U.S. adolescent vaccination rates for Tdap and MenACWY remain around 90%, but HPV coverage stagnates for the fourth consecutive year, with significant rural-urban gaps highlighting ongoing public health challenges.
Vaccination coverage among U.S. teenagers held broadly steady in 2025, but human papillomavirus shots again failed to gain ground, according to the latest federal survey of adolescent immunisation. Data published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report show that uptake of Tdap, the booster against tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis, and MenACWY, the vaccine that protects against several strains of meningococcal disease, stayed close to 90%.
The findings come from the 2025 National Immunization Survey-Teen, which examined 18,692 adolescents aged 13 to 17. Cassandra Pingali and colleagues at the CDC found small year-on-year declines in coverage for at least one dose of Tdap and MenACWY, though both remained near the 90% level. HPV vaccination, by contrast, did not improve for the fourth year running and continued to lag behind the other routine teen vaccines.
The report also points to a stubborn rural-urban gap. Adolescents living in mostly rural areas were 12 percentage points less likely than those in mostly urban communities to have received at least one HPV dose. The CDC said coverage also varied widely by jurisdiction, with HPV showing the greatest differences from place to place. TeenVaxView, the agency’s online dashboard, offers state and local data that public health officials use to track those disparities.
Last year’s survey had shown some progress, with coverage for Tdap, MenACWY and HPV rising compared with 2023 and the first two vaccines reaching roughly 90%, according to an earlier CDC report. The newer data suggest that momentum has stalled, prompting the authors to call for continued efforts to raise adolescent vaccination rates and narrow geographic gaps, especially for HPV, which helps prevent several cancers later in life.
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