Your insurance: clarified, verified, covered.

Maryland's Habilitative Services Mandate works differently than most states. Instead of setting a dollar cap on how much ABA therapy costs, it sets a floor for how much your insurer has to cover. Carriers can't deny coverage below 25 hours a week for children 18 months to 6 years old, or below 10 hours a week for children 6 to 19, and they can approve more than that whenever it's medically necessary. There's no annual dollar limit at all.

This applies to fully-insured, state-regulated plans. Self-funded employer plans follow federal ERISA rules instead, so this specific mandate doesn't automatically apply to them, though federal parity law still requires meaningful mental health coverage either way. We check which kind of plan you have as part of verifying your benefits, so you don't have to figure that out yourself.

Here's the honest range: most of the Maryland families we work with pay little to nothing out of pocket once their coverage is verified. Your child will likely need somewhere between 10 and 30 hours of therapy a week, and your BCBA sets that number based on what will genuinely move the needle, not a one-size-fits-all schedule. Since Maryland's mandate sets a floor rather than a cap, families here often have more room to get the hours their child actually needs, not less. We tell you your real number before anything starts, not an estimate you find out is wrong three months in.