Reveal identified at least 300 drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities in 44 states that required participants to work long hours without pay, in likely violation of labor law. Some work for rehab-run businesses; others for outside companies such as Walmart, Exxon and Shell. The participants receive room and board and in some cases a small stipend or allowance typically amounting to less than $20 per week – well below the minimum wage.

Look up the work-based programs in your state below. You can search by state or program name, or you can check for a company name to see if it has benefited from rehab labor.

This is not a comprehensive directory. No federal or state agency collects this data, and most of these programs are unlicensed, making information about them difficult to obtain. To measure the scope of this problem, Reveal attempted to survey several hundred programs that we learned might require unpaid work. Only a fraction agreed to answer questions. To fill in the gaps, Reveal interviewed hundreds of current and former employees, rehab participants and state regulators and reviewed thousands of pages of tax records, financial documents, and wage and injury reports. We also documented companies that use these unpaid rehab workers. Some companies said they were unaware of their connection to the unpaid work, thanks to layers of subcontractors, or denied it altogether; other companies that used rehab labor at one point have since severed ties.

This listing was compiled over the course of the past year; to report recent program status changes or information about a work-based rehab you don’t see here, send Reveal a tip to rehabtips@revealnews.org.

Will Carless, Amy Julia Harris, Sohyeon Hwang, Quinn Lewis and Heidi Swillinger contributed to this directory.

Shoshana Walter can be reached at swalter@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @shoeshine. 

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Shoshana Walter was a senior reporter and producer at Reveal, covering the criminal justice and child welfare systems. She's working on a book for Simon & Schuster about the failures of our country's addiction treatment system. At Reveal, she reported on exploitative drug rehab programs that require participants to work without pay, armed security guards, and sex abuse and trafficking in the marijuana industry. Her reporting has prompted new laws, numerous class-action lawsuits and government investigations. Her stories have been named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, Selden Ring and National Magazine Awards. She has also been honored with the Livingston Award for National Reporting, the IRE medal, the Edward R. Murrow award, the Knight Award for Public Service, a Loeb Award and Sigma Delta Chi Award for investigative reporting. Her Reveal podcast, "American Rehab," was named one of the best podcasts of the year by The New Yorker and The Atlantic and prompted a congressional investigation.


Walter began her career as a police reporter for The Ledger in Lakeland, Florida, and previously covered violent crime and the politics of policing in Oakland, California, for The Bay Citizen. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, she has been a Dart Center Ochberg fellow for journalism and trauma at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim fellow in criminal justice journalism. She is a fellow with the Watchdog Writers Group at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and is based in Oakland, California.