How to Cite the CDC in APA 7: Webpages, Reports, and Data

To cite the CDC in APA 7, use the full agency name as the author, never the abbreviation: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Year, Month Day). Title of page. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. URL. In your text, spell the name out once with the abbreviation in brackets, then use CDC alone. That covers a standard CDC webpage. The complications start when the page has no date, when it shows a "last reviewed" date, when the source is an MMWR article rather than a webpage, or when you pulled numbers out of CDC WONDER. Each of those uses a different template from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.), and this guide works through all of them with real, checkable sources.

The official APA 7 rule

A CDC webpage follows the webpage template in Section 10.16 of the manual:

Format:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Year, Month Day). Title of page. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. URL

Example:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024, January 11). About handwashing. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.cdc.gov/clean-hands/about/index.html

What each element is doing:

• Author. APA 7 uses the most specific agency responsible for the work. For most pages on cdc.gov that is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, written out in full. Pages produced by a CDC sub-agency, such as the National Center for Health Statistics, take that sub-agency as the author instead.
• Date. Use the publication or "last updated" date shown on the page, as specific as the page provides. CDC pages usually give a full date, so include the month and day.
• Title. Italicized, in sentence case. Capitalize only the first word, proper nouns, and the first word after a colon.
• Source. The parent department goes in the site-name position. The CDC sits inside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, so HHS fills that slot. This mirrors the pattern federal health agencies themselves recommend: the National Institute of Mental Health, for example, asks to be cited with "U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health" after the title. When the author and the site name would be identical, APA drops the site name; here they differ, so HHS stays.
• URL. A direct link to the page you used, with no period after it.

In-text, the group-author abbreviation rule (Section 8.21) applies. The first citation introduces the abbreviation; every later citation uses it alone:

• First parenthetical: (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2024)
• First narrative: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2024)
• All later citations: (CDC, 2024) or CDC (2024)

The reference list entry always spells out the full name. If you cite the agency only once in a short paper, you can skip the abbreviation entirely and write the full name in that one citation.

Worked examples

1. A standard CDC webpage

The most common case: a dated informational page.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024, January 11). About handwashing. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.cdc.gov/clean-hands/about/index.html

• Parenthetical, first use: (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2024)
• Parenthetical, later uses: (CDC, 2024)
• Narrative: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2024) recommends washing with soap and water for at least 20 seconds.

This particular page is a useful teaching case because it carries two dates: it was last updated on January 11, 2024, and last reviewed on February 16, 2024. The reference uses the January date. APA's rule is to ignore "last reviewed" dates, because a review does not mean anything changed. A "last updated" date counts only when it clearly applies to the content you are citing rather than to the site as a whole.

2. A CDC statistics page with no date

Some CDC pages, including the NCHS FastStats series, show no publication date and are revised on a rolling basis as new figures come in. Two rules stack here. No date means (n.d.). And content that is designed to change over time, with no archived version of what you saw, needs a retrieval date under Section 9.16:

National Center for Health Statistics. (n.d.). FastStats: Diabetes. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved August 31, 2026, from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/diabetes.htm

• Parenthetical: (National Center for Health Statistics [NCHS], n.d.)
• Narrative: National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS, n.d.)

Notice the author. FastStats is an NCHS product, so NCHS is the most specific agency and takes the author slot. The parent chain, HHS and then CDC, moves into the site-name position. Citing the CDC as the author of an NCHS page is one of the most common errors on reference lists in the health sciences.

Our guide to citing a source with no date in APA 7 covers the n.d. rules in more depth.

3. An MMWR article

The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report looks like a CDC webpage, lives on cdc.gov, and is actually a journal. MMWR articles have named authors, volume and issue numbers, page ranges, and DOIs, so they take the journal-article template from Section 10.1:

Stalter, R. M., Pecha, M., Dov, L., Miller, D., Ghazal, Z., Wortham, J., Althomsons, S., Deutsch-Feldman, M., Stewart, R., Felix, D., Hsu, S., & Strick, L. B. (2023). Tuberculosis outbreak in a state prison system - Washington, 2021–2022. MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 72(12), 309–312. https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7212a3

• Parenthetical: (Stalter et al., 2023)
• Narrative: Stalter et al. (2023)

The authors are people, so the CDC does not appear in the author slot at all, and the in-text citation uses "et al." from the first citation because there are three or more authors. List every author in the reference up to 20; our guide to citing multiple authors in APA 7 covers the cutoff rules. The dashes in the article title are part of the title as published, so they stay.

If the MMWR piece you are citing is an unsigned surveillance summary with no named authors, fall back to the CDC as group author and keep the journal elements.

4. A CDC report

Formal publications with a title page use the report template from Section 10.4 (reports and gray literature). Many older CDC reports are archived in CDC Stacks, which gives you a stable URL and a fixed publication year:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2017). National diabetes statistics report, 2017: Estimates of diabetes and its burden in the United States. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/46743

• Parenthetical: (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2017)
• Narrative: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2017)

If the report prints a publication or report number on its title page, add it in parentheses after the title, before the period: Title of report (Publication No. 123). Reports differ from webpages in one more way: a report is a self-contained document, so it never needs a retrieval date. For the full report rules, see our guide to citing a report in APA 7.

