Physician burnout seems like a persistent reality for medical group practices — no longer a pandemic-era spike but a baseline condition that continues to push experienced physicians out of the workforce earlier than planned. Practice leaders should ask themselves: Is my organization doing enough to keep their work environment one where physicians want to stay.
Unexpected physician departures lead to the remaining clinicians absorbing heavier patient panels, recruitment cycles stretching months or longer, and the practice losing institutional knowledge that cannot be quickly replaced. In smaller and independent groups, even a single early departure can reshape scheduling, revenue and care access for years.
What you told us
Our April 28, 2026, MGMA Stat poll found that one in three (33%) medical groups reported a physician retiring or leaving in the past year due to burnout, while 61% did not and about 6% were unsure. The poll had 344 applicable responses. This is a slight increase from a September 2024 MGMA poll that found 27% of medical groups reported a physician leaving or retiring early due to burnout.
This week’s poll not only signals a higher rate of unplanned physician exits but also an increase in the share of medical groups where leaders believe things are getting worse: Almost half (49%) of all respondents said they felt physician burnout was getting worse in their organizations, while 38% said it was about the same as the year before, and only 13% reported improvement. In the earlier 2024 poll, only 41% said burnout was worsening, 45% said it was about the same, and 14% reported improvement.
Practice leaders who didn’t experience an unplanned departure this past year should be cautious, though: These groups had only a small gap between those who thought burnout was getting worse (39%) and those who said it was about the same (42%), while only 19% signaled improvement. Those figures could signal that they may face the same fate of their counterparts who said goodbye to a physician abruptly this past year.
What’s driving burnout: Practice leaders’ responses
Across all respondents, the dominant theme was administrative burden as a persistent driver of burnout. Many groups report that even incremental improvements in physicians’ work lives — such as AI-assisted documentation, EMR optimization, reduced patient volumes, or modest operational tweaks — are being outweighed by growing pressures from payers, prior authorization and denial activity, documentation and compliance requirements (HCC/RAF, quality reporting), staffing shortages, and reimbursement erosion.
Even where practice leaders think they are making inroads against burnout, they often frame that improvement as fragile or situational (e.g., fewer patients seen, temporary stabilization after an EHR transition), rather than the result of systemic relief. Cultural and leadership factors also surface repeatedly, pointing to communication gaps, lack of physician voice, office politics, and corporate or structural changes as stress multipliers.
Among the 33% who experienced early retirements or unexpected departures, most describe similar compounding factors: insurance interference, increased administrative workload, staffing shortages, failed recruitment and retention, declining reimbursement, and disruptive EHR or care model changes.
Several explicitly linked burnout to leadership and governance issues — “we don’t listen to our doctors,” “office politics,” and “corporate reductions in resources” — suggesting internal organizational dynamics are accelerating attrition. Improvements, when noted, are typically narrow and tactical (AI documentation support, stabilized EMR workflows, reduced visit volumes), and sometimes tinged with gallows humor, underscoring how limited the relief feels relative to the strain.
By contrast, organizations reporting no early retirement or unexpected departure were more likely to credit proactive interventions — AI charting/dictation, operational improvements, staffing support, reduced hours, better scheduling, and stronger physician engagement in decision-making — as mitigating factors.
Still, even in this cohort, payer rules/insurance requirements, patient behavior, and documentation demands were common pain points. Taken together, this again suggests that absence of near-term departures does not equate to low burnout — and that without broader, structural relief, stability may be temporary.
Today’s picture: Better than the pandemic peak, but far from resolved
A landmark study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings in April 2025 — co-authored by researchers from the AMA, Mayo Clinic, University of Colorado School of Medicine and Stanford Medicine — found that 45.2% of physicians reported at least one symptom of burnout in 2023, down sharply from a record 62.8% in 2021 but still elevated relative to the general U.S. workforce. More recent AMA survey data from 2024 showed the rate continuing to dip, falling below 45% for the first time since before the pandemic.
But these improvements come with important caveats for practice leaders. The same Mayo Clinic Proceedings study found that physicians remained roughly twice as likely to experience burnout as other U.S. workers after adjusting for hours, demographics and education. And only about 65% of physicians in 2023 said they would choose the profession again — better than the pandemic low of 57% in 2021, but still below the 70% recorded in 2011.
For medical groups, national trend lines only tell part of the story. What matters most is what burnout looks like inside your practice: whether physicians are leaving, reducing hours, disengaging from leadership, or quietly counting the months to retirement.
An aging workforce meets accumulated strain
According to AAMC data, physicians aged 65 and older now represent about 20% of the active clinical workforce, with another 22% between the ages of 55 and 64. More than four in 10 practicing physicians are within a decade of traditional retirement age — and burnout is accelerating the timeline for many of them.
