10 Clinic Workforce Statistics Every Practice Manager Should Know in 2026

We read the latest original workforce sources from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Health Resources and Services Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This article pulls out the numbers that are most useful for understanding the clinic workforce: how large ambulatory healthcare is, which roles make up the team, where labor demand is growing, and which national statistics cannot answer a local staffing question.

The periods are not all the same. The industry snapshot uses BLS data from 2026, the industry occupation table uses 2025 estimates, and the occupation outlook figures use BLS data for 2024 with projections for 2024-34. Each section names the period and geography so the numbers are not blended into a fictional single-year benchmark.

Back to Clinic statistics

1. Ambulatory healthcare employed 9.23 million people in June 2026

The BLS definition of ambulatory healthcare services covers care delivered to patients who are not usually admitted as inpatients. The sector includes offices of physicians, offices of other health practitioners, outpatient care centers, medical and diagnostic laboratories, home health care, and other ambulatory services. It is therefore a useful industry boundary, but it is broader than a typical office-based clinic.

BLS counted 9,233.3 thousand employees in ambulatory healthcare services in June 2026, seasonally adjusted and preliminary. That is the scale of the U.S. payroll workforce across NAICS 621. It is not the number of providers, not the number of clinics, and not a recommended staff-to-patient ratio.

For a clinic manager, the practical takeaway is to define the comparison set before using a workforce statistic. An office-based physician practice, an outpatient hospital department, a diagnostic laboratory, and a health center all sit inside the broader ambulatory universe but have different staffing models.

2. Medical assistants and medical secretaries each represent about 613,000 ambulatory jobs

The BLS 2025 industry-specific occupation estimates show how much of ambulatory healthcare depends on roles that sit between clinical care and administration. Medical assistants accounted for 613,220 jobs, while medical secretaries accounted for 612,750. The same table counted 217,430 medical and health services managers and 199,790 licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses.

These estimates include private-sector and government employment in ambulatory healthcare services. They describe the national occupation mix inside the industry, not the staffing roster of a typical clinic. The near-equal counts for medical assistants and medical secretaries are still useful because they show why appointment access depends on more than provider headcount. Scheduling, intake, records, referrals, and rooming work all require capacity.

3. The ambulatory workforce averaged $41.12 per hour and 31.7 hours per week

In May 2026, BLS reported average hourly earnings of $41.12 and average weekly hours of 31.7 for all employees in ambulatory healthcare services. Both figures were preliminary in the BLS industry series. They are aggregate industry measures, so they combine different occupations, employers, ownership types, and work schedules.

The figures are useful for describing the labor market, but they are not a clinic payroll budget. Average hourly earnings are not the same as a median wage, and average weekly hours are not a full-time staffing assumption. A clinic comparing its own labor cost should keep provider compensation, support wages, overtime, benefits, contractors, and self-employed owners separate.

4. Medical assistants combine scale with a 12% growth outlook

BLS counted 811,000 medical assistant jobs in the United States in 2024. Medical assistants had a 2024 median pay of $44,200, a projected employment growth rate of 12% from 2024 to 2034, and projected employment growth of 101,200 jobs. BLS also projects about 112,300 openings per year over that decade.

Medical assistants complete administrative and clinical tasks, including scheduling appointments and taking vital signs. That combination is why the role is especially relevant to clinic operations: the same occupation can affect both the patient flow into the schedule and the work performed during the visit.

The 112,300 figure is a projected annual average of openings, not a count of live vacancies on a particular date. It includes openings created by employment growth and by the need to replace workers who leave the occupation. A practice should use it as a labor-demand signal, then measure its own open positions, time to fill, turnover, and available appointment hours.

5. Clinic administration is an 811,000-job occupation-wide labor market

BLS counted 616,200 medical and health services manager jobs and 194,800 medical records specialist jobs across all U.S. industries in 2024. Together, those occupation-wide counts equal 811,000 jobs. That sum is not a clinic headcount because the occupations also work in hospitals, nursing facilities, government, and other healthcare settings. It is a way to show the scale of the operational work surrounding care delivery.

Medical and health services managers had a 2024 median pay of $117,960, a projected growth rate of 23% from 2024 to 2034, and about 62,100 projected openings per year. Medical records specialists had a 2024 median pay of $50,250, a projected growth rate of 7%, and about 14,200 projected openings per year. The manager employment change was projected at 142,900 jobs, compared with 13,800 for medical records specialists.

