One in three Americans has resolved to make 2025 the year they get therapy. If you’re one of them, brace yourself: Figuring out how to get your insurance benefits to cover therapy can take some legwork.

The drudgery of figuring out whether and how your insurance plan covers therapy — or choosing between plans in the hope of getting therapy covered — can feel overwhelming. In a recent poll, more than half of Americans surveyed said mental health treatment costs were a major barrier to care, while four in 10 people said the scarcity of providers was a big obstacle. A third of psychologists don’t take insurance at all, and even people who get health insurance through their jobs often have to go out of network for their mental health care.

As complicated as it is for Americans to get physical health care covered by insurance, “people with mental health conditions get the short end of the stick,” wrote Hannah Wesolowski, chief advocacy officer at the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), in an email to Vox. “We wait longer, we pay more, and we have less choice for providers.”

That makes it especially important to understand how to navigate the mental health benefits insurance plans offer. Here’s what you need to know.

Do most insurance plans cover therapy?

For more than 15 years, the US has had a law — the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act — that requires most health insurance plans to provide mental health coverage that’s as good as their physical health coverage. In particular, the law forbids insurance companies from charging more for visits to a mental health care provider than for other visits, or from limiting the number of those visits its plans cover.

However, this regulation hasn’t exactly created a consumer utopia. Insurance companies often pay super low rates to mental health providers in their networks, so many therapists simply opt out of partnering with insurance plans. People seeking in-network care are also often faced with “ghost networks,” provider directories that seem robust at first before you find out that many of the providers aren’t actually taking new patients, says Wesolowski. That means many people often end up having to contact

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