What Is a CAQH Number? The Complete 2026 Provider Guide

What Is a CAQH Number?

A CAQH number is a unique provider identification number assigned by the Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare (now operating as DataSpring, powered by CAQH) when a healthcare provider registers on the CAQH Provider Data Portal (formerly CAQH ProView). It serves as the digital key that links your credentialing information to every payer that needs to verify your qualifications, and it stays with you for your entire career regardless of where you practice or which insurance networks you join.

• How to get one: You receive a CAQH number either through a participating health plan invitation or by self-registering on the CAQH Provider Data Portal at proview.caqh.org. Registration is free for all providers.
• How to find yours: Log into the CAQH Provider Data Portal with your credentials, check your original registration confirmation email, or ask a health plan you are enrolled with to look it up using your NPI number.
• Why it matters for credentialing: Nearly every major commercial payer, Medicare Advantage plan, and most state Medicaid programs pull your credentialing data directly from CAQH. An incomplete or inactive profile means payers cannot verify your credentials, and your enrollment applications stop moving.

What CAQH Stands For

CAQH stands for the Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare, a nonprofit alliance of health plans and trade associations that was created to reduce the administrative complexity of healthcare. In June 2026, the organization rebranded its broader operations as DataSpring, powered by CAQH, though the CAQH name remains on the provider-facing credentialing tools most practices interact with daily.

The organization maintains several products, but the one that matters most to providers is the CAQH Provider Data Portal (formerly known as CAQH ProView). This is the centralized database where you enter your professional information once, and authorized health plans pull it directly when they need to credential or recredential you. According to CAQH, the platform serves more than 2 million providers and is used by over 1,000 healthcare organizations, including health plans covering more than 200 million members.

Before CAQH existed, a provider joining five insurance networks had to complete five separate paper applications with largely identical information. The CAQH system eliminates that redundancy. You submit once, attest that the information is accurate, and then authorize each payer to access your data. That single act replaces dozens of forms and weeks of back-and-forth.

For a complete overview of the platform and its tools, see our guide: what is CAQH in healthcare.

What Your CAQH Number Is Used For

Your CAQH number is the identifier that connects your provider record to every payer interaction that flows through the CAQH system. Payers use it to pull your profile during initial credentialing, recredentialing (typically every 36 months), and whenever they need to verify a data point about your practice. Without a CAQH number, there is no profile, and without a profile, there is no streamlined way for payers to verify your credentials.

Here is what depends on your CAQH number being active and attached to a complete profile:

• Commercial payer enrollment. Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealthcare, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and nearly all major commercial carriers require an active CAQH profile before they will process your enrollment application.
• Medicare Advantage enrollment. Many Medicare Advantage plans use CAQH to supplement their credentialing process, even though original Medicare enrollment runs through PECOS separately.
• Medicaid managed care enrollment. Most state Medicaid managed care organizations require CAQH data. Some states, such as Florida, also reference CAQH for fee-for-service Medicaid enrollment.
• Recredentialing. Payers pull updated CAQH data every recredentialing cycle. If your profile is expired or incomplete at the time they pull it, your recredentialing stalls.
• Hospital and health system privileging. Many hospitals and health systems also participate in CAQH and use provider data from the portal when granting or renewing clinical privileges.

At Contracting Providers, the most common enrollment delay we trace back to CAQH is a provider who completed their profile months ago but never authorized the specific payer they are now trying to join. The profile exists, the data is accurate, but the payer has no permission to see it, so the application sits in limbo until someone identifies the gap.

CAQH Number vs. NPI Number

This is one of the most searched questions around CAQH, and the confusion is understandable because both are identification numbers tied to a single provider. The distinction is straightforward once you see them side by side.

