Who checks private ADHD clinics?

How many private ADHD providers are there, and how fast is that growing?

Nobody can say how many there are, because no register of them exists — but at least 346 companies with “ADHD” in their name sit on the Companies House register, 32 more than six months ago. That is a count of company names, not of clinics: it includes coaching, training and non-clinical businesses, and companies that never traded. It also misses every provider whose name does not contain the letters, which is most of them. Read it as a floor and as a shape, not as a total.

A company is counted from the date its ADHD name took effect, not from incorporation, because a company that traded for years under another name and renamed itself in 2025 joined this market in 2025. 33 of the 470 companies in the file took their ADHD name after incorporation, and one of them held such a name, dropped it and took another later; the published file carries every ADHD-named period so you can recompute the series a different way if you disagree with ours.

The part year matters. 79 companies have taken an ADHD name so far in 2026, against 85 by the same date in 2025. Among those giving a human-health SIC code, the gap is wider: 40 against 61. Two part years are a weak basis for calling a turn, and SIC codes are self-declared at registration, so we state the figures and leave the reading open.

110 of the 470 companies have been dissolved, which is why the standing count rises more slowly than the yearly one. Dissolved companies are also where the undercount bites hardest: Companies House name search matches whole words, so a dissolved company that ran the letters together is invisible to it. We added the monthly bulk file of live companies to catch run-together names among the living, and 3 charitable incorporated organisations with no usable incorporation date are left out of the yearly series entirely.

49 CQC locations carry “ADHD” in their name across the active and deactivated files of 1 September 2026, and 44 of them are on the active file. That is a small and unrepresentative slice of regulated ADHD provision — naming a location after the condition is a choice, not a requirement — but it is a slice counted the same way each year, and it turns upward at the same point the company series does.

How to check this
market_adhd_companies.csv in the data package, one row per company, with the company number, the date its ADHD name took effect, every ADHD-named period, its status, SIC codes and a link to its Companies House page. The CQC series comes from the register’s own monthly files, named in Method.

How many of the clinics we list are registered with a health regulator?

39 of 342 hold a published quality judgement; 195 are matched to no register entry we could corroborate. Before reading either number as a scandal or as reassurance, read the rule that produces it.

That is CQC’s own guidance, and it means an unregistered diagnosis-only clinic in England is doing nothing wrong. A clinic that prescribes or titrates medication is treating, and does need to register. In August 2026 the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman said the consequence of that wording should be dealt with:

The Ombudsman recommended that the Government consider revising the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 “to bring diagnosis of ADHD and autism into scope of CQC registration and inspection”. Until that happens, the categories below are what exists to check.

Each clinic appears once, under the strongest record we could corroborate, so the five categories sum to 342. A current registration with Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Healthcare Inspectorate Wales or the RQIA sits beside a CQC one, never beneath it: they are different regulators applying different tests, not rungs on a ladder.

The first step drops 38 clinics with no English location, whom CQC does not cover. Of the 132 matched, 117 matched on a strong signal and 15 on a weaker one that a human then confirmed; both are flagged in the data so you can drop the weaker set and recompute. And a registered location does not show that the ADHD work is the regulated activity: an inspection covers a whole location, and some of these locations provide much else besides.

The border changes the question

England asks what the service is. The other three nations ask who provides it. Healthcare Improvement Scotland registers an independent clinic as one “in or from which services are provided by a medical practitioner, dental practitioner, registered nurse, registered midwife, registered pharmacist, registered pharmacy technician or dental care professional”, and adds that “The term ‘service’ includes consultations, investigations and treatments”. Healthcare Inspectorate Wales registers “establishments in Wales where private only medical services are provided regularly by medical practitioners”, and independent medical agencies where there is no fixed establishment. Northern Ireland’s 2003 Order defines an independent clinic as an establishment “in which services are provided by medical practitioners”.

So a diagnosis-only ADHD clinic staffed by a doctor falls inside the registering net in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and outside it in England. That is the opposite of what we wrote in July, when we said the same diagnosis-only distinction limited what the devolved registers captured; it does not, and that study now carries a dated correction. We are reading published registration guidance, not giving legal advice, and each regulator decides its own scope.

