Addiction Treatment Success Rates 2026: Completion Data by Level of Care, New England Numbers, and a Doctor's Definition of Success

"What is your success rate?" is usually the first question families ask a treatment program, and it deserves a more honest answer than the single percentage many websites advertise. The truth is that addiction treatment outcomes are measured several different ways, each producing a different number, and the most quoted figure on the internet is drawn from a federal dataset that has since been updated twice.

This page compiles the current, primary-source numbers: treatment completion rates by level of care from the newest federal discharge data, recovery prevalence from the newest national survey, alcohol and opioid treatment outcomes, telehealth results, and the New Hampshire and Massachusetts figures that national coverage never includes. Every statistic states its data year inline and links to the government dataset or peer-reviewed study it comes from.

Key numbers at a glance

• 42.6 percent of the roughly 1.5 million U.S. substance use treatment discharges in 2023 ended in completion, per the TEDS 2023 annual report (data year 2023, released 2025).
• Completion ranged from 62.1 percent for detoxification to 26.6 percent for intensive outpatient programs in 2023, a spread that makes any single "rehab success rate" misleading (TEDS-D 2023 detailed tables, 2025).
• 74.3 percent of the 31.7 million U.S. adults who perceived they ever had a drug or alcohol problem consider themselves in recovery or recovered, about 23.5 million people (2024 NSDUH, released July 2025).
• Roughly 3 in 4 adults (74.8 percent) who ever had a substance use problem reported being in recovery in the CDC and NIDA analysis of 2018 survey data (Jones et al., 2020).
• An estimated 9.1 percent of U.S. adults, roughly 22.3 million people, have resolved a significant alcohol or drug problem (Kelly et al., 2017).
• Relapse affects 40 to 60 percent of people treated for substance use disorders, comparable to relapse in hypertension and asthma at 50 to 70 percent (NIDA, 2020).
• Only 7.6 percent of people aged 12 or older with past-year alcohol use disorder received alcohol treatment in 2024, and just 2.5 percent received medication for it (NIAAA, updated March 2026).
• All-cause mortality among people on methadone or buprenorphine is less than half the rate seen out of treatment (rate ratio 0.47) (Santo et al., JAMA Psychiatry, 2021).
• A telehealth intensive outpatient cohort of 4,724 patients showed 79.9 percent engagement at 30 days, above the 50 to 68 percent range cited for comparable in-person care (Contreras-Schwartz et al., 2024).
• Massachusetts short-term residential discharges completed treatment at 76.2 percent versus 52.8 percent nationally in 2023 (TEDS-D 2023 state tables, 2025).

What does success actually mean in addiction treatment?

Almost every page that ranks for "rehab success rates" skips the definitional step, which is exactly why the numbers they quote contradict each other. In practice, researchers and clinicians measure at least four distinct outcomes:

1. Treatment completion. Did the person finish the planned episode of care? This is what federal discharge data measures. It says something about engagement, but a completed detox stay and a completed year of outpatient care are very different achievements.
2. Remission. Does the person still meet diagnostic criteria for a substance use disorder? Remission is the closest analogue to how success is measured in the rest of medicine.
3. Abstinence or reduced use. Is the person not using at all, or using less and at lower risk? Many outcome studies count sustained reductions, not only total abstinence.
4. Functioning. Is the person working, housed, healthier, reconnected with family? The Treatment Episode Data Set tracks several of these as National Outcome Measures.

A program can look mediocre on one measure and strong on another. Medication treatment for opioid use disorder is the clearest example: it shows the lowest "completion" rate of any service type precisely because staying in treatment indefinitely, like staying on blood pressure medication, is the successful outcome. Any single-number success claim that does not name its measure, its population, and its data year is marketing, not evidence.

When a family asks me about success rates, I ask them what success would look like for their person. For one patient it is total abstinence. For another it is being back at work, sleeping through the night, and rebuilding trust at home. In my own practice I watch remission, functioning, and engagement over time, because those are the outcomes that hold up.

