The percentage of kindergarten students with vaccine exemptions reached an all-time high in Arkansas and across the nation in the 2025-26 school year, according to newly released data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Arkansas requires all children attending public and private school in the state to be immunized against certain diseases. Most states, however, allow children to be exempted from vaccines for medical or non-medical reasons; the latter may be allowed for either religious or philosophical reasons — or, in the case of Arkansas and 15 other states, both.
CDC data show that for the 2025-26 school year, 4.5% of Arkansas kindergarten students had non-medical vaccine exemptions. This was up from the 2024-25 school year, when 3.5% of Arkansas kindergarten students had non-medical vaccine exemptions. The percentage of medical exemptions held steady at 0.1%.
Arkansas’s rate of exemptions has risen every year since the 2015-16 school year, when 1.2% of kindergarten students had non-medical exemptions and 0.1% had medical exemptions. In 2016 and 2017, Arkansas experienced a mumps outbreak with nearly 3,000 cases. During the outbreak, the Arkansas Department of Health required students who were not fully vaccinated because of exemptions to be excluded from school for 26 days if they were exposed to the virus.
The national rate of childhood vaccine exemptions also reached an all-time high in the 2025-26 school year. The CDC reported that, based on data submitted by the states, 4% of U.S. kindergarten students had non-medical vaccine exemptions and 0.2% had medical exemptions for 2025-26. This was up from the previous school year, when 3.4% of U.S. kindergarten students had non-medical exemptions and 0.2% had medical exemptions.
The agency also reported that the despite the increase in vaccine exemptions in Arkansas, estimated vaccine coverage among Arkansas kindergarten students increased for all reported vaccines in the 2025-26 school year. The largest increase was for the hepatitis B vaccine, which went from 92% coverage in 2024-25 to 94% coverage in 2025-26.
While increases in both exemption rates and estimated vaccination coverage rates may appear to be contradictory, the two trends are not direct opposites. Coverage is calculated separately for each vaccine, while the exemption rate includes all students with permission to skip one or more required vaccines. A student may have an exemption from one or more vaccines but meet the requirements for others.
For the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, coverage among Arkansas kindergarten students increased from 89.6% in 2024-25 to 91.5% in 2025-26. Meanwhile, the estimated percentage of students who were not up to date with MMR but did not have an exemption decreased from 6.9% to 4.1%. The reduction in this group suggests that some students who were in this group in 2024-25 met the MMR requirement in 2025-26, while others became exempt — causing both the percentage of vaccinated students and the percentage of exempt students to increase.
Another factor to consider is that the assessed Arkansas kindergarten population decreased by about 5% from 37,570 students in 2024-25 to 35,543 in 2025-26. Because the second group was smaller, an increase in the vaccination percentage does not necessarily mean that more children were vaccinated.
The smaller assessed student population in Arkansas in 2025-26 is not the sole reason for an increase in the percentage of students with exemptions. The reported number of exempt students increased from 1,337 in 2024-25 to 1,629 in 2025-26.
Nationwide, vaccination coverage decreased in the 2025-26 school year for all reported vaccines except the two-dose regimen of the varicella vaccine, which increased slightly from 92.1% in 2024-25 to 92.2% in 2025-26, and the hepatitis B vaccine, which was unchanged from the previous year at 94%.
Other findings include:
- Exemptions for the 2025-26 school year increased in 41 states and the District of Columbia, with 24 states reporting exemptions exceeding 5%.
- The number of U.S. kindergarten students exempt from one or more vaccines was about 155,000 during the 2025-26 school year, up from 138,000 the year before.
- Coverage with the MMR, DTaP, polio, and varicella vaccines decreased in more than half of states in the 2025-26 school year, compared with coverage the year before.
- The number of U.S. kindergarten students attending school without documentation of completing the MMR vaccine series was about 280,000 during the 2025-26 school year, down from 286,000 the year before.
School vaccination requirements and exemption policies vary by state. The CDC’s estimates generally reflect whether kindergartners met the requirements in their state, so comparisons may be affected by differences in required vaccines and doses, assessment methods, and exemption policies.
The above-named vaccines are recommended for children early in life to build immunity and protect them prior to contact with life-threatening diseases, which they can be more susceptible to at a young age. When a large enough percentage of a population is vaccinated against a disease, those who are not vaccinated can still be protected by herd immunity, also known as community immunity. Herd immunity exists when enough people are immune to an infectious disease to limit the disease’s ability to spread.
According to the World Health Organization, the percentage of people who need to be vaccinated or immune to a disease to achieve herd immunity varies, ranging from about 80% for polio to more than 95% for measles.
As vaccine exemptions have increased and vaccine coverage has largely declined, some childhood diseases that formerly were under control have made comebacks. Measles has reached a level in the U.S. not seen in more than three decades, and in December the Arkansas Department of Health reported that whooping cough cases in the state were at their highest level in 15 years.
The Arkansas Department of Health has published a chart (pages 7 and 8) with immunization requirements for public school children in the state. The CDC also has adult and child immunization schedules available on its website.