5. A data set from CDC WONDER

Numbers you queried out of CDC WONDER come from a data set, which has its own template in Section 10.9. The bracketed description [Data set] is part of the format. WONDER's underlying databases are released in named versions; the mortality files come from NCHS, so NCHS is again the author:

National Center for Health Statistics. (2021). Multiple cause of death, 1999–2020 [Data set]. CDC WONDER. Retrieved August 31, 2026, from https://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd-icd10.html

• Parenthetical: (National Center for Health Statistics [NCHS], 2021)

The year is the release year of the database version you queried, which WONDER states on the database page. The retrieval date stays, because the query interface serves updated data over time and your extract is not archived anywhere a reader can see it.

6. A CDC source quoted inside another source

Nursing and public health textbooks quote CDC guidance constantly, and students ask whether they can cite the textbook's citation. If you can get to the CDC original, cite the original; it is free and usually one search away. When the original is genuinely unavailable to you, APA's secondary-source rule applies: put the source you actually read in the reference list, and name the CDC only in text.

• In text: According to CDC guidance (as cited in Potter et al., 2023), hand hygiene compliance remains the leading prevention measure.
• Reference list: only the Potter et al. textbook entry appears.

The Potter reference here is illustrative; your reference is whatever book or article you actually read. Use this pattern sparingly. Markers notice a reference list with no primary sources.

7. A CDC webpage where you quote directly

APA asks for page numbers with direct quotations, and webpages have none. Substitute what the page does have: a section heading, a paragraph number counted within the section, or both.

• (CDC, 2024, "Why it matters" section)
• (CDC, 2024, para. 3)
• (CDC, 2024, "Why it matters" section, para. 2)

Keep quoted CDC text short. Most CDC guidance paraphrases cleanly, and a paraphrase with a citation earns the same credit without the block-quote formatting overhead.

8. Two CDC pages from the same year

Cite two CDC webpages both dated 2024 and the in-text citations become ambiguous: (CDC, 2024) could mean either. APA resolves this with lowercase letters assigned by alphabetical order of title in the reference list:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024a). About hand hygiene for patients in healthcare settings ...

>

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024b). About handwashing ...

Alphabetize first, then assign letters. Here "About hand hygiene" precedes "About handwashing" because the space after "hand" sorts before the "w", so it takes the "a" even though you may have cited the handwashing page first. In-text: (CDC, 2024a) and (CDC, 2024b). The same rule covers two undated pages, which become (CDC, n.d.-a) and (CDC, n.d.-b). Our post on APA reference list order walks through the alphabetization rules that decide which entry gets which letter.

Special cases

The page shows only a "last reviewed" date

Treat it as undated. A reviewed date tells you someone looked at the page, and APA's position is that looking is not publishing. Use (n.d.), and add a retrieval date if the content is the kind that changes. If the page shows both a reviewed date and an updated date, cite the updated date and ignore the reviewed one.

The URL is dead or the page has moved

CDC reorganized large parts of cdc.gov in recent years, and links in older papers now redirect or fail. If the live page has moved, cite the new URL you actually used. If the page is gone, look for it in CDC Stacks (stacks.cdc.gov), the agency's own archive, and cite that copy with its date; a dated, archived snapshot is a better reference than a dead link. A Wayback Machine capture works the same way: cite the archive URL and the snapshot's date.

The CDC is one of several agency authors

Joint publications list each group author, joined the same way multiple personal authors would be. The reference spells out every agency name in full. In-text, the first citation carries the full names, and if that becomes unwieldy you may introduce a combined abbreviation: (NIH & CDC, 2023). The details, including congressional documents and executive-branch material, are in our guide to citing government documents in APA 7.

You used a citation generator and the fields came out wrong

Generators fail on CDC pages in predictable ways: they pull "CDC" instead of the spelled-out name into the author field, they grab the "last reviewed" date as the publication date, and they miss HHS as the site name because the page footer does not label it. Whatever tool you use, check those three fields against the rules above before you submit. The format is only five elements; the tool saves typing, and the check takes thirty seconds.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• Writing "CDC" as the reference-list author. The abbreviation belongs in text only, after a first-use introduction. The reference list always reads "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." Fix: search your reference list for "CDC." and expand any hit.
• Using the review date as the publication date. CDC pages print "last reviewed" prominently, and generators scrape it. A reviewed page has not necessarily changed. Fix: use the updated or published date, or (n.d.) when that is all the page offers.
• Citing cdc.gov instead of the page. "Retrieved from www.cdc.gov" identifies nothing. Every CDC citation points at one specific page, report, article, or data set, with its own title and URL.
• Adding retrieval dates everywhere. Old APA editions required them; the 7th does not. A retrieval date appears only when content is designed to change and is not archived. A dated fact sheet needs none. A live statistics dashboard does.
• Treating an MMWR article as a webpage. It has authors, a volume, pages, and a DOI. Citing it as "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023). Tuberculosis outbreak..." throws away the named authors and the journal. Check the top of any MMWR piece for its citation block.
• Putting HHS in the author slot. The department is the parent, so it sits after the title. The most specific agency, CDC or NCHS, is the author. When the same body would appear twice, it appears once, as author.

Quick-reference table