# Long Island Dialysis Access Report: how far every town is from a dialysis chair > How far each of 141 Long Island towns is from a dialysis unit and an evening shift, from Medicare data, drive times and Census figures. Free CSV. Source: https://dachiplus.com/resources/long-island-dialysis-access-report/ Published October 9, 2026 · CMS data released July 15, 2026 Long Island has 51 dialysis facilities registered with Medicare (24 in Nassau, 27 in Suffolk). For most towns one is close: the median town center is 7 minutes from the nearest unit. The gap is evening care. Only 18 of 50 in-center units run a shift starting at 5 PM or later, none of the 4 East End units does, and Montauk is 92 minutes from the nearest evening chair. In-center hemodialysis usually means three sessions a week of about four hours each, on a fixed slot, according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. That makes the trip, and the time of day it happens, part of the treatment. This report measures both for 141 towns in Nassau and Suffolk, using only public data. [Download the town table (CSV)](https://dachiplus.com/downloads/long-island-dialysis-access.csv). ## Key findings - Evening chairs are the scarce part. 36% of in-center units report a shift starting at 5 PM or later, the option that can let a patient keep a daytime job. For 51 of the 141 towns, the nearest unit is one of them; in the other 90, an evening slot means traveling beyond the closest unit. - The East End has no evening shift at all. Its 4 units in Hampton Bays, Riverhead and Southampton hold 63 stations, none with an evening shift. For all 8 East End communities in this report, the nearest evening chair is the same unit, DaVita Medford Kidney Center in Medford. - Past Southampton, even a daytime chair is a long drive. The easternmost unit on the South Fork is Hamptons Dialysis Center in Southampton, and the Town of Southold on the North Fork has none. Montauk is 54 minutes from the nearest unit, which works out to about 281 hours a year on the road for three sessions a week (an estimate). - Morning rush hour barely touches local dialysis trips. At a weekday 8 AM departure, the drive to the nearest unit takes a median of zero extra minutes and never more than 4. Distance and shift times decide access, not traffic. - Car-free households mostly live near a unit, but not near an evening one. In the 15 towns where at least 10% of households have no vehicle, the median drive to the nearest unit is 6 minutes. In Cedarhurst, Lawrence and Inwood, where 14.7% to 17.3% of households have no car, the nearest evening shift is 22 to 25 minutes away by car. ## Where are Long Island's evening dialysis shifts? CMS's listing marks whether each unit "has a shift starting at 5:00 P.M. or later." CMS's patient guide to Care Compare on Medicare.gov describes the same field as whether you can receive treatments after 5 pm. On the map below, filled dots are units with that shift and open rings are units without one. Gray dots are the 141 town centers measured in this report, which is why the outline looks like Long Island. ## Units from the CMS Dialysis Facility Listing (released July 15, 2026), placed by street address; town centers as used throughout this report. Drawn to scale in miles. Hover a dot for the unit's name. The pattern is easy to read. Evening chairs are spread across Nassau and western and central Suffolk, and the easternmost are in Medford and Patchogue. East of there, no unit runs a shift that starts at 5 PM or later. ## Nassau and Suffolk side by side Population for the per-100,000 figure is the county total from the ACS 2020-2024 5-year estimates. CMS's Quality of Patient Care star rating is its summary of the quality of care a unit provides; not every unit has enough data for one. ## Why are East End patients so far from an evening chair? Because none of the East End's 4 units runs a shift that starts at 5 PM or later. They are Stony Brook Southampton Hospital Regional Dialysis Center in Hampton Bays, Atlantic DMS - East End Harrison Ave in Riverhead, DaVita Peconic Bay Dialysis in Riverhead and Hamptons Dialysis Center in Southampton. Riverhead itself has a unit 4 minutes from its center, yet the nearest evening slot is 23 minutes west. Farther out, the daytime trip is already long and the evening one is longer: Drive times from Google Maps for each town's center point: light traffic, and a weekday 8 AM estimate. East End here means the hamlets and villages in the Towns of Riverhead, Southold, Southampton and East Hampton. For a Montauk patient on a daytime slot, the 54-minute drive each way adds up: three sessions a week, two legs each, 52 weeks, comes to roughly 281 hours a year in the car before any traffic. A patient who needs an evening chair to keep working faces about 3.1 hours of round-trip driving on every treatment day, on top of a session that NIDDK puts at about four hours. Montauk and East Hampton sit in Suffolk Transit's East Hampton On-Demand zone, and Southampton and Sag Harbor in its Southampton zone; both zones run daily from 6 AM to 8 PM, which ends before an evening session would. ## Which towns are farthest from an evening shift? The chart pairs each town's nearest unit (open ring) with its nearest evening shift (filled dot). The longer the line, the more an evening schedule costs in travel. 