Masters in Healthcare Administration: Every CAHME-Accredited Program (2026)

What CAHME Accreditation Buys an MHA Graduate

CAHME is recognized by the US Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, and it accredits healthcare management programs at master's level only. No bachelor's degree anywhere carries it, and an undergraduate program advertising itself as CAHME-accredited is describing something that does not exist.

The practical consequence is narrower than the word suggests, and worth being precise about. An unaccredited master's is still a real degree from a real university, and plenty of people run hospital departments with one. What accreditation changes is access to one specific route: postgraduate administrative fellowships, the standard path into hospital executive leadership, are frequently restricted to graduates of accredited programs. If you intend to take that route, the 103 programs below are effectively your list. If you do not, accreditation is one factor among several and this page is a reference rather than a shortlist.

How These Masters in Healthcare Administration Programs Are Ordered

Accreditation carries 40% of the score, the number of degrees actually conferred each year 35%, and delivery format 25%. Program size is on a log scale, because the difference that matters to a reader is between conferring three degrees a year and thirty, not between eighty and a hundred.

Be clear about what that does and does not measure. Among the accredited programs, which all score the same 40 points for accreditation, the order is decided entirely by size and delivery. It is therefore not a quality ranking of accredited programs and is not offered as one. The reason is a limit in the data rather than a choice: IPEDS reports graduation rate, admission rate and tuition only for first-time undergraduates, and attaches those same undergraduate figures to master's rows, so using them here would score a graduate degree on the university's freshmen. The full model and the factors left out on purpose are in the ranking methodology (version 1.0).

Where the Accreditation Is Not in This List, and Why

Two limits are worth stating rather than leaving for a reader to trip over.

CAHME states it accredits 175 programs, and this page names 103. The gap is real and has two causes. One institution can hold accreditation for more than one program, an executive track alongside a residential one, and the federal data records those as a single row. And some accredited programs are classified under codes outside this site's scope: the scope here is CIP 51.0701, 51.0702 and 51.2211, and adding 51.2211 alone brought in eight accredited institutions that a narrower scope would have implied were unaccredited.

Separately, 4 directory entries name an institution in a way that cannot be resolved to one place. "Concordia University" could be any of six, and "University of Michigan" could be Ann Arbor, Michigan, or Flint, Michigan. The 9 programs those entries might refer to are left out of the ranking rather than marked unaccredited, because being unable to confirm an accreditation is not the same as establishing its absence.

Accreditation status changes. Check the CAHME directory for the position today before choosing a program on the strength of it.

What a Masters in Healthcare Administration Pays

The degree feeds one federal occupation, Medical and Health Services Managers (SOC 11-9111), and the wage file does not split that occupation by degree level. So there is no honest figure here for what a master's earns over a bachelor's, and this page does not offer one. What can be said is the shape of the occupation as a whole: a median of $123,860 across 597,080 jobs, a middle half between $94,700 and $166,100, and a top tenth above $224,340.

Those are BLS OEWS figures for May 2025, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The survey reports what the occupation is paid, which is the only wage claim this page makes.

Sources for These Master's in Healthcare Administration Rankings

• Program counts, degrees conferred and delivery format: IPEDS, US Department of Education, CIP 51.0701, 51.0702 and 51.2211 at award level 7.
• Wages: BLS OEWS, May 2025, SOC 11-9111 (Medical and Health Services Managers). A wage survey covering the whole occupation at every education level, carrying no employment projections and no breakdown by degree level.
• Accreditation: the CAHME directory of accredited programs, retrieved 2026-09-02, matched to institutions by hand.
• Institutional accreditation, which is separate from programmatic and is what makes a degree recognized at all: the Department of Education's accreditation database.
• Degree titles, delivery format and certification: each school's own program page.