Dr. Richard Marasa, Medical Director, Clear Steps Recovery

How many people recover from addiction?

The most important statistic in this entire topic is also the least quoted: recovery is the most common long-term outcome.

• In the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (released July 2025), 12.2 percent of U.S. adults, 31.7 million people, perceived that they ever had a problem with their use of drugs or alcohol. Of those, 74.3 percent, about 23.5 million adults, considered themselves to be in recovery or to have recovered.
• That finding replicates an earlier analysis by CDC and NIDA researchers using 2018 survey data: more than 1 in 10 adults (27.5 million) reported ever having a substance use problem, and 74.8 percent, about 20.5 million, reported being in recovery (Jones et al., Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 2020). Two different survey years, essentially the same answer: about 3 in 4 people who develop a substance problem eventually get better.
• A separate national study estimated that 9.1 percent of U.S. adults, roughly 22.3 million people, have resolved a significant alcohol or drug problem. About 54 percent of them used some form of assistance, most commonly mutual-help groups (45.1 percent) and formal treatment (27.6 percent) (Kelly et al., Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 2017).

The CDC's recovery framing is blunt about what follows from these numbers: addiction is a disease, not a character flaw, there are safe and effective ways to recover, and a return to use is a sign that treatment needs adjusting, not that recovery is out of reach. Treatment is one of several pathways into that majority, and for people with moderate or severe disorders it is the pathway with the strongest safety evidence.

Treatment completion rates by level of care

This is the table nearly every competing page is missing. The figures below come from the newest federal discharge data, the Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS) 2023 annual detailed tables (Table 9.1, linked admission and discharge records from 49 states and jurisdictions, data received through December 19, 2024, published 2025).

First, the correction. If you have read that "43 percent of patients complete treatment (TEDS 2019)" or any variation of "42 percent, TEDS 2019," you are reading a statistic that is now four data years out of date. The current data year is 2023, and the overall completion figure barely moved: 42.6 percent of all 2023 discharges completed treatment, per the TEDS 2023 annual report. What the recycled citation misses is not the headline number. It is everything underneath it.

Source: SAMHSA, TEDS 2023 Annual Detailed Tables, Table 9.1 (2025). Percentages are row percentages among discharges with known values; remaining discharges were terminated by the facility or discharged for other reasons.

Four things to understand before quoting this table:

• Shorter programs complete more often. Detoxification tops the table largely because it lasts a median of 4 days. Completing detox is a genuine first step, but it is medical stabilization, not treatment of the underlying disorder. (Clear Steps Recovery provides outpatient levels of care and connects people who need medical detox to appropriate referral partners before they step into ongoing treatment.)
• "Transferred" mostly is not bad news. In most state reporting systems, a transfer records a planned move to a different service within one continuing episode, for example residential care stepping down to an intensive outpatient program. Read intensive outpatient's 26.6 percent completion alongside its 32.8 percent transfer rate: nearly 6 in 10 IOP discharges either finished or moved to a next planned level of care.
• Medication treatment breaks the metric. Outpatient medication-assisted opioid therapy shows 10.9 percent "completion" because remaining on medication is the clinically desired outcome; most of its discharges are transfers within ongoing care. Judging medication treatment by completion rate is like judging insulin by how many people stop taking it.
• TEDS is not all of U.S. treatment. It covers episodes reported by state agencies, which weight toward publicly funded care. Private-pay outcomes may differ, and states differ in what they report.

Choosing between these settings is its own decision, and the tradeoffs are covered in our guide to inpatient versus outpatient rehab. For a sense of what the middle tiers look like in practice, see our intensive outpatient program and our partial hospitalization program in New Hampshire.

Completion numbers reflect the way life collides with treatment. Work schedules, transportation, childcare, cravings, and confidence all pull at people hardest in the first weeks. In my experience, the patients who stay engaged are the ones whose plan was matched honestly to their life from the start, and who can name some early progress that feels like their own.

