The Physician Shortage Just Got a Number: What 86,000 Missing Doctors by 2036 Means for Your Hiring Strategy

The AAMC's latest workforce projection puts the U.S. physician shortfall at up to 86,000 by 2036. That number isn't new in kind — AAMC has been projecting a gap for years — but it keeps growing, and the drivers behind it aren't the kind that resolve on their own: an aging population needing more care, a wave of physician retirements, residency slots that are still effectively capped by federal funding, and burnout pushing early-career physicians out faster than new ones can be trained in.

Where the gap actually lands

• Primary care and psychiatry are projected to see some of the steepest shortfalls, driven by both an aging population and a physician workforce that skews older in those specialties.
• Surgical specialties face a different problem - training pipelines are long and residency slots are fixed, so supply can't respond quickly even when demand is well understood years in advance.
• Rural and lower-reimbursement markets absorb the shortage first and hardest, since physicians facing a competitive job market gravitate toward higher-paying, higher-resource settings.

Why you can't hire your way out of a structural shortage

A shortfall measured in the tens of thousands isn't a recruiting problem any single employer can out-compete. If every hospital in a region is chasing the same shrinking pool of primary care physicians, raising your offer just moves candidates between employers — it doesn't grow the pool. The organizations pulling ahead are the ones treating this as a workforce-mix problem, not a recruiting-intensity problem.

• Build NP and PA capacity deliberately into care models that have historically been physician-only, rather than treating APPs as a stopgap.
• Use locum tenens and telehealth coverage to bridge open positions without letting a 226-day average fill time become an open coverage gap.
• Model your hiring plan against the specialty-level shortage data, not the national average — a psychiatry vacancy and a dermatology vacancy are not competing in the same labor market.

DirectShifts sources physicians, NPs, and PAs across the full acuity range specialty by specialty - talk to a clinician partner about what a realistic multi-channel hiring plan looks like for the specialties you're actually short on.