The United States recorded more than 2,000 measles cases for a second consecutive year, with 2,030 confirmed infections reported across 38 states and the District of Columbia, according to updated Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. The threshold had not been crossed before 2025 since 1992.
The 2026 total remained below the 2,288 cases recorded during all of 2025, but it was reached with much of the year still remaining. Only 10 infections had been reported among international travelers, indicating that the national tally could not be explained simply by a large number of separately imported cases. The supplied data did not determine how every outbreak cluster was connected.
Children and teenagers aged 19 and younger accounted for most confirmed cases. About 92 percent of infections were in people who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was not known. Four percent were reported among people with one dose of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, and another 4 percent among those with the recommended two doses.
The CDC recommends a first MMR dose at 12 to 15 months of age and a second between ages 4 and 6. It estimates one dose to be 93 percent effective against measles and two doses to be 97 percent effective. Coverage among kindergarten pupils was 92.5 percent in the 2024-25 school year, down from 92.7 percent the year before and 95.2 percent in 2019-20.
The rising case count also placed the country’s measles-elimination status under scrutiny. The United States achieved elimination in 2000, meaning the virus was no longer continuously circulating domestically. Cases first identified in Texas in January 2025 had been followed by infections in other states, but it was not yet clear whether they formed one chain lasting at least 12 months. The Pan American Health Organization was expected to review the US status in November 2026.
In 2025, the country recorded its first measles deaths in more than a decade: two unvaccinated school-age children in Texas and an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico. Those deaths were part of the previous year’s toll and should not be read as fatalities in the new 2026 count.
William Schaffner, a preventive-medicine professor at Vanderbilt University, said the figures threatened elimination status and urged clinicians to engage directly with parents who were hesitant about vaccination. The latest numbers establish broad transmission and declining coverage; the pending review will determine whether they also amount to renewed endemic circulation.
Because vaccination status was unknown for some people in the largest category, the 92 percent figure cannot be read as a precise measure of infections among definitively unvaccinated people. Even so, the breakdown shows that documented cases were concentrated outside the group known to have received the recommended two-dose series.
