The typical healthcare organization managed 100 physician and provider searches in 2025, down from a peak of 115 in 2023, according to the Association for Advancing Physician and Provider Recruitment’s annual benchmarking report.
The report, released Sept. 16, draws on more than 10,000 physician and provider searches active in 2025 from recruitment teams that collectively recruit for more than 21,000 healthcare locations. Nearly 60% of the searches were for physicians.
Six findings:
1. Recruitment budgets dropped. The median annual budget for internal physician recruitment departments fell 7.4%, from $553,376 in 2024 to $512,500 in 2025.
2. Recruiter workloads held steady. Recruiters individually managed a median of 36.5 searches, essentially unchanged from 35.6 in 2024.
3. Physician searches remain lengthy. Physician searches took a median of 119 days to fill. Endocrinology and metabolism took the longest at a median of 321 days, followed by oncology at 244 days. The median time to fill for advanced practice provider searches dropped from 80 days in 2024 to 65 days in 2025.
4. A signed contract is not the finish line. The typical physician began work 229 days after the position was posted, reflecting the time needed for credentialing, privileging, licensing and onboarding.
5. More searches are staying open. Half of physician searches remained open as of Dec. 31, up from 49% in 2024 and 47% in 2023. By comparison, 31.8% of advanced practice provider searches were still open at the end of 2025.
6. Some specialties are especially hard to fill. Urology searches were filled 28.3% of the time by the end of 2025. About one-third of neurology and cardiology searches were filled, along with 40.1% of anesthesia searches and 40.5% of gastroenterology searches.
“Our data shows that searches in high-impact specialties like cardiology, urology, neurology, anesthesiology and gastroenterology are increasingly difficult to fill,” Carey Goryl, CEO of AAPPR, said in the Sept. 16 news release. “This is a clear warning sign that our physician pipeline isn’t keeping up.”