	CAQH Number	NPI Number
Issued by	CAQH (DataSpring)	CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services)
Purpose	Links your credentialing data to payer verification	Identifies you in all billing and claims transactions
Used for	Credentialing, enrollment, recredentialing	Claims submission, billing, prescribing, referrals
How assigned	When you register on the CAQH Provider Data Portal	When you apply through NPPES (nppes.cms.hhs.gov)
Permanent	Yes, stays with you for your career	Yes, stays with you for your career
Cost	Free	Free

Your NPI is one of the data fields you enter into your CAQH profile, but the two systems serve entirely different purposes. Think of the NPI as the number payers use to identify you on claims, and the CAQH number as the number payers use to verify your credentials before they ever accept a claim from you.

One issue we see repeatedly at Contracting Providers is providers who assume that having an NPI means they are set for enrollment. An NPI alone does not get you into any insurance network. Payers also need your CAQH profile complete, attested, and authorized before they will process your application.

How to Get a CAQH Number

There are two paths to obtaining a CAQH number, and which one applies to you depends on whether a payer has already initiated the process on your behalf.

Path 1: Payer Invitation

When you submit a credentialing application to a health plan, many payers will create a CAQH profile on your behalf and send you a registration email with your CAQH provider ID and instructions to complete the profile. This is the most common path for providers enrolling with their first commercial network.

Path 2: Self-Registration

Providers can also register directly at proview.caqh.org without waiting for a payer invitation. Self-registration requires your NPI number, a valid email address, and personal identifying information. Once you complete the registration process, the system assigns your CAQH number immediately.

What Happens After Registration

Receiving your CAQH number is only the first step. The number itself does nothing until you complete the full profile, upload supporting documents, attest to the accuracy of the data, and authorize specific payers to access it. CAQH typically processes a completed profile within a few business days, after which participating health plans can begin pulling your data.

For a step-by-step walkthrough of the full registration process: CAQH provider guide: register, maintain, and verify.

How to Find Your CAQH Number

If you already registered for CAQH but cannot locate your number, there are several ways to find it without starting over.

Check Your CAQH Login

Log into the CAQH Provider Data Portal at proview.caqh.org. Your CAQH provider ID is displayed on your dashboard and profile summary. If you have forgotten your login credentials, use the portal password reset tool.

Check Your Registration Email

When you first registered, CAQH sent a confirmation email containing your provider ID. Search your email for messages from CAQH or DataSpring.

Ask a Payer or Your Credentialing Specialist

Any health plan you are enrolled with can look up your CAQH number using your NPI. Your credentialing vendor or enrollment specialist can also retrieve it through payer portals or by contacting CAQH directly at 888-599-1771 (Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM EST).

For detailed login help: CAQH login guide for providers.

What Information Your CAQH Profile Requires

Your CAQH profile is essentially your digital credentialing file. Payers expect it to contain every piece of information they would otherwise request on a paper credentialing application. Incomplete sections are the number one reason profiles fail payer review, and CAQH requires a continuous five-year history with no unexplained gaps.

The required data fields include:

• Personal and demographic information: legal name, date of birth, Social Security number (last four digits), gender, and contact details
• Practice locations: every address where you render services, including suite numbers, phone numbers, and office hours
• Professional licenses: state license numbers, issue dates, and expiration dates for every active license
• Education and training: medical school, residency, fellowship, and any additional training programs with exact dates
• Board certifications: certifying board, specialty, certificate numbers, and expiration dates
• Hospital affiliations and privileges: every hospital where you hold or have held privileges, with status and dates
• Work history: a continuous five-year employment history with no unexplained gaps
• Malpractice insurance: current certificate of insurance with carrier name, policy number, coverage limits, and expiration date
• Malpractice claims history: disclosure of any pending or settled claims
• Professional references: typically two or three peer references
• DEA registration: DEA certificate number and expiration date, if applicable
• Disclosure questions: responses to standard questions about sanctions, disciplinary actions, and criminal history

Every document you upload must be current and legible. An expired malpractice certificate is the single most common document failure we see when auditing CAQH profiles for practices at Contracting Providers. Even a one-day lapse between certificate expiration and renewal upload can trigger a payer hold.