6 towns are more than 30 minutes from an evening chair, and all of them are on the East End. ## Drive times from Google Maps, town center to unit, light traffic. Every town is in the full table below. Outside the East End, the longest evening trips run 22 to 27 minutes, from Bayville, Inwood, Locust Valley, Mastic Beach, Rocky Point, Wading River, Glen Cove, Lawrence, Shoreham and Cedarhurst. Several of these have a daytime unit much closer: Glen Cove's nearest unit is 4 minutes away and Cedarhurst's 4, so for them it is the late shift, not dialysis itself, that is far. ## Does morning rush hour slow down dialysis trips? Not much, for the nearest unit. We compared each town's light-traffic drive with Google's estimate for a Tuesday 8 AM departure. The median difference was zero minutes, and the largest was 4 minutes, from East Hampton. Because the nearest unit is usually a short local drive, a weekday morning adds little to it. The practical takeaway: when a patient keeps missing chair time, look at the pickup schedule and the shift before blaming traffic. Our piece on the [8 a.m. medical rush hour](https://dachiplus.com/resources/8-am-medical-rush-hour/) covers why early pickups are tight anyway. ## What about households without a car? NIDDK notes that patients may need to rest after each treatment, and a household without any car depends on someone else for every one of those trips. These are the 15 towns where at least 10% of households have no vehicle, according to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey: No car: share of occupied households with no vehicle available, ACS 2020-2024 5-year estimates for the matching village or Census place. Bus stops: fixed-route NICE or Suffolk County Transit stops within 3/4 mile of the town center, from the agencies' schedule data. The town with the highest car-free share, Hempstead village, where 23.7% of households have no vehicle, has a unit with an evening shift 7 minutes from its center. The harder cases are Oyster Bay and Bayville. About 12% and 10% of households there have no car, NICE lists both as areas Able-Ride does not serve, and the nearest NICE stop is 4.7 and 4.6 miles from their centers. ## How paratransit fits the dialysis schedule Paratransit (Able-Ride in Nassau, SCAT in Suffolk) is the public shared-ride service for riders who qualify under the ADA, and its rules decide whether it can reach a unit at all. NICE says Able-Ride serves trips that start and end within 3/4 mile of fixed-route service during that service's hours, and lists Syosset, Bayville, Oyster Bay, Lido Beach, Point Lookout, Locust Valley and Sands Point as not served. Of those, Bayville, Lido Beach, Locust Valley, Oyster Bay and Syosset are in this report, and the nearest dialysis unit from them is 6 to 16 minutes away by car. In Suffolk, SCAT runs Monday to Saturday from 5 AM to 10 PM and Sunday from 6 AM to 8 PM, but its earliest and latest service only reaches addresses within 3/4 mile of a Suffolk County Transit route that is running at the time. A four-hour session that starts at 5 PM ends around 9 PM, close to the end of SCAT's day. If you rely on paratransit, ask the agency whether the return from an evening chair is possible before you take the slot. Our guides to [Access-A-Ride and Able-Ride in Nassau](https://dachiplus.com/resources/how-do-i-access-a-ride-in-nassau-county-ny/) and to [getting around Long Island without a car](https://dachiplus.com/resources/how-to-get-around-long-island-without-a-car/) go further. ## What this means if you or a parent needs dialysis - Ask about evening chairs early. The CMS listing tells you whether a unit runs an evening shift, not whether it has an open chair. If keeping a job depends on it, ask the nephrologist's office and the unit's social worker which nearby units have evening openings. - Count the drive when you compare units. Ten minutes closer each way saves an hour a week on a three-session schedule. The town table below shows the nearest unit and the nearest evening unit for every town. - With Medicaid, start at the dialysis center. Medical Answering Services (MAS) arranges New York Medicaid rides, and authorized trips cost the member nothing. For a three-times-a-week schedule, the dialysis center or doctor's office requests a standing order through the MAS portal; members cannot enter their own. It lasts up to six months and the office renews it. You can ask MAS for DachiPlus by name: MAS sets the type of transportation first, then considers your choice. For a single trip, call MAS at [1-844-666-6270](tel:+18446666270) at least three days ahead. - Paying privately. Fares are priced by distance from our published rates; check your route in the [fare estimator](https://dachiplus.com/cost/estimator/) before you book. DachiPlus drives ambulatory riders and wheelchair users who can transfer to a seat; for riders who need to stay in their wheelchair, we arrange the trip through licensed wheelchair-van partners. See our [dialysis transportation service](https://dachiplus.com/services/dialysis-transportation/), the [guide to dialysis rides on Long Island](https://dachiplus.com/resources/dialysis-transportation-long-island/), and