Comparing Physician Recruitment Services in 2026

Comparing physician recruitment services means weighing two fundamentally different staffing models: locum tenens coverage and permanent placement. Each model solves a different problem, and the right comparison depends less on marketing claims than on time-to-fill data, retention outcomes, and how well a partner understands multi-site coordination. Multi-location practices increasingly need both models working together rather than choosing one over the other.

The stakes are rising: specialty and surgical searches often stretch well beyond a year before they close, according to AAPPR, and every month a role stays open adds another month of lost patient access at the practice’s existing sites. Multi-location practices increasingly turn to a physician staffing agency to coordinate both locum tenens and permanent searches across every location at once.

What is the difference between locum tenens and permanent physician placement?

Locum tenens staffing places a temporary doctor for a defined period, typically days to several months, while permanent placement recruits a physician who joins the organization as a long-term team member. The two models solve different problems: locum tenens closes an immediate coverage gap, permanent placement builds the core team. Most growing practices eventually use both.

Locum tenens carries a higher daily rate than an equivalent permanent salary, but it comes without benefits packages, recruitment fees, or long-term commitment. Permanent placement takes longer to close but builds toward the retention outcomes multi-location practices need at scale. AAPPR’s CEO, Carey Goryl, described the environment plainly: “physician searches now average nearly four months to signing.” Specialty searches often extend well past that.

Where locum tenens fits in a growth strategy

Temporary coverage can maintain patient access at a new location while a practice runs a permanent search in parallel. The model also absorbs volume spikes, leave coverage, and short-notice departures without forcing existing staff to carry the overflow.

An estimated 57,000 U.S. physicians, or 8% of those eligible to practice, worked locum tenens assignments in 2024, according to CHG Healthcare’s 2025 State of Locum Tenens Report. That figure reflects a shift the report describes directly: locum work has moved from an occasional stopgap to a career path a growing share of doctors choose deliberately.

Where permanent placement earns its higher cost

Permanent recruitment justifies its longer timeline by screening for cultural fit, career trajectory, and community alignment, factors that predict whether a new hire stays five years or five months. AAPPR’s 2025 data puts median physician turnover at 7.3%, still above pre-pandemic levels, which keeps retention-focused screening a financial issue as much as a cultural one.

Why multi-location practices need a different recruitment approach

Multi-location practices compete for the same clinicians as large health systems and academic centers while also coordinating staffing across sites with different patient volumes, payer mixes, and community characteristics. A single-site recruitment approach rarely scales cleanly once a second or third location enters the picture.

Geography compounds the challenge. A rural site and an urban site inside the same practice can require entirely different compensation benchmarks, lifestyle pitches, and candidate pools, and a recruitment partner who treats every location identically will underperform at some of them.

For hospital and health system leadership, the operational question is usually how many searches a recruitment team can run in parallel without any one site falling behind. The typical organization ran 96 physician and provider searches in 2024, according to AAPPR, with large health systems running several hundred.

For doctors and advanced practice providers evaluating an offer, the question runs the other direction: whether a specific site’s schedule, call structure, and community fit their expectations, not just whether the parent organization looks stable on paper.

When does locum tenens make the most sense?

Locum tenens works best when a coverage gap cannot wait for a permanent search: a new location opening, a mid-search vacancy, a leave of absence, or a service line a practice wants to test before committing to a permanent hire. Locum assignments can start within days to weeks rather than months.

Some practices also use locum assignments as an extended interview, letting a candidate and an organization evaluate fit before either side commits to a permanent role. The U.S. locum tenens market reached an estimated $9.6 billion in 2025 and is projected to keep climbing through 2026, according to SIA’s US Locum Tenens Market Growth Assessment, evidence that this is no longer a niche option.

Locum coverage also protects the clinicians already on staff. When a permanent team member takes leave or a location runs short-staffed during a volume spike, temporary coverage prevents the remaining providers from absorbing an unsustainable patient load, a factor that feeds directly back into retention.

What makes a permanent physician placement succeed?

A successful permanent placement starts with realistic expectations on both sides: compensation competitiveness, call responsibilities, schedule flexibility, and growth path, evaluated honestly before a candidate is ever presented. Skipping this step is the most common reason placements fail inside the first two years.

Credentialing and privileging can take up to 180 days on top of the search itself, according to the American Medical Association, and multi-state licensure or multiple hospital affiliations can push that further. Practices that begin credentialing in parallel with final interviews, rather than after an offer is signed, recover weeks of lost start-date time.

Cultural fit carries equal weight. A doctor who is clinically excellent but clashes with a practice’s communication style or decision-making pace tends to leave within a few years regardless of compensation, which is part of why AAPPR’s turnover figure has held above pre-pandemic norms.

How should a practice evaluate a recruitment partner?

A practice should evaluate a recruitment partner on specialty track record, multi-site coordination experience, credentialing support, and communication cadence, not on placement guarantees alone. Ask for references from organizations with a size and specialty mix similar to the practice’s own.

Credentialing support in particular separates recruitment partners. A firm that coordinates directly with hospital credentialing offices and licensing boards shortens the gap between signed offer and first patient seen, which matters more as credentialing timelines extend toward the 180-day ceiling.

The table below lays out where each model tends to win, since the two are rarely an either/or decision for a growing practice.

Retention, turnover, and the real cost of an open position

A vacancy is not a neutral line item. CHG Healthcare’s 2025 State of Locum Tenens Report puts the annual cost of a single physician vacancy at $2.6 million in lost revenue, and CHG Healthcare CEO Leslie Snavely framed the stakes directly: “our data shows that effective locum use prevents millions in lost revenue.”