CAQH Attestation and the 120-Day Cycle

Completing your CAQH profile is not a one-time task. CAQH requires every provider to attest, meaning review and confirm that all profile data is still accurate, every 120 days. Illinois providers follow a 180-day cycle. If you miss your attestation deadline, your profile status changes to inactive, and payers can no longer access your data until you log in and re-attest.

The consequences of a missed attestation are immediate and concrete. When payers attempt to pull your data for recredentialing or new enrollment and find an inactive profile, they pause or reject your application. One missed attestation cycle can trigger denied claims, frozen enrollment, and weeks of follow-up with payer provider relations departments to reverse the hold.

CAQH sends email reminders before your attestation is due, but the emails frequently land in spam folders or go to an address the provider no longer checks. Across the practices we manage credentialing for at Contracting Providers, missed attestation is the single most preventable cause of enrollment delays. We track every provider attestation deadline internally and re-attest on their behalf before the window closes.

For a full breakdown of the attestation process: CAQH attestation and why it is essential for credentialing.

Common CAQH Mistakes That Delay Credentialing

Even experienced practices make CAQH errors that stall enrollment. These are the most frequent mistakes we encounter when onboarding new clients at Contracting Providers, and every one of them is avoidable with proper profile management.

• Letting attestation lapse. A profile that expires becomes invisible to payers. No attestation, no credentialing.
• Failing to authorize specific payers. Completing the profile but not granting access to the payer you are enrolling with. The payer cannot see your data without explicit authorization.
• Uploading expired documents. An outdated malpractice certificate, expired license, or lapsed DEA registration creates immediate flags during payer review.
• Inconsistencies between CAQH and other records. If the address on your CAQH profile does not match NPPES, or your license number does not match the state board record, payers flag the discrepancy and delay processing.
• Gaps in work history. CAQH requires a continuous five-year history. Any unexplained gap, even a month between positions, triggers additional verification requests.
• Using a different name format across systems. “John A. Smith, MD” on CAQH but “John Smith” on NPPES can cause matching failures in automated credentialing systems.
• Not updating after a practice change. Moving to a new address, joining a new group, or adding a new state license all require immediate CAQH updates. Delays in updating compound into delays in enrollment.

The pattern we see most often is not a single catastrophic error but a combination of small mismatches that each add days or weeks to the credentialing timeline. A provider might have an accurate profile except for a slightly different suite number on their practice address and a malpractice certificate that expired two weeks ago. Each issue individually might be minor, but together they can push a 60-day credentialing process past 120 days.

CAQH Help: Contact, Support, and Resources

If you need help with your CAQH profile, the following resources are available directly from CAQH (now DataSpring):

• Portal access: proview.caqh.org
• Phone support: 888-599-1771, Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM Eastern
• Live chat: available through the portal, Monday through Friday, 8:30 AM to 6:30 PM Eastern
• Automated chat: available 24/7 through the portal
• Have your CAQH provider ID ready before contacting support

For practices that need more than technical support, meaning you need someone to build, maintain, and manage your CAQH profile as part of a broader enrollment strategy, that is what Contracting Providers handles. Our credentialing specialists manage CAQH profiles alongside payer applications so that every piece of data stays synchronized across systems.

See how we handle the full enrollment process: provider enrollment services.

Learn about the four stages of a payer application: four phases of provider enrollment.

Next Steps: Choose Your Path

Where you go from here depends on where you are in the CAQH and enrollment process:

Need to understand the full CAQH platform? Read our complete guide: CAQH meaning: what it is and why every provider needs it.

Struggling with your CAQH login? See our troubleshooting guide: CAQH login for providers.

Ready to understand credentialing end-to-end? Start here: efficient provider credentialing steps.

Need to understand paneling and network participation? Read: insurance credentialing and paneling.

Ready to hand the entire process off to a team that manages CAQH, payer applications, and follow-ups daily? Get in touch below.

Frequently Asked Questions