Dr. Richard Marasa, Medical Director, Clear Steps Recovery

Relapse rates in context

No success rate discussion is honest without relapse, and no relapse number is honest without its comparison group. The National Institute on Drug Abuse puts relapse for treated substance use disorders at 40 to 60 percent, side by side with relapse in high blood pressure and asthma at 50 to 70 percent. Addiction relapses at rates typical of the chronic conditions medicine manages successfully every day, and NIDA's guidance is explicit: a return to use is a signal to resume, modify, or change treatment, not evidence that treatment failed.

We keep this section short deliberately, because we maintain a full, regularly reviewed statistics page on this topic: see relapse statistics and what they really mean for recovery for rates by time period, warning signs, and the evidence on lowering risk.

I treat a return to use the way a cardiologist treats a blood pressure spike: it is a signal to adjust the plan, not proof that the plan was worthless. Families who adopt that frame stop asking whether treatment worked and start asking what needs to change, which is the far more useful question.

Dr. Richard Marasa, Medical Director, Clear Steps Recovery

Alcohol treatment outcomes

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is the most common substance use disorder in the country, and its treatment gap is the widest. According to the 2024 NSDUH, 27.9 million Americans aged 12 or older had past-year AUD. Yet the NIAAA's Alcohol Treatment in the United States page (updated March 2026, using 2024 NSDUH data) reports that only 2.1 million of them, 7.6 percent of people with past-year AUD, received any alcohol use treatment, and only 2.5 percent received FDA-approved medication for AUD.

What happens to people with AUD over time? The peer-reviewed epidemiology is more hopeful than the treatment rates suggest. In the NIAAA-published review by Tucker, Chandler, and Witkiewitz (2020), national survey follow-ups showed that only about 34 percent of people with AUD had a persistent disorder; roughly 16 percent achieved abstinence without remaining symptoms and 18 percent reached low-risk drinking without symptoms, with the remainder showing partial improvement. The same review notes that a majority of alcohol problem resolutions, more than 70 percent, happen outside formal treatment, and that fewer than a quarter of people with AUD ever use alcohol-focused services.

Those findings do not argue against treatment. They describe a population dominated by milder cases, and they sit alongside consistent evidence that people with moderate to severe AUD benefit from structured care, behavioral therapy, and medication. What they do argue against is despair: improvement is the statistical norm for alcohol problems, with or without a rock-bottom story attached.

Opioid treatment and MAT outcomes

For opioid use disorder, the outcome that matters most is survival, and here the evidence is unambiguous. A systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies covering 749,634 participants found that all-cause mortality during methadone or buprenorphine treatment was less than half the rate observed during time out of treatment (rate ratio 0.47), and that mortality was six times higher in the four weeks immediately after treatment stopped (rate ratio 6.01) (Santo et al., JAMA Psychiatry, 2021). The CDC's treatment page summarizes the same body of evidence: medications for opioid use disorder help people reduce illicit opioid use, stay in treatment longer, and lower overdose risk.

Two numbers put usage in context. In 2024, about 2.2 million Americans received medication for opioid use disorder (2024 NSDUH). And as the level-of-care table above shows, medication treatment's low "completion" rate (10.9 percent in 2023 TEDS data) is a measurement artifact of open-ended care, not a failure rate; most discharges from medication treatment are transfers within continuing care.

This page keeps MAT statistics at summary depth. If you are weighing this option, our medication-assisted treatment program page explains how medication is combined with counseling in outpatient care.

