From ABA science to autism dealmaking and Medicaid policy, here are the behavioral health conferences worth your calendar and travel budget in 2026.
The behavioral health calendar has grown crowded enough that few professionals can attend everything, and the events don’t always resemble one another. A scientific convention built around peer-reviewed research shares almost nothing, in format or audience, with an invitation-only investment symposium or a staffing-focused working summit.
Here are nine events that matter most across applied behavior analysis (ABA), autism services, and the wider behavioral health economy in 2026, along with what each is built to do. They appear in no ranked order; the right starting point depends entirely on whether your next decision is clinical, operational, financial, or political.
1. Autism Law Summit
The Autism Law Summit is the field’s policy and legal anchor, and 2026 marks its twentieth year. The summit runs October 27 to 28 in Charleston, South Carolina, gathering more than 350 service providers, attorneys, lobbyists, legislators, parents, and self-advocates to work through the insurance, Medicaid, and adult-services questions that shape autism coverage. Founded by Lorri Unumb (also Chief Executive Officer of the Council of Autism Service Providers), it is where much of the advocacy that determines provider reimbursement originates, a throughline to the state-level Medicaid rate cuts and contract fights now playing out across the country. For anyone whose business depends on what payers will and will not cover, this is the room where that future gets argued. The 2026 program pairs the main sessions with invitation-only attorney workshops and a twentieth-anniversary gala.
2. Autism Investor Summit
The Autism Investor Summit is the sector’s dedicated dealmaking event. Produced by trade-media company WTWH Media, the 2026 summit gathered service providers, investors, and operators in Scottsdale, Arizona from May 13 to 15 to talk valuations, consolidation, and the state of capital in autism services. Attendees self-select into provider, investor, and ancillary-service tiers, which makes it an efficient venue for sourcing transactions and benchmarking valuations in a market that remains highly fragmented. It offers the clearest annual read on how investors view a sector that private equity has spent a decade building out, and where the largest ABA platforms are heading next.
3. Association of Professional Behavior Analysts (APBA)
APBA serves the practitioner and organizational side of the behavior-analytic community. Its 2026 convention ran March 12 to 14 in New Orleans, with programming aimed at the professional, ethical, and business questions that working behavior analysts and the companies employing them face daily. Smaller and more intimate than the field’s research conventions, APBA tends to draw clinic owners, supervisors, and accreditation-minded leaders rather than bench scientists. The association also sits at the center of field-wide advocacy: it is one of the professional bodies behind the coalition challenging state-level restrictions on how ABA services are billed.
4. Behavioral Health Tech Conference
The Behavioral Health Tech Conference is the largest behavioral-health-focused event on this list and the most technology-forward. The 2026 edition heads to the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville from September 22 to 24, convening health plans, employers, providers, digital health companies, investors, and policymakers around expanding access to mental health, substance use, and autism and intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) care through technology. Its scale and heavy payer presence make it the natural venue for questions about value-based care, artificial intelligence in clinical workflows, and how digital tools actually reach patients. For providers thinking beyond ABA into the broader behavioral health economy, it is the widest-angle gathering of the year. Qualifying senior decision-makers who evaluate behavioral health solutions can often attend free with limited travel reimbursement, a sign of how aggressively the event courts the buy side.
5. ABA C.A.R.E.S. Conference
The ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit narrows the lens to the workforce crisis that shapes every provider’s economics. Organized by Holli Beth Clauser of ABA C.A.R.E.S. Staffing and set for the Boston Marriott Long Wharf from August 4 to 7, 2026, the summit is built around recruitment, retention, and operational alignment rather than clinical theory. Its four tracks (executive leadership, people operations, career counseling, and clinical leadership) are designed to put owners, HR leaders, recruiters, and board certified behavior analysts (BCBAs) in the same room speaking the same language. For organizations losing revenue to turnover among registered behavior technicians (RBTs), it is the rare event that treats staffing as the central problem rather than a footnote.
6. BHASe Summit
The BHASe Summit (Behavioral Health and Addiction Summit for Executives) is the executive-level dealmaking counterpart across the wider behavioral health economy. Its 2026 edition, held February 11 to 13 at Trump National Doral in Miami, convened owners and operators alongside banks, brokers, and private equity firms in a curated, relationship-driven format explicitly oriented toward strategy and merger-and-acquisition activity. Where the Autism Investor Summit centers ABA, BHASe spans substance use disorder, mental health, eating disorders, and I/DD as well, making it a useful cross-section of behavioral health dealmaking for anyone whose interests reach autism services. Its deliberately small, invitation-driven scale is the point: the format favors closed-door conversations over large-stage keynotes.
7. CASP Conference
The CASP Conference is about running the business of care. Hosted by the Council of Autism Service Providers (CASP), the 2026 edition marked the organization’s tenth anniversary and ran April 26 to 28 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, selling out its in-person registration. CASP bills itself as the only conference focused specifically on administering and operating autism service organizations while maintaining clinical excellence, and its roughly 100 small-group breakout sessions reflect that operator orientation: compliance, billing, Medicaid policy, staff retention, and outcomes measurement. The programming leans hard into the compliance pressures intensifying as federal and state audits scrutinize ABA billing, and the event has become the primary venue where technology vendors court provider buyers.
8. Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI)
ABAI hosts the largest scientific and academic gathering in the discipline. Its 52nd Annual Convention drew behavior analysts to San Francisco from May 21 to 25, 2026, at the Moscone Center West, with thousands of presentations spanning basic research, clinical application, and practitioner training. ABAI also runs a dedicated Autism Conference each winter and an International Convention (set for Prague in the fall of 2026), and with continuing education offered for behavior analysts and psychologists, the convention doubles as a research showcase and a credential-maintenance hub. For anyone trying to understand the field’s path from B.F. Skinner’s laboratory to its current private-equity era, ABAI is where that intellectual lineage still lives.
9. J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference
The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference sits in a category of its own. The 44th annual edition ran January 12 to 15, 2026 at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco, and although it is invitation-only and oriented toward biotech, pharmaceuticals, and large-cap healthcare rather than behavioral health specifically, its gravitational pull is enormous. The real value for most behavioral health professionals is the ecosystem that forms around it: the satellite meetings, dinners, and side conferences that turn the week into the year’s densest concentration of healthcare capital and dealmaking. An invitation is hard to come by, and the 45th edition is set for January 11 to 14, 2027, but the surrounding week is where much of the industry’s annual relationship-building happens. Behavioral health is a small presence on the formal agenda, yet the sector’s largest players increasingly use the week to take meetings they would struggle to schedule at any other point in the year.
