Staff turnover in independent medical practices was flat in 2026, with 69.0% of medical group leaders telling MGMA it held steady or fell compared with 2025. Another 28.0% reported turnover rising this year, and 2.0% were unsure, according to MGMA's May 2026 poll of 303 medical group leaders.
That result almost matches the year before it. In MGMA's May 2025 poll of 357 leaders, 70.0% reported turnover flat or falling against 2024, and 29.0% reported an increase. For practice administrators, the two polls together show a workforce problem that stopped getting worse two years ago but has not actually improved. The stall matters because the roles driving turnover, medical assistants and front-line clinical staff, are also the roles practices report as hardest and most expensive to replace.
What the 2026 Poll Found
MGMA has run this question as a spring tracking poll since staffing shortages became a top concern for medical groups. The 2026 results split the stable-or-improving group into 39.0% who said turnover held steady and 30.0% who said it fell. That is a different split than 2025, when the same and lower groups tied at 35.0% each, but the combined share reporting no worsening barely moved, 69.0% in 2026 against 70.0% in 2025.
| Turnover trend reported | 2025 poll (n=357) | 2026 poll (n=303) |
|---|---|---|
| Same as prior year | 35.0% | 39.0% |
| Lower than prior year | 35.0% | 30.0% |
| Higher than prior year | 29.0% | 28.0% |
| Unsure | 1.0% | 2.0% |
Source: MGMA Stat polls, May 14, 2025 and May 28, 2026.
MGMA's own read of the 2026 data is that turnover stabilized without improving. Practices reporting higher turnover in 2026 described strain concentrated in a short list of roles:
- Medical assistants
- Nursing and other clinical support staff
- Front-desk and administrative positions
- Billing and revenue cycle staff
- Specialty technologists, including mammography and cardiac sonography
Which Roles Are Hardest to Keep Staffed
An earlier MGMA Stat poll, fielded May 7, 2025 among 420 practice leaders, asked which role was hardest to recruit. Medical assistants topped the list at 47.0%, ahead of nurses at 15.0%, billers at 10.0%, and coders at 9.0%. The remaining 18.0% of leaders named other roles.
The pressure shows up in how practices cope, not only in who they struggle to hire. In 2024, 43.0% of medical groups said they hired alternative staff, such as medical scribes or externs, to cover open medical assistant positions, per the same MGMA data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 15.0% growth in medical assistant jobs through 2033, with about 119,800 annual openings nationally, a pace that keeps demand for MAs ahead of the pipeline supplying them.
What One Turnover Event Actually Costs
A study published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine in May 2020 put a dollar figure on this problem for one academic family medicine center. Researchers Friedman and Neutze tracked an average medical assistant workforce of 25.5 people at the University of North Carolina Family Medicine Center through calendar year 2017 and found a 59.0% MA turnover rate, with 15 MAs separating from the practice that year.
Replacing each MA cost the center an estimated $14,200, about 40.0% of an MA's average annual salary of $35,194 at the time. Applied across the year's departures, total turnover cost the center $213,000. More than 70.0% of that cost came from training time rather than recruiting or vacancy coverage, the study found. The figures come from a single center and are not a national average, but they show why a role with a 47.0% recruiting-difficulty rating carries a real budget line, not just a scheduling headache. A practice losing MAs at a rate close to the 59.0% found in the UNC study, while also drawing from the same national pool where 47.0% of leaders already call the role hardest to fill, is paying the replacement cost twice: once in the training hours the study measured, and again in the weeks a seat sits open before a candidate accepts an offer.
The Labor Market Behind the Numbers
MGMA's 2026 analysis points to Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing the broader healthcare quits rate cooling alongside practice-level turnover. The healthcare and social assistance quits rate averaged 2.2% in 2024, down toward the 2.0% average that held from 2018 through 2020 and again in early 2025.
Hiring volume tells a similar story. Average monthly healthcare hires rose from 679,000 in 2020 and 2021 to a peak of 792,000 in 2023, then eased to 758,000 in 2024 and 731,000 in early 2025. MGMA reads the combination of a cooling quits rate and slower hiring as evidence that the broader labor market, not only practice-level retention programs, sits behind the plateau in turnover numbers.
More than two-thirds of medical groups had adopted new recruiting or retention strategies by 2025, per MGMA. For practice leaders working from the 2026 numbers, the data supports treating turnover as stabilized rather than solved. A 28.0% share still reporting increases, concentrated in medical assistant, clinical support, and billing roles, has barely moved across two years of polling. That share is large enough that a typical multi-physician group should expect at least one hard-to-fill vacancy in a given year, even as the overall trend line holds flat rather than worsens.
Sources
- MGMA, "Stabilized but not solved: Staff turnover in medical practices looking no better, no worse in 2026," May 28, 2026
- MGMA, "Can staff turnover continue to be tamed in medical practices into 2026?," May 14, 2025
- MGMA, "Why medical assistants are still tougher to hire today than nurses, coders and other medical practice staff," May 7, 2025
- Friedman ND, Neutze D, "The Financial Cost of Medical Assistant Turnover in an Academic Family Medicine Center," Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, May 2020
Talk to us
Fifteen minutes about your practice and the systems you run.