For clinic operators, the insight is not that every practice needs a manager or a records specialist at a fixed ratio. It is that administrative capacity is a large and changing part of the healthcare labor market. A workforce article that lists only physicians and nurses leaves out the roles that keep referrals, records, authorizations, schedules, and patient communication moving.

6. Provider growth is uneven: APRNs at 35%, PAs at 20%, RNs at 5%, and physicians at 3%

BLS projects very different growth rates for major healthcare occupations between 2024 and 2034. The combined category of nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives, and nurse practitioners has the fastest outlook in this comparison at 35%. Physician assistants are projected at 20%, registered nurses at 5%, and physicians and surgeons at 3%.

The combined APRN category needs to stay labeled as combined. It is not a nurse practitioner-only statistic. The physician figure also needs to stay faithful to the source: BLS reports the median as equal to or greater than $239,200 rather than publishing a more precise value.

These are occupation-wide U.S. figures, not outpatient-clinic staffing ratios. They help a practice compare labor-market pressure across roles, but they do not say how many clinicians are available in one county or how many appointment hours a clinic can offer.

7. Annual openings are not vacancies, and OEWS excludes self-employed workers

BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook openings are projected annual averages over 2024-34. They combine openings from projected employment growth with openings created when workers leave an occupation. They should not be described as the number of unfilled jobs today, the number of positions a clinic is currently trying to hire, or the number of appointments lost to understaffing.

The BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey has a different boundary. It measures occupational employment and wage rates for wage and salary workers in nonfarm establishments. The technical notes state that the survey does not include self-employed workers, owners and partners in unincorporated firms, household workers, or unpaid family workers.

That coverage distinction matters for independent practices. A BLS occupation estimate can be a sound benchmark for employee labor-market scale and pay while still missing an owner-physician who works in an unincorporated practice. The correct label is "not included in the OEWS estimate," not "there are no self-employed workers."

8. HRSA shortage areas are geographic signals, not national staffing ratios

HRSA's Health Workforce Shortage Areas data are designed to identify communities with the greatest need for health care services. HRSA lets users explore HPSA designations by geography, population, and facility for primary care, dental health, and mental health. Its search tools can be filtered by state, county, discipline, HPSA type, score, status, rural status, and update date.

The geography is the point. A shortage-area designation can help a clinic describe the access conditions around a particular location, but it cannot be converted into a national clinic vacancy rate or a universal provider-to-patient benchmark. A practice should record the exact state, county, discipline, designation type, status, score, and update date when it uses an HRSA result.

HRSA also reports that health centers serve 32.4 million people at nearly 1,400 health centers each year. That is useful scale context for the HRSA Health Center Program, but it is not a denominator for every outpatient clinic in the United States. Health centers are one defined part of the broader ambulatory market described by BLS.

9. NAMCS 2024 cannot produce a national provider headcount

The CDC's 2024 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey collected data from office-based physicians and physician associates. The provider survey component was a pilot year, so the data are unweighted and cannot produce national estimates. CDC also states that no visit-level data were collected in 2024. Only provider-level data are available, in separate files for office-based physicians and physician associates.

This is an important evidence boundary for clinic workforce research. The dataset may help a researcher understand what was collected from participating providers, but it cannot support a sentence such as "there are X office-based providers nationally" based on the 2024 provider component. It also cannot supply national appointment volume, visit frequency, or waiting-time estimates for that year.

10. Local capacity metrics are the bridge from workforce statistics to appointment access

National workforce statistics become operationally useful when a clinic pairs them with its own capacity data. The following measures can be calculated locally without pretending that a national occupation estimate is a clinic benchmark.

These formulas are operator metrics, not published national benchmarks. They can be compared over time within the same clinic or across clinics that use the same definitions. The defensible connection is local: if available appointment hours fall when a role is vacant, the clinic can show its own operational relationship. The national sources above can explain the labor market around that result, but they cannot prove the local cause by themselves.

Sources

• BLS, Ambulatory Health Care Services: NAICS 621
• BLS, May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics technical notes
• BLS, Occupational Outlook Handbook
• BLS, Physicians and surgeons
• BLS, Physician assistants
• BLS, Registered nurses
• BLS, Nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives, and nurse practitioners
• BLS, Licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses
• BLS, Medical assistants
• BLS, Medical records specialists
• BLS, Medical and health services managers
• HRSA Data Warehouse
• HRSA, Health Workforce Shortage Areas
• CDC, 2024 NAMCS questionnaires, datasets, and documentation