# Methodology: Walmart Inc. NPI records **Source:** CMS NPPES Data Dissemination V.2, full replacement monthly file for September 2026 (CMS label "September 14, 2026"; records through 2026-09-13). File `NPPES_Data_Dissemination_September_2026_V2.zip`, sha256 `6573e0d148c18a9a9d974248d77447744bd9666aa288c38d13ebf3d766e3cec4`, from . The three weekly update files dated 7-27 Sep 2026 feed the change log (checksums in provenance.json). **Scope:** active NPI-2 records whose legal business name, upper-cased with punctuation removed and spaces collapsed, equals "WALMART INC" (1,390 records, listed with 7 different authorized officials). Deactivated NPIs are excluded; NPPES blanks their names, so they cannot be attributed to an organization. The literal NPPES placeholder `` is treated as empty. **Locations:** distinct pairs of normalized first address line and five-digit ZIP across primary and secondary practice addresses (1,294). In the CSV, `location_key` is the record's primary pair and `secondary_practice_addresses` lists its secondary pairs (`;`-joined `address|ZIP`, same normalization: upper-cased, punctuation replaced by spaces, whitespace collapsed), with `secondary_practice_states` giving each secondary location's state in the same order; the distinct union of both columns gives the location count, and a state's count uses the secondary pairs located in that state. A practice address can carry more than one NPI-2 record: 95 primary addresses have two or more records (191 records in all). **Taxonomy:** NUCC Health Care Provider Taxonomy code set 26.1. Primary taxonomy is the code flagged primary on the record (code 1 if none is flagged). **Last-update age:** years from each record's NPPES last-update date to 2026-10-01; "last NPPES update 5+ years ago" (CSV `not_updated_5y`) means a last-update date before 2021-10-01. The date shows when the record was last changed in NPPES, not whether its address or phone number is still correct. National comparison: 1,159,329 of 1,972,058 active NPI-2 records in the same September 2026 file. **Selection:** legal business names on active NPI-2 records (1,444,038) ranked by practice-location rows; this name ranks 5th. The rank counts legal names, not corporate families. **State pages:** California; a state page is indexed when it has at least 5 street-addressed records. Counties and metro areas come from the Census 2020 ZIP Code Tabulation Area to county relationship file and the 2023 CBSA delineation file, applied to each record's ZIP code (state CSV columns `county` and `cbsa`). **Other names:** NPPES lets each record list other names the organization uses or has used, such as a store or department name. `other_name_counts` gives the total entries, the records with at least one entry, the number of different names (exact strings as filed, `` excluded) and how many of them appear on only one record, then names by the number of records that carry them. The CSV `other_name` column lists each record's other names, `;`-joined. NPPES does not say why a name was added. **Similar legal names:** other legal names among the 500 with the most practice-location rows whose normalized name contains the reviewed phrase in `family_phrases` as whole words; the full list is `similar_legal_names` in the JSON. NPPES does not record whether these names belong to one company. **Change log:** distinct NPIs across the three weekly files. Re-issued = records in this profile's September set; new = NPIs not in the September file under this name; renamed = NPIs in the September file under another legal name that carry this name in a weekly file; renamed away = records in this profile's September set that carry another legal name in a weekly file. **Owner and review:** Owner: Rome (Provyx). Review trigger: each monthly NPPES full file (next: October 2026 release), or a correction report; figures are re-derived from the new file. **License:** CC BY 4.0 for derived fields; the underlying NPPES data is public.