In July, Wales and Northern Ireland were covered by a name search that returned nothing, and we published that there was no Welsh or Northern Irish file to compare against. Checking clinic by clinic instead produced 5 Welsh and 2 Northern Irish register rows, both published in this package, and a dated correction in corrections.csv. The lesson is not about Wales: a name search over a register that lists services by provider name will miss any clinic that registered under a different one.

How to check this
clinic_checks.csv has one row per listed clinic, with every check flag, the match method and confidence, the rating and its date, and the status_category this chart counts. Group that column and you get the chart. The register rows themselves are in wales_hiw_register.csv and northern_ireland_rqia_register.csv.

What do clinics show about who their clinicians are?

213 of 342 clinics name the clinician who carries out the assessment, and 172 name the professional regulator that clinician is registered with. Those are the two facts a patient can actually check for themselves: a name and a regulator together turn a website claim into a public register entry, in a way that neither does alone.

We read 337 of the 342 sites; 5 could not be read at all and stay in every denominator, so each share here is a floor. 324 publish something about their clinicians’ credentials. Nothing in this chapter is a check that a claim is true, with one exception set out below.

Which regulator a clinic names is itself informative, because the regulators cover different professions: 77 name the General Medical Council, 105 the Health and Care Professions Council and 27 the Nursing and Midwifery Council. 1 clinics name some other regulator, counted together rather than listed, because a regulator named by one clinic plus that regulator’s own register identifies the clinic, and no clinic is named in this study.

157 clinics name a college or membership body. A membership is not a regulator and not an inspection: most of these bodies admit members on qualification and subscription, and none of them audits an ADHD service. The same goes for the 9 clinics showing some other certification, which in practice are information-security and quality-management schemes — 2 show ISO 9001 and 4 Cyber Essentials. They say something about how a business is run, and nothing about an assessment.

No accreditation scheme is specific to ADHD assessment, so every accreditation claim on this chart is a claim about something else. Two published standards exist — the adult one quoted above and its counterpart for children and teenagers — but a standard is not a scheme, and no body certifies a clinic against either. The Royal College of Psychiatrists runs quality networks that do accredit services, none of them ADHD-specific. 16 clinics describe themselves as accredited without naming a body at all, which is the claim a patient can do least with.

Where a clinic named a body that publishes a member list, we looked the clinic up on that list and recorded what we found in the row’s notes. We never mark a claim false from a list that may be out of date or that may hold the clinician rather than the clinic; a claim we could not corroborate is recorded as exactly that.

How to check this
site_claims.csv in the data package, one row per listed clinic, with clinicians_named, professional_registration_shown, memberships_shown, accreditation_claims and other_certifications_shown, each non-empty value carrying the clinic’s own words and the page they were read on.

How many clinics say they take NHS Right to Choose referrals?

39 of 342, in their own published words. Right to Choose lets a patient in England ask to be referred to any provider that holds an NHS contract for the service and meets NHS standards, at no cost to them. It applies in England only, and it needs a GP referral: the right attaches to a referral from or on behalf of a GP, dentist or optometrist, and NHS England’s guidance is explicit that “The legal rights do not extend to self-referrals”. Patients in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have no equivalent right.

Only a statement on the clinic’s own site counts here. We re-read the stored pages of every clinic carrying any Right to Choose signal, fetched the sites that were silent, and checked the sitemaps of the rest for a Right to Choose page, giving 153 sites read for this question and 87 with any Right to Choose text at all. Of the 39 that accept referrals, 29 state that adults are covered and 19 that children or young people are; 28 name the areas or Integrated Care Boards they can take referrals from, which is the detail most likely to decide whether a particular patient can use a particular clinic.

Our July study put this at 40 of 332 clinics. That figure came from our own directory field, which records what we had been told rather than what a clinic publishes, and it is superseded by the quoted count here. Both are now labelled as such wherever they appear.

How to check this
right_to_choose.csv, one row per listed clinic: the status, the verbatim quote, the URL it was read on, the date, the ages covered and any area restriction. A row with no quote is a row we did not count.

