NEMT Broker Changes in 2026: Who Runs Your State Now

Adam runs A.S. Reliable Transport in Indiana. Going into this year he was doing over 500 broker trips a month and climbing. Then the calendar flipped to 2026, Indiana’s managed-care plans moved their transportation to a new broker, and his schedule fell off a cliff: under 50 trips a month, for four months straight.

Nothing about his service changed. His vans were fine, his drivers were fine, and the riders still needed rides. But his broker, Access2Care, lost the business, and the trips he’d been running overnight belonged to WellTrans, a broker he wasn’t credentialed with. Getting credentialed took four months of paperwork and waiting.

He did eventually get through, and today he’s running over 1,000 trips a month, roughly double his old volume. But a healthy, growing company lost 90 percent of its volume, for a third of a year, without doing a single thing wrong.

If you run Medicaid trips through a broker, 2026 is the year this stopped being a rare story. At least seven states have changed brokers this year or announced they’re about to, and in Maine more than 100 lawmakers are pushing to rebid the state’s contract. The trips never disappear in these transitions. They change hands. This article is about what happens in the handoff, and how to make sure some of those trips land with you.

Which states changed NEMT brokers in 2026?

Indiana, Texas, and Nebraska switched brokers on January 1, 2026. Florida followed on March 1, Georgia on April 1, and Colorado on July 1. Wisconsin has named its next broker but not the date. Some of these are statewide contract changes; several are health-plan vendor switches that never got a press release. Here’s the map as of late July 2026:

State	What changed	New broker	Effective
Indiana	HIP and Hoosier Healthwise managed-care plans moved NEMT to a single broker [1]	WellTrans	Jan 1, 2026
Texas	UnitedHealthcare Community Plan switched transportation vendors [2]	SafeRide Health	Jan 1, 2026
Nebraska	UnitedHealthcare Community Plan switched transportation vendors [3]	MTM	Jan 1, 2026
Florida	UnitedHealthcare Community Plan switched transportation vendors [4]	MTM	Mar 1, 2026
Georgia	Verida took over all five state regions; ModivCare exited its three [5]	Verida	Apr 1, 2026
Colorado	The state moved to a single statewide broker, Denver metro first [6]	MediDrive	Jul 1, 2026
Wisconsin	The state announced intent to award its contract to Verida; MTM serves until the handoff [8]	Verida	TBD
Maine	100+ lawmakers are urging the governor to rebid the $750 million ModivCare contract [9]	TBD	Pending

There are two different kinds of change hiding in that table. Georgia, Colorado, and Wisconsin are state-level moves, the kind that get announced and covered. But Indiana, Texas, Nebraska, and Florida were plan-level swaps: the state didn’t change anything, a health plan changed vendors, and the only warning was a provider notice. If you only watch your state Medicaid office’s news page, you’ll miss half of these.

Behind the table sits consolidation. MTM struck a deal in 2024 to buy Access2Care, one of the largest brokers in the country [10]. ModivCare, the biggest of them all, spent the last months of 2025 in Chapter 11 and emerged in late December having cut its debt by more than 85 percent [11]. Fewer, bigger brokers competing for the same state contracts means more handoffs like these, not fewer.

Colorado went one step further and passed a law about it. HB26-1328, signed June 4 and effective July 1, reclassifies NEMT as a medical service and requires auditable electronic trip records, with GPS location data and timestamps, on Medicaid trips [7]. Keep an eye on which states copy it. I’d bet several do.

What happens to providers when the broker changes?

Your enrollment doesn’t transfer. The new broker credentials you from scratch, on its own requirements and its own timeline, and your history with the old broker carries no weight. Even providers who do everything right can face a gap with no trips in it.

Adam lived the full version. Every verification requirement he’d already satisfied once, he had to satisfy again, on the new broker’s terms. Access2Care’s requirements had been flexible, he said. WellTrans’s were not: “It wasn’t easy.” Four months passed before he could take a trip from them. And when the rate conversation finally came, he was holding no cards.

His vans didn’t stop costing money while he waited.

