See how AAPPR’s 2026 Physician and Provider Recruitment Benchmarking Report can help your team make smarter staffing decisions, set realistic hiring timelines, justify resources and focus effort where it will have the greatest impact.

• Benchmarking gives recruitment teams the context to set realistic expectations, with median 2025 time to fill at 119 days for physicians and 65 days for advanced practice providers.
• Recruiter workloads remained steady while median internal recruitment budgets declined, making staffing, workload and budget benchmarks useful for resource planning and leadership conversations.
• Half of physician searches remained open at the end of 2025, with several specialties showing particularly low fill rates, giving teams additional benchmarks to identify where recruitment challenges are greatest.
• Workforce planning should account for the full recruitment timeline, since physicians began working a median of 229 days after a position was posted.
• Specialty-level demand data can help recruitment teams identify recurring workforce needs and prioritize pipeline development, sourcing strategies and resources.

Recruitment leaders regularly face questions about whether searches are taking too long, teams have enough resources and recruitment dollars are being spent effectively. Answering those questions requires more than knowing your own numbers; you need to understand how they compare.

AAPPR’s 2026 Physician and Provider Recruitment Benchmarking Report: Search Dynamics and Trends gives recruitment professionals that context, drawing on more than 10,000 physician and provider searches active in 2025 from recruitment teams that collectively recruit for more than 21,000 unique healthcare locations.

The report provides benchmarks recruitment teams can use to evaluate performance, inform workforce planning and strengthen conversations with organizational leadership. With physician searches remaining lengthy, half of physician searches still open at year-end and recruitment teams managing steady workloads amid declining internal budgets, that context is increasingly important.

While the topline findings offer an industrywide view, the full report and benchmarking tools allow recruitment teams to dig deeper into the factors most relevant to their own organization.

Here are five ways to put that data to work.

1. Set More Realistic Expectations for Time-to-Fill 

When a position has been open for months, recruitment teams may face questions about why a search is taking so long. Benchmarking can provide valuable context for those conversations.

In 2025, physician searches took a median of 119 days to fill, compared with 65 days for advanced practice provider searches. Timelines also varied significantly by specialty, reinforcing why a single industrywide benchmark does not tell the whole story.

Use these benchmarks to compare your organization’s performance with national trends and establish realistic expectations with hiring leaders at the beginning of a search. The full report provides specialty-level benchmarks that can help teams make more meaningful comparisons based on the positions they are actually trying to fill.

2. Strengthen the Case for Recruitment Resources

Search volume has moderated from its recent peak, but recruiter workloads have remained relatively steady.

• The typical organization managed 100 searches in 2025, while individual recruiters managed a median of 36.5 searches, essentially unchanged from 35.6 in 2024.
• Meanwhile, the median annual budget for internal physician recruitment departments declined 7.4% year over year, from $553,376 in 2024 to $512,500 in 2025.

Together, those numbers can help recruitment leaders tell a more complete story about team capacity. By comparing your organization’s staffing, budget and workload against industry benchmarks, you can bring objective data into conversations about the resources your team needs and show organizational leaders how your team’s capacity compares with relevant industry benchmarks.

3. Identify Where Searches Are Hardest to Fill 

Overall benchmarks can provide valuable context, but specialty-level data can help recruitment teams pinpoint where hiring challenges are most pronounced.

At the end of 2025, 50% of physician searches remained open, up from 49% in 2024 and 47% in 2023. Some specialties faced even greater challenges. By the end of the year, just 28.3% of urology searches were filled, along with 33.3% of neurology and 33.6% of cardiology searches. Anesthesia and gastroenterology searches were also filled less than half of the time.

For recruitment teams, these benchmarks can help identify where a different approach may be needed. Compare specialty-level fill rates with your own search portfolio to determine which roles may benefit from earlier pipeline development, additional sourcing strategies or greater recruitment resources.

The full report provides specialty-level data on search volume, fill rates and recruitment timelines, allowing teams to identify where their greatest hiring challenges align with broader industry trends.

4. Plan Beyond the Signed Contract

A signed contract is an important milestone, but it does not mark the end of the recruitment timeline.

The typical physician began work 229 days after the position was posted in 2025, reflecting the additional time needed for credentialing, privileging, licensing, onboarding and other steps before a new hire can begin.

That distinction matters for workforce planning. Recruitment teams can use the full recruitment-to-start timeline to help organizational leaders understand when a new physician will realistically be in place and plan earlier for anticipated workforce needs.

Benchmarking these timelines can also support stronger collaboration with credentialing, medical staff services and other internal partners involved in moving a candidate from acceptance to start.

5. Use Demand Data to Prioritize Your Strategy

While fill rates can show where recruitment challenges are greatest, search volume provides another important perspective: where organizations are seeing the greatest demand.

Family Medicine represented 11.6% of physician searches in 2025, followed by Hospital Medicine at 10.9% and general OB/GYN at 6.6%.

Compare national demand with your own search portfolio. Which specialties consistently account for your vacancies? Where could earlier pipeline development help your organization prepare for recurring workforce needs rather than starting from scratch each time a position opens?

Use these demand benchmarks alongside your own workforce needs to identify where earlier pipeline development and proactive sourcing could have the greatest impact.

Go Beyond the Topline Numbers

National trends are a valuable starting point, but the real power of benchmarking comes from understanding how your organization compares.

Are your physician searches taking longer than the benchmark? How does your recruiter workload compare? Are your recruitment resources aligned with the volume and types of searches your team manages?

The 2026 AAPPR Physician and Provider Recruitment Benchmarking Report: Search Dynamics and Trends provides the deeper benchmarks across staffing, search volume, specialty demand, sourcing, search firm usage and costs, fill rates, recruitment timelines and technology to help recruitment professionals answer those questions and turn industry data into organizational strategy.

Purchase the full 2026 report to see how your recruitment performance compares and identify opportunities to strengthen your strategy. Survey participants receive complimentary access to the AAPPR Benchmarking Portal, which includes advanced search tools, time-to-fill and compensation calculators, and customizable benchmarking capabilities.

Explore the 2026 report and AAPPR’s benchmarking resources at aappr.org/research/benchmarking.