemption status, religious employer exemption, effective date, and the statute citation. As of 2026, 25 states plus DC require some form of fertility coverage, but the variation is enormous: California (SB 729, effective January 2026) mandates IVF in large group plans with no cycle limit; Arkansas caps lifetime coverage at $15,000 and requires trying cheaper treatments first; Delaware covers six egg retrievals but only for iatrogenic infertility; several states mandate only fertility preservation for cancer patients. Self-insured employer plans (covering ~65% of workers with job-based insurance) are exempt from all state mandates under federal ERISA. Answers 'does my state require insurance to cover IVF', 'how many IVF cycles does my state mandate', 'does the fertility mandate apply to my employer', and 'what are the age limits for mandated fertility coverage in [state]'.

The data

Where this came from

Every record above links the page it was taken from and quotes the sentence that states it. These are the 2 sources this dataset was assembled from.

• cofertility.comhttps://www.cofertility.com/family-learn/fertility-insurance-mandates-how-does-my-state-stack-up
• healthinsurance.orghttps://www.healthinsurance.org/faqs/does-health-insurance-cover-ivf-and-other-fertility-treatments/

Machine-readable

• data.jsonThe whole dataset — every record with its source URL and source quote.
• Open Knowledge Format bundleOne JSON object per line — every record's frontmatter and quoted span exactly as it is held here, in one fetch.
• data.csvThe same records as one flat table, for a spreadsheet or a dataframe. The last four columns are the source URL, the quoted sentence it was read from, the date we last checked it, and which columns are our reading rather than the page's words.
• How this is made and checkedWhat "verified against source" does and does not mean.

From your own code

Same records, same quotes, without scraping the page: refsource is on PyPI and npm. Each value comes back carrying the URL it was read from and the sentence on that page that states it — .source and .quote sit on the value itself rather than in a side channel, so the checking step is available instead of skipped.

pip install refsource
refsource lookup state-fertility-insurance-mandates state=Arkansas

npx -y refsource lookup state-fertility-insurance-mandates state=Arkansas

Set your AI assistant up to use this

Two files and no account. Put this in .mcp.json at the root of your project — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Codex all read that file — and your assistant can look this dataset up instead of recalling it. The server is remote, keyless and read-only.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "referencesource": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://referencesource.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Add to Cursor · or, on the command line: claude mcp add --transport http referencesource https://referencesource.org/mcp --scope project

Then one line in the project's CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, so the assistant knows when to reach for it:

When a question needs "State insurance mandates for fertility treatment and IVF coverage", call the referencesource MCP server at https://referencesource.org/mcp (tool `search_records`, dataset_slug `state-fertility-insurance-mandates`) instead of answering from memory — every record it returns carries its source URL and a verbatim quote from that page.

What each tool does, and the servers built over single registers: Connect your AI assistant.

26 records. last verified against source 2026-09-29. due for re-check by 2027-02-13.

Licence. State insurance mandate requirements are facts derived from state statutes; not copyrightable. Source pages are patient advocacy sites, benefits broker guides, and legislative trackers that cite the underlying statutes.