‘Autism Epidemic Runs Rampant,’ New Data Shows 1 in 31 Children Afflicted

WASHINGTON, DC—APRIL 15, 2025—Autism prevalence in the U.S. has increased from 1 in 36 children to 1 in 31, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network survey published today in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

“The autism epidemic is running rampant,” said U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “One in 31 American children born in 2014 are disabled by autism. That’s up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children born in 1992. Prevalence for boys is an astounding 1 in 20 and in California it’s 1 in 12.5.”

“President Trump has tasked me with identifying the root causes of the childhood chronic disease epidemic -- including autism,” Secretary Kennedy continued. “We are assembling teams of world-class scientists to focus research on the origins of the epidemic, and we expect to begin to have answers by September.”

The new ADDM report was conducted in 2022 across 16 sites in the U.S. and surveyed children aged 8 years born in 2014. This latest autism prevalence is 4.8 times higher than in the first ADDM survey 22 years ago, when prevalence was 1 in 150 children.

The increase in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) prevalence cannot be solely attributed to the expansion of diagnoses to include higher functioning children. On the contrary, the percentage of ASD cases with higher IQs (> 85) has decreased steadily over the last six ADDM reports to 36.1% in the 2022 survey. Nearly two thirds of children with ASD in the latest survey had either severe or borderline intellectual disability (ID).

Minority children were more severely affected. Black, Asian, and Hispanic children in the 2022 survey had higher overall ASD prevalence (3.66%, 3.82%, and 3.30%, respectively) than White children (2.77%), and were also more likely to have a more severe form of autism. Among Black, Asian, and Hispanic children, 78.9%, 66.5%, and 63.9%, respectively, had either severe or borderline ID, compared to 55.6% of Whites.

This report exposes a series of critical public health crises, including a persistent rise in ASD prevalence, an alarming escalation in case severity, and increasingly stark disparities across racial and ethnic groups. This also highlights the urgent need for real-time data.

A deeply troubling finding in the survey is that among children aged 4 years born in 2018, the overall ASD prevalence rate is 2.93% (1 in 34). Prevalence rates typically rise as children age from 4 to 8 and more cases are diagnosed. Compared to the 8-year-olds in the new report, the 4-year-olds showed wider differences by race and ethnicity. Overall prevalence among Black, Asian, and Hispanic children in this group was 3.5%, 3.11%, and 3.82%, respectively, compared to 2.04% among White children.

“The autism epidemic has now reached a scale unprecedented in human history because it affects the young,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “The risks and costs of this crisis are a thousand times more threatening to our country than COVID-19. Autism is preventable and it is unforgivable that we have not yet identified the underlying causes. We should have had these answers 20 years ago.”