Are Surrogacy Agency Rankings Real? The Only License You Can Actually Verify (2026)

No U.S. government agency, no state, and no professional body publishes a ranking of surrogacy agencies — not a health department, not ASRM, not SEEDS. Nearly every "Top 10 Surrogacy Agencies" list you'll find was written by someone with a commercial interest in the order. One agency credential can be checked against a government record, and it isn't a ranking.

If you're early in this, that's genuinely unhelpful news. You're making a decision measured in years and in six figures, and the internet keeps handing you lists that carry the visual grammar of consumer research and the contents of an advertisement.

Who this is for: intended parents comparing surrogacy agencies who have found the "best agency" lists unhelpful, contradictory, or oddly similar to one another.

The better news is narrower but real. You can't rank agencies, but you can verify specific things about them. Below: where the lists actually come from, the one credential that exists in U.S. law, how to check it in about a minute, and seven things worth verifying about any agency — including this one.

Where "Top 10" Lists Actually Come From

Almost every ranking you'll find falls into one of three categories. None of them is a scam exactly. All three are marketing arranged to look like research.

1. Agencies ranking themselves. The most common. An agency publishes "The Best Surrogacy Agencies of 2026" on its own blog and appears somewhere in its own list — often at number one, sometimes at two or three, which reads as modest and tends to work better. This is standard content marketing, and some publishers disclose this in a line near the bottom. The list isn't necessarily wrong about the other agencies on it. It just isn't a comparison, because the author is one of the things being compared.

How to tell: look at the domain in your address bar before you read the list rather than after, then open the site's About page. If the publisher is an agency, you're reading an ad written in the format of a review.

2. Referral sites paid per inquiry. These look independent — a neutral-sounding name, a claim to have evaluated dozens of agencies, a comparison table with checkmarks. The business model is that placement on the list, or the inquiry form itself, is worth money. When you enter your details there, they may be forwarded or sold to one or more agencies as a lead.

How to tell: find out where the form goes. If the contact form lives on the review site rather than on the agency's own site, you're a lead, not a reader. Look for an advertising or affiliate disclosure — usually small type in the footer or a "How we make money" page. There's nothing illegitimate about lead generation, but a list ordered by what each placement pays is not a list ordered by quality.

3. Content assembled from other content. The third category has no relationship to the industry at all. The article exists because the search term has traffic. It's assembled from other articles about agencies, which were themselves assembled from agency websites.

How to tell: no named author with relevant background; no primary sources — no statutes, no registries, no clinic data; criteria that can't be measured ("compassionate coordinators," "excellent communication"); and an "updated for 2026" label above facts that stopped being true a while ago.

What all three have in common is also the reason an honest ranking is hard to produce: the criteria that would matter aren't collected by anyone. There is no standardized, audited definition of an agency "success rate," no regulator that publishes agency-level outcomes, and no public database of match times, journeys completed, or matches that fell apart. Agencies publish figures they calculate for themselves, using definitions they choose. A number nobody outside the company can reproduce isn't evidence — it's a claim.

Is There Any Official Credential At All?

Yes. One, in one state.

There is no federal license for surrogacy agencies and no national accrediting body with legal authority. In most states, the requirements for opening a surrogacy agency are the requirements for opening any small business: register an entity, open a bank account, build a website. No exam, no background review, no filing with a health department.

A few states regulate one specific practice without licensing anyone. California, for example, requires a non-attorney surrogacy facilitator to hold client funds in an independent, bonded escrow depository or an attorney's client trust account — a real protection, but one aimed at the money rather than at the agency. No state other than New York licenses the agency itself. Professional associations exist and some publish standards, but membership is voluntary and self-administered — a trade association is not a regulator.

New York is the exception. When New York legalized compensated gestational surrogacy through the Child-Parent Security Act (CPSA), effective February 15, 2021, it became the only state in the country with an agency-licensing regime, paired with a statutory Surrogates' Bill of Rights. Under the CPSA, surrogacy matching programs that work with New York surrogates — or that operate in New York — must be licensed by the New York State Department of Health, and that license carries requirements much of the industry treats as optional:

• Independent escrow. Surrogate compensation and anticipated expenses must be placed with an independent escrow agent before medical procedures begin — not left in the agency's operating account. New York's definition of "independent" is specific: someone other than the parties and their attorneys — and unless the escrow agent is a surrogacy program owned by a New York-licensed attorney, it must be bonded and insured.
• The Surrogates' Bill of Rights. Statutory protections for the surrogate, including her own independent legal counsel, health insurance, and the right to make her own medical decisions about her body and her health care.
• Independent counsel on both sides. Intended parents and the surrogate must each have their own attorney. No shared representation.

New York is the only U.S. state that licenses surrogacy agencies this way, which makes that license the only agency credential in the country a government keeps a public record of.

Three honest limits, before you weight it more heavily than it deserves:

• A license is a floor, not a ranking. It means an agency met a state's requirements and remains subject to that state's oversight. It doesn't tell you the agency is the right fit for you, that your coordinator will return calls, or that your journey will go smoothly.
• An agency without one isn't thereby disqualified. Outside New York there is nothing to be licensed by. Plenty of agencies have never worked with a New York surrogate and never needed a license. Absence from the registry means there's nothing available to check — not that something is wrong. The flip side: an agency that does operate in New York or match New York surrogates is required to be on that list. If it isn't, that's not missing data — that's a red flag.
• A license regulates the agency, not every journey. New York's protections attach to agreements governed by New York law — typically when the surrogate lives there. If your journey runs through another state, ask which state's law will govern your agreement, and which of these standards the agency follows there as company policy rather than legal obligation.