Telehealth and virtual IOP outcomes

Telehealth is the newest frontier in treatment outcome research, and none of the widely cited "rehab success rate" pages covers it at all. Three peer-reviewed findings define the current picture:

• A retrospective cohort of 4,724 patients in a fully virtual intensive outpatient program (2021 to 2023) recorded 79.9 percent engagement at 30 days, which the authors note exceeds the 50 to 68 percent 30-day engagement estimates published for conventional in-person IOP care (Contreras-Schwartz et al., Healthcare, 2024).
• A multilevel analysis of 1,410 patients found the virtual IOP group had fewer no-shows (21.7 versus 30.9 percent) and a higher share of discharges with staff approval (61.0 versus 52.6 percent) than in-person outpatient care (JMIR Human Factors, 2023).
• A longitudinal comparison of intensive outpatient patients during the pandemic found no significant differences in continuous abstinence three months after discharge between in-person (70.1 percent), hybrid (72.8 percent), and virtual-only (70.5 percent) formats among the 1,060 patients surveyed (Gliske et al., JMIR Mental Health, 2022).

Adoption has followed the evidence: in 2024, 3.6 million Americans received substance use treatment via telehealth (2024 NSDUH). The honest reading of the research so far is that virtual intensive outpatient care retains people at least as well as in-person care and produces comparable early abstinence outcomes, which matters most for people whose work, childcare, or distance would otherwise end treatment early. We describe how this works in practice in our overview of virtual IOP as an approach to recovery.

Dual diagnosis and treatment success

Co-occurring mental health conditions are the rule in addiction treatment, not the exception, and they change the outcome math. In 2024, 21.2 million U.S. adults, 8.1 percent, had both a mental illness and a substance use disorder, and among the 14.6 million adults with serious mental illness, nearly half (6.9 million) also had an SUD (2024 NSDUH).

The clinical consensus, stated by both NIDA's co-occurring disorders overview and SAMHSA's co-occurring disorders guidance, is that both conditions need to be treated together, in an integrated plan, rather than sequentially or in parallel silos. Untreated depression, anxiety, PTSD, or other conditions are among the most consistent drivers of dropout and return to use, which is why an intake that screens for them is a marker of a serious program. Success rate statistics that ignore dual diagnosis are describing a simpler population than the one that actually walks through treatment doors.

Veteran treatment outcomes

Veterans carry distinct risk factors, including chronic pain, PTSD, and transition stress, and the research arm of the VA maintains a dedicated substance use disorder portfolio. According to VA Research, about 9 percent of American adults have a current non-tobacco substance use disorder and about 1 in 4 will develop one in their lifetime; among veterans in VA care, an analysis of about 4.8 million records found that those with a substance use disorder had more than twice the suicide risk of veterans without one. That elevated risk is precisely why engagement and retention, the outcomes tracked throughout this page, carry extra weight for this population.

The VA operates substance use treatment across its health system, and veterans can also use VA Community Care to receive treatment closer to home. Clear Steps Recovery serves veterans through a dedicated VA rehab program in New Hampshire and Massachusetts under that framework.

The treatment gap: who never gets care

Every success rate statistic describes people who made it into treatment, which most people never do. In 2024, among Americans aged 12 or older who needed substance use treatment, only 19.3 percent, about 10.2 million people, received any; among the 48.4 million with a past-year substance use disorder specifically, 12.3 percent received treatment (2024 NSDUH). Receipt rises with severity, from 6.4 percent of people with mild disorders to 27.9 percent with severe disorders, but even at the severe end, fewer than 1 in 3 get care. The treatment gap is its own large topic with its own drivers, chiefly the fact that most people with an untreated disorder do not perceive a need for treatment, and we keep it to one section here.

New Hampshire and Massachusetts treatment outcomes

National averages hide enormous state variation, and none of the pages ranking for this topic publishes state numbers at all. The table below compiles completion rates for New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and the national total from the TEDS-D 2023 state tables (Tables 10.1 through 16.1, 2025).

Source: SAMHSA, TEDS 2023 Annual Detailed Tables, state tables by service type (2025). Discharge counts in parentheses.