unit pages such as [DaVita Waldbaum in Great Neck](https://dachiplus.com/facilities/davita-waldbaum/) and [the Hampton Bays regional unit](https://dachiplus.com/facilities/barbara-lord-dialysis-hampton-bays/). ## Town-by-town results Every town in the report, with drive times to the nearest unit and the nearest evening shift, the share of households without a car and of residents 65 and older, and fixed-route bus access. Each town name links to its dialysis page with the full trip table. The CSV has the same towns with public columns and straight-line distances. [Download the town table (CSV, 141 towns)](https://dachiplus.com/downloads/long-island-dialysis-access.csv) Drive times from Google Maps for the center of each town: light traffic, with the weekday 8 AM estimate in brackets. * Inside a Suffolk Transit On-Demand zone (daily 6 AM to 8 PM), where On-Demand buses pick up without fixed stops, so the count understates bus service. n/a: the Census release used here does not include that place. Names, stations, evening shift and Quality of Patient Care star rating as CMS lists them (names written in capitals are shown in title case). Released July 15, 2026. ## Methodology Dialysis units. Every facility in Nassau and Suffolk Counties in CMS's Dialysis Facility, Listing by Facility (data.cms.gov dataset 23ew-n7w9, released July 15, 2026). We use CMS's own fields: number of stations, whether the unit offers in-center hemodialysis, the late-shift flag, which CMS's data dictionary defines as a shift starting at 5:00 P.M. or later, and the Quality of Patient Care star rating. DaVita Floral Park Home Dialysis (PD) offers peritoneal (home) dialysis and no in-center hemodialysis, so the drive-time figures use the other 50 units. Each unit is placed by geocoding its CMS street address. Towns. The 141 Nassau and Suffolk communities in our [service area](https://dachiplus.com/service-area/), each measured from one center point, the same point used on our town pages. Drive times. Google Maps Distance Matrix, from each town center to its three nearest in-center units and two nearest evening-shift units by straight line, plus any unit our town pages already have a drive time for. "Light traffic" is Google's drive time with no departure time set; "8 AM" is Google's typical-traffic estimate for a Tuesday 8:00 AM departure. Times were fetched in October 2026. The nearest unit is the one with the shortest light-traffic drive. The annual-hours estimate multiplies that drive by six legs a week and 52 weeks. Census. American Community Survey 2020-2024 5-year estimates (tables B25044, B01001 and B18101) for the village or Census place matching each town, or its ZIP code where no place matches, read through Census Reporter. Bus and paratransit. Straight-line distance from each town center to the nearest fixed-route stop, and the number of stops within 3/4 mile, from the NICE and Suffolk County Transit GTFS schedule feeds (fetched October 7, 2026). Paratransit rules come from NICE's Able-Ride page and Suffolk County Transit's SCAT and On-Demand pages. East End. Hamlets and villages in the Towns of Riverhead, Southold, Southampton and East Hampton. Shelter Island is not one of the towns in this report. The numbers on this page and in the CSV are computed by a script, so they can be rebuilt when CMS publishes a new release (CMS lists its next update for October 28, 2026). No DachiPlus trip, rider or company data is used. ## Limitations - A town center is not your front door. Large hamlets can be several miles across, so check your own address. - Google's times are typical estimates. Weather, crashes and seasonal traffic change any given day. - CMS reports whether a unit runs an evening shift, not whether a chair is open, and units can change schedules between CMS releases. - A few units are small hospital units: LIJ Medical Center (6 stations), Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital (3 stations) and Huntington Hospital (7 stations). They are counted as CMS lists them; call before counting on one. - Facilities that are not registered with Medicare are not in the CMS listing. - ACS figures are survey estimates with margins of error, which are widest for small villages. The Census Reporter release used here returns no figures for the Brentwood and Wyandanch Census places, so their census columns are blank. - Bus stop counts cover fixed routes only. Suffolk Transit's On-Demand buses in the South Fork zones pick up without fixed stops, so the stop counts for Montauk, East Hampton, Southampton and Sag Harbor understate the bus service there. ## How to cite this report DachiPlus. "Long Island Dialysis Access Report." October 2026. https://dachiplus.com/resources/long-island-dialysis-access-report/. Data: CMS Dialysis Facility Listing (released July 15, 2026), Google Maps drive times, U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2020-2024. Journalists, researchers and community groups are welcome to use the figures and the [CSV](https://dachiplus.com/downloads/long-island-dialysis-access.csv) with credit and a link to this page. For questions about the data, [contact us](https://dachiplus.com/contact/). ## Frequently asked questions Medicare's dialysis facility listing (CMS, released July 15, 2026) has 51 dialysis facilities in Nassau and Suffolk Counties: 24 in Nassau and 27 in Suffolk, with 912 dialysis stations between them. 50 offer in-center hemodialysis; one, DaVita Floral Park Home Dialysis (PD) in Floral Park, offers peritoneal (home) dialysis and no in-center hemodialysis. 