Some groups are left out of the birth statistics because there are too few of them

Provisional natality estimates are built from all complete birth records
received and processed by the National Center for Health Statistics as of a
stated cutoff date, covering events among US residents in the 50 states and
the District of Columbia. The records and monthly provisional counts come from
state vital registration systems through the **Vital Statistics Cooperative
Program**.

How complete the data is, stated openly

Each release includes a table showing **percent completeness by month, for the
United States and each jurisdiction**, calculated as the number of complete
records received from a state for a month divided by the expected provisional
count.

Publishing the completeness alongside the estimate is what makes a provisional
figure usable: a rate from a state at 70% completeness means something
different from one at 99%, and the reader is given both.

Provisional quarterly estimates are compared with final data when it becomes
available.

Who is counted, and who is not

Hispanic origin and race are reported separately on the birth certificate.
Estimates by Hispanic origin include all people of Hispanic origin regardless
of race, and estimates for non-Hispanic people are shown separately by
single-race group, following the **1997 Office of Management and Budget
standards**.

Estimates are shown for:

• Single-race Black non-Hispanic
• Single-race White non-Hispanic
• Hispanic

**Data for additional race and ethnicity groups exists in the National Vital
Statistics System natality files but is not included in these provisional
estimates, because the counts are small and the estimates would be
statistically unreliable.**

That exclusion is honest and consequential. A quarterly provisional estimate
for a smaller population would swing on a handful of births, so publishing it
would mislead — and not publishing it means those populations are absent from
the fastest-moving national numbers, and visible only in the final annual data.

Anyone reading a quarterly natality release should know that the three groups
shown are the ones large enough to estimate quarterly, not the ones that
matter.

*Source: National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention.*