Here’s the other side, though. A transition resets incumbency for everyone, including the operators who had the inside track before you. When ModivCare filed for bankruptcy last fall, I said on our podcast that it was a chaotic time, and that the same riders still need rides. That’s how Adam’s story ends, too. He came back bigger than he’d ever been, at over 1,000 trips a month, because WellTrans needed capacity and he’d finally gotten through the door. A broker change punishes the unprepared and pays the prepared, and it doesn’t check which one you deserved to be.

None of this makes brokers villains. They operate under service-level penalties and procurement calendars, and the loyalty was never there to lose. Marqus Johnson, a Tampa operator and coach who came on our podcast this month, said it cleaner than I can: “If you allow a broker to send you as many trips as humanly possible, they’re happy to do so. And as long as you complete them, they could care less.” [12] The relationship is real. The loyalty is contractual.

How do you get credentialed with a new broker fast?

Start the day the award is announced, not the day your trips stop. Any broker insider will tell you that online provider applications mostly sit. Call the new broker’s provider relations team instead of waiting on the web form, and have your paperwork ready before anyone asks for it.

The window between announcement and go-live is your credentialing runway. Texas’s new vendor was taking reservations on December 15 for January 1 service [2]. Colorado named its broker months before July 1. Providers who finish contracting during that window are positioned to take trips on day one, when the new broker is scrambling to cover a whole state’s demand with whoever’s ready. Wait until go-live and you’re one of hundreds re-enrolling at once, behind everyone who moved early.

Then there’s the file. Keep one folder, paper or digital, that holds your insurance certificate, your driver roster with background checks and cert dates, your vehicle list with inspections, your W-9, and your licenses. Insurance paper trips up more providers than anything else: brokers differ on required coverage symbols, limits, and even the exact wording on the certificate, and a renewal that satisfied the old broker can quietly disqualify you with the new one. Get the new broker’s requirements sheet before you assume anything carries over. Adam found that out the hard way: “The onboarding is very different… you have to comply with a lot of stuff.” Closing that gap was most of his four months.

Two more things that cost nothing. First, over-communicate. Tell the new broker your fleet size, your hours, your counties, and what you have room to take, because a broker that knows your capacity can place you. Second, watch both channels: your state Medicaid provider bulletins and every health plan’s provider notices. Half of this year’s changes only ever appeared in the second one.

Can you negotiate rates with a new broker?

At transition time, usually not, and the new rates often come in below what you were earning. Bargaining power comes back later, from your performance record and from capacity the broker can’t find anywhere else.

When Adam finally got credentialed, the new rates came in well under the ones he’d had with Access2Care. He signed anyway; after four months of almost no broker volume, holding out wasn’t a real option, and both sides knew it. The reason he had no leverage wasn’t the rate — it was that he had nowhere else to send his vans. “If you were only working with Access2Care, you don’t have any other brokers to work with,” he told me. “Then you are in the bad position. You can’t even negotiate any price.” That’s the trap a transition sets: the moment you finally get through is the worst possible moment to bargain.

So treat rates as a later conversation, and set yourself up for it. Know your cost per trip before you accept any rate card, so you at least know which trips lose money from day one. Ask for the rate sheet again every year; brokers rarely raise rates unprompted, but a year of clean on-time performance is a real opening. Scarcity helps you more than seniority: wheelchair capacity, stretcher capability, rural coverage, and weekend hours are things brokers struggle to source. If you’re the only realistic option for a corner of the map, ask for more.

And read what you sign. No-show windows, wait-time rules, submission deadlines, on-time penalties: the fine print is where transition-year money leaks. If the new broker makes volume promises, get them in writing, and if they won’t put trips on paper, price their promises accordingly.

How do you broker-proof your NEMT business?

Cap what any single payer can do to you. Keep work from any single broker at a share you could survive losing, build trips you control directly, and keep records clean enough to hand any new broker, or any auditor, on day one.

Guests on our podcast have described capping broker work at 10 to 15 percent of their schedule. Plenty of good operators run far more than that, and some markets don’t leave much choice. The percentage matters less than the question behind it: if your biggest broker vanished on January 1, would you still make payroll in April?

The trips you control are the hedge. Private-pay riders and direct facility contracts don’t move when a procurement office scores proposals, and they’re usually better-paying trips anyway. We’ve written full guides on starting and pricing private pay and winning facility contracts, and the short version is that every one of those trips keeps paying you straight through somebody else’s broker transition.