18 of the 50 in-center units tell Medicare they run a shift starting at 5 PM or later. In Nassau (10 units): Bellmore, Bethpage, Great Neck, Hempstead, Hicksville, Mineola, New Hyde Park (2), Oceanside and Uniondale. In Suffolk (8 units): Amityville, Bay Shore, Commack, East Setauket, Hauppauge, Huntington Station, Medford and Patchogue. None of the 4 East End units, in Hampton Bays, Riverhead and Southampton, has one. An evening shift on the listing does not mean a chair is open, so ask the unit. There is none in Montauk and none in the Town of Southold on the North Fork. The easternmost units are Hamptons Dialysis Center in Southampton on the South Fork and the two Riverhead units at the base of the North Fork. From the center of Montauk the nearest unit is 54 minutes away in light traffic (57 at 8 AM on a weekday), and the nearest evening shift is 92 minutes away in Medford. Yes, when the trip is authorized. Medical Answering Services (MAS) arranges New York Medicaid rides, and authorized trips cost the member nothing; the Downstate contact center for Nassau and Suffolk is 1-844-666-6270. For dialysis three times a week, the dialysis center or doctor's office requests a standing order through the MAS portal (members cannot enter their own); it lasts up to six months and the office renews it. You can ask MAS for a provider such as DachiPlus by name: MAS sets the type of transportation first, then considers your choice. Yes. The town-level table is a free CSV download on this page. Please credit "DachiPlus, Long Island Dialysis Access Report (October 2026)" and link to the report. The CSV holds public figures and straight-line distances; the drive times come from Google Maps and appear on this page only. ## Sources - [CMS: Dialysis Facility, Listing by Facility (data.cms.gov dataset 23ew-n7w9)](https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/dataset/23ew-n7w9) - [CMS: Data Dictionary for Quarterly Dialysis Facility Care Compare (late shift = a shift starting at 5:00 P.M. or later)](https://data.cms.gov/provider-data/sites/default/files/data_dictionaries/dialysis/DF_Data_Dictionary.pdf) - [CMS: Quick Guide to Dialysis Facility Care Compare (star ratings, hours after 5 pm)](https://www.cms.gov/files/document/2023-dfc-patient-handbook.pdf) - [Medicare.gov Care Compare](https://www.medicare.gov/care-compare/) - [NIDDK (NIH): Hemodialysis](https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/kidney-disease/kidney-failure/hemodialysis) - [U.S. Census Bureau: ACS 2020-2024 5-year, table B25044 (vehicles available)](https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT5Y2024.B25044) - [NICE: Able-Ride, How to Ride (service area, areas not served)](https://www.nicebus.com/Able-Ride/How-to-Ride) - [Suffolk County Transit: SCAT paratransit (hours and service area)](https://sctbus.org/Paratransit) - [Suffolk County Transit: On-Demand zones](https://sctbus.org/On-Demand) - [MAS: Contact Center numbers by region](https://wp2.medanswering.com/contact-center/) - [MAS: New York Medicaid transportation (authorized trips at no cost; book routine trips 3 days ahead)](https://wp2.medanswering.com/) - [NYS DOH: Medicaid Transportation Standing Order Policy, effective October 1, 2020 (published by MAS)](https://wp2.medanswering.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Standing-Order-Policy-08202020.pdf) - [eMedNY: NYS Medicaid Transportation Policy Manual, effective August 25, 2023](https://www.emedny.org/ProviderManuals/Transportation/PDFS/Transportation_Manual_Policy_Section.pdf) - Drive times: [Google Maps Distance Matrix API](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/distance-matrix/overview) - Bus stops: [NICE](https://www.nicebus.com/) and [Suffolk County Transit](https://sctbus.org/) GTFS schedule data ## Need a ride to dialysis on Long Island? DachiPlus serves Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Medicaid patients: ask your dialysis center to request a standing order through MAS with DachiPlus as your preferred transportation provider, or call MAS at [1-844-666-6270](tel:+18446666270) at least three days before a single appointment and ask for DachiPlus. Private pay: call DachiPlus at [(516) 754-7777](tel:+15167547777) or check the [fare estimator](https://dachiplus.com/cost/estimator/). ## Dialysis rides with DachiPlus DachiPlus drives recurring rides to dialysis centers across Nassau and Suffolk. On Medicaid, your dialysis center can set up a standing order through MAS with DachiPlus as your preferred provider, so you do not rebook every session. Paying privately? Book with us directly. ## Related resources Part of our guide to [rides to dialysis and treatment](https://dachiplus.com/resources/topics/dialysis-and-treatment-rides/). ## Can Dialysis Patients Travel by Car? ## Dialysis Transportation on Long Island — Medicaid & Private Pay ## Do You Need a Driver for Dialysis? ## Does DaVita Provide Dialysis Transportation?