How to read this responsibly:

• Massachusetts looks strongest exactly where stays are structured and short. Its short-term residential completion rate of 76.2 percent runs more than 23 points above the national average, and its detoxification completion (65.5 percent) also beats the national figure.
• The Massachusetts outpatient number is a reporting artifact as much as an outcome. One third of MA outpatient discharges (33.7 percent) were coded to the catch-all "other" category, several times the national rate, which mechanically depresses the completed share. This is a known feature of how states map their own records into TEDS.
• New Hampshire's counts are small. The state reported only about 1,100 discharges across these service types in 2023, so single percentages swing on a few dozen cases. NH's outpatient completion of 35.8 percent against a 50.0 percent national average is a real gap worth watching, but it describes a small reported slice of the state's treatment activity.
• SAMHSA itself warns that state-to-state comparisons require caution, because states differ in funding structures, which episodes they report, and how discharge reasons are coded (TEDS methodology).

For readers who want the states' own reporting, the primary portals are the Massachusetts Bureau of Substance Addiction Services statistics library and the New Hampshire DHHS alcohol and drug treatment data pages. Both publish deeper state-level admission and outcome detail than TEDS captures.

What predicts success in treatment?

Averages describe systems. Individual outcomes track a handful of factors that recent peer-reviewed research (2021 and newer) keeps confirming:

• Staying engaged, and being helped to stay engaged. A comprehensive review of continuing care found that longer-duration care with active efforts to keep patients engaged produces the most consistently positive results, and that people at higher relapse risk, including those with weak social support, benefit the most from it (McKay, Alcohol Research: Current Reviews, 2021).
• Recovery capital, not just social contact. In a 2021 study of 1,492 adults with resolved alcohol use disorder, each unit increase in recovery capital, the combination of self-efficacy, recovery-supportive relationships, stable housing, and employment, cut the odds of relapse by 7 percent in men and 10 percent in women, while generalized social support alone showed no protective effect (Gilbert et al., Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 2021).
• Active participation beats passive attendance. In a 2023 outpatient program study, attending self-help groups during treatment and setting explicit treatment goals were the strongest predictors of both staying more than 90 days and completing treatment (Scientific Reports, 2023).

The practical translation: the period after a program ends is part of the program. Structured aftercare planning, from continued counseling to peer support and scheduled check-ins, is where completion statistics turn into recovery statistics.

Methodology and sources

This page draws on four primary federal datasets and eight peer-reviewed studies, chosen for recency and directness of measurement. Treatment completion figures come from SAMHSA's Treatment Episode Data Set for calendar year 2023 (the newest discharge data available, received through December 19, 2024, and published in 2025), using the annual report for national totals and the annual detailed tables (Table 9.1 and the by-state service tables) for level-of-care and New Hampshire and Massachusetts breakdowns. Prevalence, recovery, and treatment-receipt figures come from the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, released July 2025, the newest edition available. Alcohol treatment rates come from the NIAAA's compilation of 2024 NSDUH data, updated March 2026. Peer-reviewed sources were verified live at the time of writing; where a widely circulated statistic could not be traced to a live primary source (for example, a virtual-versus-in-person completion pair quoted on several commercial sites), it was excluded rather than approximated. TEDS covers treatment episodes reported by state agencies and does not represent all private treatment; NSDUH is a self-report household survey. All figures are population statistics: they describe the U.S. treatment system broadly, not the outcomes of any single program, including ours. Statistics on this page were last reviewed on July 3, 2026.

The bottom line on treatment success rates

Read carefully, the numbers on this page say three things at once. Completion of a single treatment episode is a coin flip on average, 42.6 percent in 2023, and heavily dependent on the level of care. Recovery over a lifetime is far better than a coin flip, with about 3 in 4 people who ever had a substance problem eventually describing themselves as recovered or in recovery. And the bridge between those two numbers is sustained engagement: matched levels of care, medication when appropriate, integrated mental health treatment, and structured support after discharge.

If you are comparing programs, ask each one how it defines success, how it keeps people engaged in the first month, and what happens after discharge. Those three answers will tell you more than any advertised percentage. And if you are asking these questions for yourself or someone you love in New Hampshire or Massachusetts, our admissions team will walk you through the numbers, and the options, without judgment.