Then there’s your data. Colorado’s new law requires GPS-stamped electronic records on every trip [7], and brokers already lean toward providers who submit trip data electronically; Ray Hagan, a vice president at WellTrans, says electronic completion records pay their providers a week or two faster than paper logs do. Your trip records are quietly becoming your credential file. The operator who can hand a new broker clean trip histories, on-time numbers, driver files, and insurance certs enrolls faster than the one digging through a glovebox.

Hagan’s sharpest point was about running several brokers at once, which is exactly where a transition year leaves you. Multiple brokers assign trips to the same pool of providers with no visibility into each other’s schedules. “You’re sending out your trips and hoping that they take your stuff,” is how he described his own side of it. His advice to providers of any size was to run scheduling software that pulls every broker’s trips into one schedule. I agree, obviously; that’s what dispatch software built for NEMT is for, ours included. When the trips change hands, the operator whose schedule and records already live in one system is the one who re-credentials fastest.

Wisconsin’s handoff has no date yet. Maine’s fight isn’t settled. Somewhere right now, a procurement office is scoring proposals that will move a few hundred thousand trips on some future January 1, and nobody involved will think to warn the providers running those trips today. The reshuffle isn’t the risk. Depending on one payer is.

Adam built A.S. Reliable back bigger than it was, and I’m glad he did. But the first thing he said when we talked about it: “It’s not easy to start… it’s like you’re starting everything over.” Build so you don’t have to.

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Sources

[1] Indiana Health Coverage Programs (IHCP), provider bulletin BT2025157: MDwise exit and NEMT broker changes effective January 1, 2026. https://www.in.gov/medicaid/providers/files/bulletins/BT2025157.pdf

[2] UnitedHealthcare, “Texas Medicaid: SafeRide Health will manage transportation in 2026.” https://www.uhcprovider.com/en/resource-library/news/2025/tx-medicaid-nemt-transportation-vendor.html

[3] UnitedHealthcare, “Nebraska Medicaid: MTM Health to manage non-emergency medical transportation requests.” https://www.uhcprovider.com/en/health-plans-by-state/nebraska-health-plans/ne-comm-plan-home/ne-cp-news/MTMHealth-manage-transportation.html

[4] UnitedHealthcare, “Florida Medicaid: MTM Health managing non-emergency transportation,” 2026. https://www.uhcprovider.com/en/resource-library/news/2026/fl-medicaid-mtm-health-nemt.html

[5] Georgia Department of Community Health, “Non-Emergency Medical Transportation.” https://medicaid.georgia.gov/programs/all-programs/non-emergency-medical-transportation

[6] Colorado Department of Health Care Policy & Financing, “Non-Emergent Medical Transportation (NEMT).” https://hcpf.colorado.gov/non-emergent-medical-transportation

[7] Colorado General Assembly, HB26-1328, “Medicaid Nonemergency Medical Transportation,” signed June 4, 2026. https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/HB26-1328

[8] Wisconsin Department of Health Services, “Medicaid: 2026 Announcement for Wisconsin’s Non-Emergency Medical Transportation Vendor.” https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/nemt/vendor.htm

[9] Maine Public, “Lawmakers urge the Mills administration to drop embattled MaineCare transportation provider,” January 9, 2026. https://www.mainepublic.org/health/2026-01-09/lawmakers-urge-the-mills-administration-to-drop-embattled-mainecare-transportation-provider

[10] MTM, “MTM Health to Expand with Acquisition of Access2Care’s NEMT Business.” https://www.mtm-inc.net/mtm-to-expand-reach-with-acquisition-of-access2cares-nemt-business/

[11] Modivcare, “Modivcare Successfully Completes Financial Restructuring, Reducing Debt by More Than 85%,” December 29, 2025. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251229414980/en/Modivcare-Successfully-Completes-Financial-Restructuring-Reducing-Debt-by-More-Than-85

[12] Duet NEMT Growth Podcast, “How to Turn Your NEMT Drivers Into Your Sales Force,” with Marqus Johnson, July 2026. https://duetinc.com/duetblog27_driversalesforce