LEIE, SAM.gov and state exclusion lists: what each one covers

Published 2026-09-15. Sources are linked where each rule is quoted.

Three kinds of list get called "the exclusion list", and they are not interchangeable. A person can appear on one and not the others, and each publishes different identifying fields. Here is what each one is, from the publishers' own descriptions.

The OIG LEIE

The List of Excluded Individuals and Entities is published by HHS-OIG and lists individuals and entities excluded from participation in Medicare, Medicaid and all other federal health care programs. It is refreshed monthly as a full downloadable file plus monthly supplements of new exclusions and reinstatements. Each record carries the exclusion authority as a statute citation (1128a1, 1128b4 and so on), the exclusion date, and identifying fields that often include a date of birth and sometimes an NPI. As of our June 2026 copy the full file held 83,665 records, about 96 percent of them individuals.

SAM.gov exclusions

SAM.gov is the federal government's System for Award Management, run by the General Services Administration. Its exclusions extract lists parties excluded from federal procurement and non-procurement programs by any federal agency. OIG's health care exclusions are cross-listed there, but SAM.gov also carries debarments and suspensions from agencies that have nothing to do with health care, and it is refreshed daily. SAM records publish no date of birth, so a SAM hit on a common name is verified on other fields or by contacting the excluding agency.

Medicaid exclusion and termination lists published by states

Most states' Medicaid agencies publish their own list of providers excluded, terminated or sanctioned by that state. Some are true exclusion lists; some are termination lists; a few are debarment registers kept by a state treasury. The publishers are explicit about which, and our source pages repeat each publisher's own term rather than calling everything an exclusion.

State actions are not automatically federal ones. When we measured three of the smaller state lists against the two federal lists in August 2026, 140 of North Carolina's 165 NPI-bearing records, 204 of Massachusetts' 245 and 292 of Kentucky's 367 carried an NPI that appeared in neither the LEIE nor SAM.gov. A federal-only check would have missed all of them. The reverse is also true: a state list covers actions by that state, and a person excluded federally after working elsewhere may not appear on it.

Which lists apply to you

That depends on the programs you bill and the states you operate in, and the state agency pages linked from our source pages are where the rules are written. What we can say from the data is that the lists do not duplicate one another, that they refresh on different schedules, and that each publishes different identifying fields, so the same name can be a strong match on one list and an unverifiable one on another. A screening record that names the list, the version and the fields compared is what lets a reader judge each potential match on its own terms.