How do published assessments compare with the adult quality standard?

Of the 99 clinics that publish a comparable adult contact time, 44 publish two hours or more and 29 publish less. There is no regulator standard for how an ADHD assessment is conducted, but there is a professional one. In 2024 a group of UK clinicians specialising in ADHD published the adult ADHD assessment quality assurance standard, known as AQAS:

AQAS counts “two hours or more of direct patient contact time”, and treats a consultation held over video as direct contact. So we coded contact time only: where a site separates questionnaires, scoring or report writing from the appointment, those minutes are excluded, and where it states several sessions, the stated contact minutes are totalled. The rule was written before the data was read, and it is published in full in Method.

112 clinics publish an adult or child appointment length we could read; 13 of those state it only for a child pathway and are counted in the children’s study instead, leaving the 99 here. The point of the middle categories is that they are not failures: a clinic advertising “90 minutes to 2.5 hours” has told you something true and unclassifiable, and folding it into either side would manufacture a finding.

The dashed line is where the standard sits, not a pass mark, and nothing here places a clinic on the wrong side of a rule: AQAS is a published professional standard that no body enforces, and it says “in most cases”. The 69 clinics in this chart are those whose stated time falls wholly on one side of two hours; the 13 with a range crossing it and the 4 publishing a ceiling with no floor have no position on this axis, and appear in the chart above instead.

Online or in person

AQAS asks for “direct consultation (face-to-face, or remote using video-conferencing)”, so a video assessment is not a lesser one under the standard, and nothing below should be read that way. The Ombudsman reported in August 2026 that “Many Right to Choose and independent providers conduct most of their assessments remotely” and that “there is no national data on the proportion of assessments conducted remotely”. This does not fill that gap. It records what clinics say they offer.

131 of 297 adult pathways leave it unstated, which is a practical finding rather than a statistical one: a patient who needs to know whether they will be seen in a room or on a screen cannot find out from nearly half of these websites without asking. Our own directory carries an online flag; it is deliberately not mixed in here, because this chart is the clinic’s wording, quoted and dated.

What NICE asks for, and what sites publish

The clinical guideline in England and Wales is NICE NG87, and our September study of the same 337 websites found that 74 of them describe all three elements at the centre of its assessment recommendation — who assesses, a full developmental history, and an informant or observer account — falling to 63 of 297 when only the adult pathway is counted. Those figures are re-surfaced here unchanged from the September assessment-standards study that produced them, because a chapter about standards that ignored the clinical guideline would be a strange one.

How to check this
appointment_length.csv, one row per clinic with a stated length: the quote, the URL, the minutes we read from it, the class the rule assigns and the reason. Every class in the chart is a value of one column, so a reader can re-apply the rule differently and see what changes.

What do clinics advertise about access and payment?

192 of 342 clinics state on their own site how soon they can see you, and 74 set that against NHS waiting times. This chapter counts what clinics advertise. It is not our claim about how long anyone waits, and nothing here compares private provision with the NHS: it records how many clinics draw that contrast themselves, which is a different and checkable thing.

The unit a clinic chooses is part of the offer. 48 give a period in hours or days, 88 in weeks and 8 in months. 32 use a speed word with no period attached, and 16 say they have no waiting list without saying what that means in time. A stated period is not a measured wait, and none of these is a promise we have tested.

18 clinics sell a paid option to be seen sooner than their standard route. That is a legitimate thing to sell and it is disclosed on the page where we found it, but it is worth seeing counted, because it prices access itself rather than the assessment. 73 offer instalments or third-party finance, and 47 advertise a discount or concession.

We record these because the independent review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism is expected to consider how private ADHD services are advertised, and because a count is the part of that argument nobody has published. We take no view here on whether any of it should be permitted; that is a question for a regulator, and this is a measurement.

How to check this
site_claims.csv, columns speed_statement, nhs_wait_comparison, paid_fast_track, finance_offered and discount_offered. Every non-empty value carries a verbatim quote and the URL it was read on, so each count can be re-derived claim by claim.

