The USDA Is Launching the First National Equine Health Study in Over a Decade. Here's Why It Matters and How to Get Involved.

The last time the federal government took a comprehensive look at equine health across the United States, the iPhone 6 had just come out and the term precision medicine was still mostly theoretical. That was 2015. A lot has changed in equine veterinary medicine since then, and the data infrastructure supporting research, policy, and clinical practice has been running on eleven-year-old numbers ever since.

That is about to change.

The USDA's National Animal Health Monitoring System, known as NAHMS, in partnership with the National Agricultural Statistics Service, has announced a national study of equine operations launching in 2026. It is the most significant federal investment in equine health data in over a decade, and for veterinary professionals who work with horses, the profession's ability to make evidence-based arguments about resources, research priorities, and policy for the next decade will depend significantly on what this study finds.

What the study will actually examine

The 2026 Equine Study is structured in two phases.

Phase One, the Farm Study, begins August 1, 2026. Equine operations will be randomly selected from the NASS list of farms and ranches in all 50 states. The data collected will cover equine care and health management practices, disease occurrence, use of equine veterinary services, and issues surrounding horses that are at-risk or in vocational transition. That last category is particularly significant. Horses in vocational transition, meaning animals moving out of competitive or working life into retirement, rescue, or rehoming situations, represent a welfare challenge the industry has struggled to quantify at a national level. This study creates a framework for doing that.

Phase Two, the Equine Event Study, is expected to involve voluntary questionnaires and biological sampling conducted at equine events. NAHMS will evaluate its capacity to proceed with this phase in spring 2027. The event-based component adds a surveillance dimension that farm-level data alone cannot capture, particularly relevant for infectious disease spread across show circuits and competition venues.

Why the data gap has been costly

The absence of current national equine health data has had real consequences. Research funding allocation, educational program development, disease preparedness planning, and policy arguments all depend on credible baseline numbers. When the most recent federal benchmark is from 2015, every stakeholder in the equine space, from veterinary researchers to breed associations to welfare organizations, is working with a picture of the industry that predates the significant changes in population demographics, management practices, disease prevalence, and veterinary service utilization that have occurred since.

The large animal veterinary shortage, for instance, is a documented national crisis, but the equine-specific dimension of that shortage has been difficult to characterize precisely without current data on how equine operations are actually accessing veterinary services, how frequently they need them, and where the gaps are most severe. This study asks those questions directly.

What this means for veterinary professionals

If you practice equine medicine, this study is measuring your world. The findings will be used to prioritize research, target education on best practices, and shape understanding of equine welfare issues at the federal level. The quality of those outcomes depends entirely on participation.

NAHMS and NASS are required by law to keep all individual information confidential. Data is used for statistical purposes only and published in aggregate form. No individual owner, manager, or farm operation can be identified in the results. That confidentiality protection is not a courtesy. It is a legal requirement built into how these agencies operate.

For equine owners interested in participating in the Farm Study, the entry point is the NASS Respondent Portal at agcounts.usda.gov. For questions about the study, contact NAHMS directly at NAHMS@usda.gov.

The results of previous NAHMS equine studies, including the 2015 study, are available on the APHIS website for reference.

The profession's ask

Every equine operation that participates makes the resulting data more representative, more statistically robust, and more useful to the researchers, clinicians, and policymakers who will use it. Encourage your clients to participate when they are contacted. If you work with equine operations professionally, make the study visible in your client communications this summer. The industry asked for better data. This is the mechanism for getting it.