MGMA polling has tracked this pattern of departures. In 2022, 40% of medical groups reported a physician retiring early or leaving due to burnout. That figure eased to 29% in 2023 and 27% in 2024, suggesting a modest stabilization — but not a resolution. Practice leaders responding to the 2024 poll described physicians who were worn down by flat reimbursement amid rising costs, heavier patient panels created by prior departures, documentation burdens and the cumulative weight of years of operational stress.
As Tony Stajduhar of Jackson Physician Search told MGMA, the aging physician workforce represents a potential cliff that many organizations are still not preparing for. Physicians nearing retirement are increasingly willing to transition out of full-time practice, and the traditional assumption that they will simply keep working no longer holds. If you are managing a tight roster, you need a more proactive approach to workforce planning.
What stops physicians from staying — and what keeps them practicing
Joint research from Jackson Physician Search and LocumTenens.com found that 90% of physicians and APPs initially viewed medicine as a calling, with altruism as their top motivator. Yet more than half reported that their sense of calling had diminished over time — driven by administrative burden, regulatory pressure and a perceived loss of autonomy.
The generational breakdown of their study is telling: Baby Boomer physicians remain the most likely to view medicine as a calling and express joy in their work, while Millennials report lower levels of that sentiment. Meanwhile, when asked what sustains them during difficult stretches, clinicians most often cited patient connections, time with family and self-care — not organizational wellness programs.
This suggests that the most effective retention strategies are not abstract well-being initiatives; instead, explore operational changes that protect what physicians value most: time with patients, professional autonomy and manageable workloads. When those erode, burnout follows — and so do departures.
Encouraging signs from practices that are getting it right
An April 2025 MGMA poll found that about one in four practice leaders had added to or updated their burnout-mitigation tactics in the prior year. The most common efforts included deploying AI-powered documentation tools, restructuring schedules to offer greater flexibility, expanding APP roles to redistribute clinical workload, and creating formal physician wellness committees.
Several organizations have gone further. Some medical groups are using hospitalist and part-time roles as a structured path to retirement for physicians who might otherwise leave outright — allowing the practice to retain experienced clinicians at reduced hours rather than losing them entirely. Others have invested in physician leadership development programs that give clinicians a stronger voice in operational decisions, which research increasingly links to reduced burnout and stronger retention.
At the system level, shared leadership models — including dyads that pair a physician with an administrator, and triads that add a nursing or operations leader — have proven effective at bridging clinical and administrative perspectives. As one CommonSpirit Health leader described at the 2025 MGMA Summit, investing in physician leadership education fundamentally changed the dynamic: physicians moved from passive alignment to active ownership of organizational priorities once they understood the operational realities behind decisions.
The AMA's Joy in Medicine Health System Recognition Program, which has recognized more than 150 hospitals and health systems since 2019, has also surfaced common strategies among organizations that are making measurable progress. These include systematic measurement of burnout through organizational assessments, executive-level accountability for well-being outcomes and process improvements that reduce low-value administrative work.
The work ahead
It’s natural to look at headline figures and use them as a barometer for practices making progress against burnout. But the real takeaway is that the margin for inaction is shrinking. With more than 40% of the physician workforce approaching retirement age, the cost of losing even a small number of physicians to preventable burnout is multiplied by a recruitment environment in which replacements take months to find and years to fully integrate.
Most practices know now that they cannot treat burnout as a wellness problem to be solved with resilience training. It requires structural changes: reducing documentation burden, redesigning schedules, expanding team-based care, giving physicians meaningful input into governance and creating off-ramps that keep experienced clinicians connected to the practice even as they reduce their hours.
As Steve Brewer wrote for MGMA in 2025, there is even a risk being “burned out on burnout” — that an excessive organizational focus on burnout as a label can reinforce negative thought patterns rather than drive constructive change. The stronger approach, he argued, is to shift attention toward what is working: rebuilding the conditions that allow physicians to reconnect with the purpose that brought them to medicine in the first place.
That is ultimately the leadership challenge: not just measuring and acknowledging burnout, but redesigning practice operations so that experienced physicians can keep doing meaningful clinical work under conditions that are sustainable for them and for the organization.
Join the conversation
- MGMA Stat polls are conducted weekly to give medical practice leaders a pulse on the latest trends in healthcare management. To participate, sign up for MGMA Stat at mgma.com/mgma-stat.
- Have a success story in dealing with physician burnout or retention? Let us know in the MGMA Member Community or email us at connection@mgma.com.
