This week marks the 10th annual National Locum Tenens Week, running August 10 through 14 under NALTO’s theme “Temporary Providers, Permanent Impact.” A decade ago, this was a niche staffing observance most health system leaders never heard about. Now it lands the same month a bill reclassifying locum providers under federal labor law is sitting in Congress, and the workforce it celebrates has become too large to plan around casually.
If you’re a CFO, CHRO, or workforce planning lead, the anniversary itself isn’t the story. The data behind it is. Here’s what the numbers actually say, and what they mean for how you budget and staff going forward.
The market has roughly doubled in size since 2023
U.S. locum tenens revenue hit an estimated $9.6 billion in 2025, according to Staffing Industry Analysts, continuing three straight years of growth. That growth hasn’t been steady so much as compounding: 17% in 2023, 12% in 2024, and a more modest but still real 5% in 2025 as the post-pandemic surge normalized. SIA projects the market to keep climbing toward roughly $9.9 billion by the end of 2026.
Translation for anyone building next year’s labor budget: locum spend is not a line item that shrinks back down once the “crisis” passes. It’s been growing for years without a crisis attached to it anymore.
Locum work is now a mainstream career path, not a stopgap
Here’s the stat that should reframe how you think about your own contract labor strategy. In a recent Doximity poll of nearly 1,200 U.S. physicians, more than 63% said they were either already working locum tenens or actively considering it within the next five years.
That’s not a workforce of last resort filling in during emergencies. That’s close to two-thirds of the physician population either doing this or planning to, and a growing share treating it as a standing part of how they practice rather than a detour.
Burnout is the supply engine, and it isn’t slowing down
The Physicians Foundation’s 2025 Wellbeing Survey found 55% of physicians reporting debilitating stress and 54% reporting burnout, numbers back at pandemic-era levels.
This matters for buyers because it tells you where locum supply is actually coming from. It isn’t new graduates picking locum work as a first job. It’s experienced physicians and APPs leaving traditional employment structures for more control over their schedules, and locum tenens is where a meaningful number of them land. If your organization’s retention strategy doesn’t account for burnout as a driver of this shift, your permanent staffing plan is fighting the same current that’s feeding your contingent labor spend.
The shortage isn’t coming. It’s already being managed with the tools you have
AAMC projects a shortfall of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036. That number gets cited constantly, often as a warning about the future. It’s less often treated as what it actually is: a description of the staffing model health systems are already running on today, just at a smaller scale than what’s coming.
Rural and underserved markets feel this first and hardest, which is exactly where H.R. 8347, the RURAL Healthcare Act, entered the picture. The bill advanced out of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on July 23, 2026, and would classify qualified locum tenens physicians and advanced practice providers as independent contractors under federal labor law. It hasn’t passed and its trajectory from here isn’t guaranteed, but its advancement this close to the 10th Locum Tenens Week is not a coincidence we should ignore. Workforce planners should be watching this bill regardless of where they land on the underlying policy debate, because a change in classification would ripple through how locum arrangements get structured, budgeted, and contracted.
What this means for how you plan
Ten years ago, locum tenens coverage got budgeted like a contingency fund: something you tapped when a position sat open longer than expected. The numbers above describe a different reality. The market has nearly doubled in three years. Most physicians are either working locums already or seriously weighing it. Burnout is pushing more clinicians toward flexible arrangements every year, not fewer. And federal policy is actively catching up to a workforce model that’s already operating at scale.
Organizations that still treat locum staffing as an emergency line item are budgeting for a workforce reality that stopped existing around 2023. The ones getting ahead of the next five years are building locum and PRN coverage into their standing workforce strategy the same way they’d plan for any other structural staffing need, because that’s what it’s become.
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