Turnover compounds that cost. AAPPR’s 2025 data shows physicians accepted 71% of offers extended in 2024, down from 83% the year before, a decline that pushes recruitment timelines even longer when a preferred candidate declines late in the process. Schedule dissatisfaction, compensation concerns, and administrative burden remain the most commonly cited reasons clinicians leave a position within their first few years.

Multi-location practices face an added wrinkle: a doctor assigned to a site that does not match their preferences on patient demographics, facility resources, or community fit is more likely to leave for a location that does. Setting honest expectations about a specific site, not the organization in the abstract, during recruitment reduces this risk.

Building a hybrid staffing model for 2026

A hybrid approach, permanent hires supported by locum tenens coverage, has become the default staffing strategy for practices expanding into new markets or service lines. Temporary providers hold a new location’s patient volume steady while a permanent search runs in parallel, and the practice transitions to permanent staff once volume stabilizes and the right cultural fit is identified.

For practices with stable, predictable volume, permanent staffing with occasional locum coverage for leave periods is usually sufficient. For practices expanding into new markets, heavier locum utilization during the first 12 to 18 months buys the time needed to run a proper permanent search without leaving a site uncovered.

Flexibility now shapes candidate decisions as much as compensation does. Doctors increasingly weigh schedule control and career autonomy alongside salary, and organizations offering rigid, inflexible schedules see a smaller pool of interested candidates as a result.

Key takeaways

• Use locum tenens as a strategic bridge for long searches: With the latest AAPPR benchmarking data showing the median physician search stretching to 118 days (and 77 days for advanced practice providers), multi-location practices cannot afford to simply wait out a vacancy. Use locum tenens coverage to maintain patient access and avoid burning out your existing staff while your permanent search runs in parallel.
• Weigh recruitment costs against massive vacancy losses: An unfilled physician role costs a health system an estimated $2.6 million annually in lost revenue, according to CHG Healthcare. When comparing recruitment services and fees, factor in this massive financial leak—proactively deploying locum coverage almost always pays for itself by keeping your schedules full and clinic doors open.
• Leverage the growing locum talent pool for practice expansion: Temporary coverage is no longer just a stopgap. With an estimated 8% of eligible U.S. physicians now working locum tenens assignments (SIA), you need a recruitment partner that coordinates both locum and permanent models so your practice can tap into this growing pool of doctors to staff new sites or test new service lines.
• Demand proactive credentialing support to prevent start-date delays: Finding a candidate is only the first hurdle. Because credentialing and privileging can add up to 180 days on top of the search itself (AMA), prioritize recruitment firms that initiate credentialing paperwork alongside final interviews to significantly compress the timeline to the new hire’s first billable shift.
• Evaluate permanent placement partners on retention, not just speed: The national median physician turnover rate sits at 7.3%. For multi-site groups, this underscores why permanent placement must rigorously screen for cultural and community fit. Demand that your permanent recruitment partner proves their success with long-term retention data so you aren’t paying to repeat the same search a year later.

Physician recruitment service FAQs

How long does physician credentialing take?

Credentialing can take up to 180 days, according to the American Medical Association, particularly when multi-state licensure or multiple hospital affiliations are involved. Starting the process in parallel with final-round interviews, rather than after an offer is signed, is the most reliable way to shorten the gap to a new hire’s actual start date.

How many physician searches does a typical healthcare organization run each year?

The typical healthcare organization ran 96 physician and provider searches in 2024, according to AAPPR, while recruitment departments at large health systems managed several hundred. Search volume at this scale is one reason multi-location practices increasingly look for a recruitment partner rather than running every search internally.

What percentage of physicians now work locum tenens assignments?

An estimated 8% of physicians eligible to practice in the U.S., or roughly 57,000 doctors, worked at least one locum tenens assignment in 2024, according to CHG Healthcare’s 2025 State of Locum Tenens Report. That share has grown as locum work shifts from an occasional stopgap to a deliberate career path for a meaningful share of physicians.

What do physician recruitment firms typically charge?

Contingency-based search fees typically run 20% to 25% of a candidate’s first-year compensation, with retained search arrangements, more common for difficult-to-fill specialties, running higher and often including upfront milestone payments. Locum tenens arrangements are priced differently, through a daily or hourly rate rather than a placement fee.

What is the median physician turnover rate?

Median physician turnover held at 7.3% in 2024, according to AAPPR, still above pre-pandemic levels. That figure is one reason recruitment firms increasingly measure success by retention outcomes rather than placement speed alone.

Why are physician offer acceptance rates falling?

Physicians accepted 71% of offers extended in 2024, down from 83% in 2023, according to AAPPR. The decline reflects a more competitive market where candidates routinely field multiple offers and favor organizations that move decisively through interviews and offer decisions.

Turning physician recruitment into a competitive advantage

Comparing physician recruitment services ultimately comes down to matching the model to the moment: locum tenens for immediate coverage, permanent placement for long-term team building, and a hybrid approach for practices doing both at once. The organizations that treat this as a deliberate strategy, rather than a reaction to an open position, consistently close searches faster and hold onto the clinicians they hire.

For multi-location practices, that means partnering with a healthcare recruitment firm that can coordinate searches across sites, price locum and permanent options honestly against a specific timeline, and support credentialing from day one rather than after an offer is signed. For physicians and advanced practice providers, it means treating recruitment partners, and the timelines and turnover data they can produce, as a genuine signal of what working with a given organization will actually be like.

As searches continue averaging close to four months and credentialing adds months more on top, the practices that shorten their own decision cycles, and choose recruitment partners built for multi-site coordination, will be the ones best positioned to keep growing without leaving patient access behind.