What the license does give you is unusual in this industry: a claim about an agency you can confirm without asking the agency.

How to Verify a License in About a Minute

Three steps.

1. Open the official registry. The New York State Department of Health publishes the list of licensed surrogacy programs here: NYSDOH licensed surrogacy programs. It's maintained by the state, not by any agency.
2. Search the agency's legal name. Marketing names and legal entity names often differ. Ask an agency for the exact legal name of the entity you'd be contracting with — that's the name that appears on a license, and it should also be the name on your agreement.
3. Match the license number. A license claim without a number you can find on the state's list is a claim, not a credential.

For us specifically: Ivy Surrogacy, Inc. holds New York State Department of Health license GSP250701, first issued in July 2025 and renewed in July 2026. Open the registry, find the entry, match the number. We'd rather you did that right now than take our word for it — what the license requires of us is spelled out on our NY licensed agency page.

Deliberately, we're not going to reproduce the rest of that registry here or tell you what to conclude from who else appears on it. Read the state's list yourself. It's the primary source, and any version of it retyped onto an agency's website — including ours — is one step further from the original and one step closer to marketing.

If an agency describes itself as "licensed," "certified," or "accredited," two questions settle it: by whom, and where can I look it up? A certificate issued by a trade group, by the agency's own parent company, or by an organization that won't publish its criteria is a different category of thing from a state license. Sometimes a useful one. Just not the same thing.

A 7-Point Checklist That Works for Any Agency, Anywhere

The license exists in one state. These checks work everywhere, and none of them requires you to trust the agency's account of itself — that's the whole design.

1. Independent escrow. Ask who holds surrogate funds, and get the escrow company's name in writing. Money owed to your surrogate should never sit in an agency's operating account, where it's exposed to that agency's business risk. Ask whether you receive statements, and who authorizes each disbursement.
2. Know what's screened before matching — and what comes after. No agency finishes every screen before you see a profile — final medical clearance happens at your IVF clinic, after a match, and some steps, commonly the psychological evaluation, are scheduled once a preliminary match is made. What you're checking is whether the sequence is in writing: which screens are complete before a profile reaches you, which come after, and what happens to your money if a later step ends the match. A written sequence lets you weigh the risk; a vague "everyone is fully screened" doesn't.
3. A clear legal pathway to parentage in the state where the birth will happen. Not "surrogacy is legal there," but specifically: pre-birth order or post-birth process, who files, at what point, and which attorney is licensed in that state. Ask them to describe your route in plain sentences. Our state-by-state guides cover how much this actually varies.
4. An itemized budget with trigger points. Every line item, what event triggers each payment, and what's refundable at each stage. A single large number described as all-inclusive is not a budget. Ask what happens if a match falls through after screening, or if a transfer doesn't take: who has been paid what by then, and what comes back to you.
5. Medical partners you can look up. Ask which fertility clinics they work with, then check those clinics' own reported outcomes in the national ART data published by the CDC and SART. Clinic-level data is collected and published; agency-level "success rates" aren't. Verify at the layer that has real data behind it. One caution the CDC and SART themselves give: clinic figures reflect each clinic's patient mix and treatment choices — use them to verify, not as a simple ranking, and a clinic's average is not your personal probability.
6. Reviews on platforms the agency doesn't control. Testimonials on an agency's own site are selected by the agency. Google reviews aren't, and neither are complaints filed with the BBB or with a state attorney general's consumer division, in the states that publish them. Read the three-star reviews — they carry the most information — and read how the agency replies to criticism.
7. A credential you can verify on a government registry — where one applies. An agency that operates in New York or matches New York surrogates must appear on the state's registry; check there, not on the agency's site. An agency with no New York connection has no license to show — ask instead which of its claims, from its legal entity name to its escrow provider, you can confirm in a public record.

If an agency answers all of them without deflecting — the seventh where it applies — you've learned something a ranking could never have told you. If it deflects on escrow or on the budget, you've also learned something. The license is also only one lens: for how to weigh an agency's experience, medical depth, and payment structure, see our guide on how to choose a surrogacy agency.

Why This Article Exists — and Who Published It

This article is published by Ivy Surrogacy. We hold New York State Department of Health license GSP250701, and we obviously have an interest in you deciding that licenses matter. An article arguing that the one credential we hold is the credential worth checking is not a neutral document, and you shouldn't read it as one.

Which is exactly why every check above points somewhere we don't control: the state's registry, CDC and SART clinic data, review platforms we can't edit, an escrow agent who isn't us, and your own attorney. We haven't asked you to trust us anywhere in this article, and we're not going to start in the last paragraph. Run all seven points on us, and run them on every agency you're considering — by the same standard, in the same order.

If it helps to talk it through with someone, you can book a free consultation, including as a second opinion on an agency you're already in conversation with.

This article is for general informational purposes and is not legal advice. Surrogacy law varies by state and changes over time; decisions about agencies, contracts, and parentage should be made with an attorney licensed in the state where your journey will take place. License information is accurate as of publication — current status can be verified on the New York State Department of Health registry.