How Long Does It Take to Fill a Physician Vacancy in 2026?

A physician vacancy takes a median of 118 days to fill, and some specialty searches run past a year, according to the Association for Advancing Physician and Provider Recruitment's (AAPPR) 2025 benchmarking survey of nearly 130 health organizations. Advanced practice provider (APP) searches close faster, at a median of 77 days, a 41-day gap that gives practices leaning on APPs during a vacancy a real timeline advantage.

The survey covered more than 15,000 searches, 61% of them for physicians, run by organizations that conducted a median of 96 physician and provider searches apiece in 2024. For a practice budgeting locum coverage or projecting when a new hire starts billing, 118 days is the number to plan around.

Search Times Vary Sharply by Specialty

Search length depends heavily on specialty. Oncology searches took a median of 332 days to fill in AAPPR's 2025 data, the longest of any specialty tracked, and surgical and other specialty searches commonly ran a year or longer. Across all specialties, the average time from opening a search to a signed contract ran to nearly four months.

Demand held steady even as timelines stretched. Nearly half of all searches opened in 2024 were still unfilled at year's end, AAPPR found. A typical organization running 96 searches a year, at a median of 118 days each, keeps dozens of roles open at any given point, which helps explain why so many searches carried into the next year. Hospital medicine accounted for 10.8% of all searches, the largest single category, followed by family medicine at 10.6%, OB/GYN general at 7.8%, and internal medicine at 5.8%. Those four specialties made up more than a third of all searches organizations ran that year.

Offer Acceptance Rates Are Falling

Fewer physicians are accepting the offers recruiters extend. The physician offer-acceptance rate fell to 71% in 2024, down from 83% in 2023, AAPPR's data shows. APPs moved the opposite direction: their acceptance rate rose to 80% in 2024 from 71% the year before.

Technology has not closed the gap. Seventy-five percent of surveyed organizations use an applicant tracking system, but more than 67% rated their recruitment technology as average or below average. A falling physician acceptance rate combined with a 118-day median search means more searches restart mid-cycle, adding months to an already long timeline.

Physician and Recruiter Turnover in 2026

Physician turnover held at a median of 7.3% in 2025, and APP turnover ran slightly higher at 7.9%, according to AAPPR's July 2026 report on the in-house recruiter workforce. Both figures sit above pre-pandemic norms.

Recruiter turnover, in contrast, has dropped. It fell to 9.8% in 2025, with the average across responding organizations at 12.1%, down from a range of 18.9% to 22.7% over the prior four years. Median recruiter compensation rose to $100,420 in 2025, up 10.4% year over year, and more than 90% of recruiters now work remote or hybrid. Nearly 75% of recruiters report satisfaction with their role, and 66% rate their work-life balance good or excellent, though the same share, 66%, report high or very high workplace stress. AAPPR also found that 87% of in-house recruiters say they feel genuinely called to the work, a factor the group ties to the drop in recruiter turnover even as stress stays high. The survey drew responses from 428 internal recruitment professionals, 396 of whom provided compensation data.

Most Practices Don't Track the Metrics That Matter

Only 39% of the 158 recruitment leaders AAPPR surveyed in early 2026 said their organization has a formal, documented retention strategy, and 16% have no retention strategy or activity of any kind. AAPPR found that 80% of respondents overall are either working informally or running a formal strategy with gaps in execution.

Metric tracked	Share of organizations
Employee satisfaction	81%
Turnover rate	78%
Days-to-fill	41%
Cost-per-hire	22%
Internal promotion rate	8%

Source: AAPPR, "Retention as a Recruitment Strategy: What the 2026 AAPPR Report Reveals," May 20, 2026.

The barriers differ by group. Among leaders without a retention strategy, 51% point to unclear ownership of the problem and 48% cite a lack of executive buy-in. Among leaders who already have a strategy, the constraints shift: 61% cite competing priorities and another 61% cite limited budget. Nearly three-quarters of leaders without a strategy, 74%, say they want to build one.

What This Means for Independent Practices

Independent practices rarely have the recruiting infrastructure AAPPR's respondent base represents. Most respondents work inside larger health systems and medical groups with dedicated in-house recruitment teams. A solo or small group practice facing a 118-day search timeline, without the internal tracking that catches a stalled search early, has fewer levers to pull once that median passes.

The 22% cost-per-hire tracking rate matters here specifically. A practice that does not know what a physician search costs, in recruiter time, job board fees, signing bonuses, and locum coverage for the 118 days a role sits open, cannot build an accurate budget for the next one. Days-to-fill tracking, at 41%, fares only slightly better. Practices that adopt even basic tracking of these two figures gain a planning tool most of their peers still lack.

Building more APP roles into a staffing plan does not remove a vacancy gap, but the 41-day difference in median fill time between physicians and APPs is one lever a smaller practice can pull without adding a new tracking system. A practice that pairs that staffing flexibility with even basic cost-per-hire and days-to-fill tracking starts each search with a budget the majority of AAPPR's respondents still cannot produce.

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