The national shortage of primary care physicians will likely worsen without more daring, targeted strategies to bolster this workforce, according to an April 23 report from Trilliant Health.

This workforce shortage is multifactorial. Primary care specialties, including family medicine, general internal medicine and pediatrics, commonly receive less reimbursement than several other specialties. For example, the average pediatrician earned $266,000 in 2025, while the average orthopedic surgeon made $611,000, according to Trilliant, a healthcare data and research company.

With medical school debt surpassing $200,000 for the average student, less-lucrative specialties like family medicine are also less appealing to the nation’s future physicians. While compensation is an important factor to the supply-and-demand gap of primary care physicians, other important trends include the significant portion of physicians nearing retirement and rising acuity.

Trilliant’s report found that despite a yearslong growth in medical school enrollments and primary care residency slots, these residencies are increasingly going unfilled.

Addressing the widening gap in primary care “requires more than incremental increases in residency positions and miniscule annual adjustments to the Medicare physician fee schedule,” Trilliant said.

Here are 20 statistics to know:

• Since 2012, the number of medical school applications have risen 20.8% and enrollment has grown 22.9%.

• “Between 2024 and 2025, applications grew 5.3% compared to enrollment growth of 1.3%, marking the first time in recent years that application growth outpaced enrollment — a potentially encouraging signal for the physician workforce shortage,” Trilliant said. However, the federal government’s cap on Medicare-funded residency positions has not been updated to reflect this growth in enrollment, which has stymied the workforce pipeline.

• When it comes to healthcare access in rural and Health Professional Shortage Area-designated areas, from 1970 to 2018, there has not been a statistically significant change in physician density or resident mortality in HPSA communities. After counties receive an HPSA designation, 73% of them remain as shortage areas for at least 10 years.

• Since 2012, U.S. medical residency positions increased 65.6%. For the 2026 Match, more than 40,000 medical school graduates secured a residency spot for 2026. While primary care specialties accounted for about half of these placements (approximately 20,700), “primary care residencies were disproportionately unfilled in 2026,” Trilliant found. “Family medicine went 16.4% unfilled, followed by pediatrics and internal medicine, 5.6% and 4.6%, respectively.”

• In the past four years, these specialties saw the highest increases in offered residency slots: vascular surgery (31%), neurology (23.6%), psychiatry (22.9%) and internal medicine (17.9%).

• Four primary care specialties — internal medicine, internal medicine-pediatrics, pediatrics and family medicine — experienced a 9.21% fill rate in 2026. This is a 1.4% decline from 2025.

• There is a significant difference in fill rates across several specialties. In 2026, “orthopedic surgery, physical medicine and rehab, neurological surgery and vascular surgery residencies were 100% filled,” Trilliant said. In comparison, family medicine had an 83.6% fill rate across 5,491 available positions, pediatrics filled 94.4% of 3,185 spots and internal medicine filled 95.2% of 11,632 positions.

“The data suggests that simply expanding training capacity is insufficient,” Trilliant said. “The widening gap of primary care physicians creates a concerning feedback loop: a shrinking primary care workforce may lead to greater dissatisfaction and distrust in the healthcare system, which discourages patients from seeking care.”

“Evidence supports targeted strategies — recruiting and training physicians in the regions where they are most needed, expanding rural and community-based residency capacity and reforming reimbursement structures that currently disadvantage primary care relative to procedural specialties,” Trilliant concluded.

Absent those changes, the continued rise in unfilled primary care residencies could further strain access to care, particularly in underserved communities, and deepen long-term challenges for the U.S. healthcare system.

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