What this study cannot tell you

• It is not a quality assessment. We list clinics; we do not rate them. Registration, a published length and a regulator judgement are facts about records and websites, not about what happens in an assessment, and nothing here is a clinical opinion about any provider.
• Every count is a floor. Conservative matching, name searches that miss run-together names, and up to six pages read per website all push in the same direction: towards undercounting.
• Company names are not clinics. The market series counts companies whose names contain four letters. It includes businesses that never traded and excludes every provider trading under some other name.
• We cannot chart waiting times over time. Our own wait field is a category rather than a measured wait, and its change log only begins in July 2026, so there is no six-month series to publish. For waits, NHS England Digital’s quarterly ADHD Management Information is the official series; its August 2026 release is the latest.
• No registration rate for the whole market. Joining the company register to the regulator registers would produce one, and it would be wrong: a company-name search cannot tell a trading clinic from a dormant, non-clinical or non-English company, and diagnosis-only providers need not register in England at all.
• Websites change. This is a snapshot taken in the week to 21 September 2026, and registers are updated continuously. Some of these pages will already have been rewritten.

Work this builds on

The Centre for Health and the Public Interest reported in January 2026 on the NHS-funded end of this market, using freedom of information requests to Integrated Care Boards to reach spending and contracting that no website study can. NHS England’s ADHD taskforce reported in November 2025 on demand and capacity across the system. The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s August 2026 report set out the regulatory gap this study measures against, from complaints rather than from registers. The independent review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism, chaired by Professor Peter Fonagy, published an interim report in March 2026; its final report had not been published when this page went live.

What is new here is the clinic-level join: each listed clinic’s regulator record, its own published Right to Choose position and its own published appointment length, in one row, with the quote and the URL attached to every value. Our companion studies cover how clinics say they assess children and what those assessments cost across the UK.

Sources

• Care Quality Commission, Scope of registration: treatment of disease, disorder or injury
• Care Quality Commission, Scope of registration: diagnostic and screening procedures
• Care Quality Commission, public register of providers and locations
• Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, Improving access to ADHD and autism assessment and treatment: commissioning with confidence — recommendations (26 August 2026)
• Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, Improving access to ADHD and autism assessment and treatment: commissioning with confidence — variation in the quality of assessments (26 August 2026)
• Healthcare Improvement Scotland, regulation of independent healthcare: background and legislation
• National Health Service (Scotland) Act 1978, section 10F (meaning of independent health care service), as amended
• Healthcare Inspectorate Wales, who needs to register with us
• Care Standards Act 2000, section 2, as it applies in relation to Wales
• RQIA, registration guidance
• The Health and Personal Social Services (Quality, Improvement and Regulation) (Northern Ireland) Order 2003, article 2
• NHS Commissioning Board and Clinical Commissioning Groups (Responsibilities and Standing Rules) Regulations 2012, Part 8 (choice of health service provider)
• NHS England, patient choice guidance
• Adamou M, Arif M, Asherson P, Cubbin S, Leaver L, Sedgwick-Müller J, Müller-Sedgwick U, van Rensburg K, Kustow J. The adult ADHD assessment quality assurance standard. Frontiers in Psychiatry 2024;15:1380410
• NICE guideline NG87, Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: diagnosis and management
• Companies House public data
• Independent review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism (GOV.UK collection)
• Centre for Health and the Public Interest, Market failure: how the under-regulated market in NHS funded ADHD services impacts patients and the finances of the NHS (January 2026)
• NHS England, ADHD taskforce final report (November 2025)

Questions

Related research

• Every chart, with its data — the September 2026 chart pack, each chart with a CSV, an image and a link back to the method.
• How private ADHD clinics say they assess children — the children’s pathway the same clinics describe, against the published children’s assessment quality standard.
• What a private ADHD assessment costs across the UK — prices and provision, July 2026.

Changes to this report

No corrections have been made since publication on 24 September 2026. Any change to a figure will be listed here with its date and reason, and the published files will be regenerated at the same time. Corrections this release makes to our earlier studies are listed in corrections.csv and on the pages concerned.