The best children's hospital in New York is not across a bridge or through a tunnel. In the 2026-27 Best Children's Hospitals rankings that U.S. News and World Report published on September 15, Cohen Children's Medical Center in New Hyde Park is tied for No. 1 in the state, sharing the top spot with NewYork-Presbyterian's children's hospital at Columbia and Cornell in Manhattan.

What the ranking actually measures

This is the twentieth year U.S. News has ranked children's hospitals, and the methodology is built for the hardest cases: how hospitals perform when caring for the sickest, most medically complex children, measured through an extensive data survey covering outcomes like survival, readmissions and infection prevention. Hospitals are ranked nationally in eleven pediatric specialties, from cancer and cardiology to neonatology and behavioral health.

Cohen Children's placed among the nation's top hospitals in ten of the eleven, including a No. 23 national ranking in neonatology, where U.S. News rated its infection prevention in the neonatal intensive care unit as excellent. The 2025-26 edition marked the hospital's eighteenth consecutive year on the national lists, a streak this year's result extends to nineteen.

The rest of the state list

The gap between the top two and everyone else is real. Below the tie at No. 1, Hassenfeld Children's Hospital at NYU Langone ranks third in the state, the Children's Hospital at Montefiore Einstein fourth, and a four-way tie at fifth includes Mount Sinai Kravis Children's Hospital, Maria Fareri in Westchester and the two upstate Golisano children's hospitals. Cohen also ranks fourth among children's hospitals across the entire mid-Atlantic, a region that includes New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

The hospital up the road

For a Long Island parent, the geography is the story. Cohen Children's sits on the Queens-Nassau line in New Hyde Park, on the same campus as Long Island Jewish Medical Center, whose pediatric care is evaluated as part of the hospital's performance. It is the largest provider of pediatric health services in New York State, serving a catchment of 1.8 million children across Nassau, Suffolk, Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island and Westchester, and it operates the state's largest Level 1 pediatric trauma center, the designation for hospitals equipped to handle the most severe emergencies at any hour.

In the patient surveys U.S. News publishes alongside the rankings, 86 percent of families treated at Cohen said they would recommend the hospital, slightly above the New York state average.

What it means for a Long Island family

Nobody plans on needing a children's hospital, which is exactly why the ranking matters before anything goes wrong. The instinct when a child is seriously ill has always pointed toward Manhattan, toward the idea that the best care requires the hardest trip. The new rankings say otherwise: one of the state's two best children's hospitals is a parkway drive from anywhere in Nassau and most of Suffolk, and in ten of the eleven specialties U.S. News measures, the care at the end of that drive ranks among the best in the country.