MGMA Physician Compensation Data (2026): What MGMA Published, What's Free, and How It Compares

If you have negotiated a physician contract, you have probably heard an offer described as "at the MGMA 50th percentile" or seen a productivity bonus tied to MGMA median wRVUs. The Medical Group Management Association runs the best-known employer survey of physician pay, and most employers who quote it are reading from a data set you can't see. MGMA sells the specialty figures; it gives away only the headline trends.

This guide covers what MGMA's data contains, what its 2026 report found, what you can get for free, how it compares with AMGA, SullivanCotter, Doximity, and Medscape, and how to use survey numbers when you negotiate. Every figure comes from the publisher's own pages. For pay in a single specialty, see our physician salary by specialty guide.

MGMA's physician pay figures come from its DataDive Provider Compensation data set, which medical groups and other organizations fill in with their providers' pay and production. MGMA describes it as "a Federally recognized source to assist in fair market value." Besides the main compensation and productivity data, DataDive has separate sets for academic practice, medical directorships, on-call pay, and starting salaries, the last covering first-year physicians' guaranteed salaries and signing bonuses.

For each specialty, the data reports percentiles rather than a single number, along with work RVUs, collections, encounters, and compensation per work RVU, and it can be cut by region and by whether the practice is physician-owned or hospital-owned. The previous cycle, the 2025 report, drew on 2024 data from more than 220,000 physicians and APPs.

Read the year carefully. MGMA names each report for the year it is released, and the data is from the year before. The 2026 report, released June 10, 2026, describes 2025 pay. An employer quoting "2026 MGMA" in late 2026 is quoting 2025 compensation.

MGMA's June 10, 2026 release summarized 2025 data from more than 245,900 physicians and advanced practice providers. Physician pay rose, but slower than in recent years:

By MGMA's numbers, only surgical specialists kept pace with inflation in 2025, and none of the three groups did over five years. The rest of the release explains why pay growth is slowing:

• Productivity fell. On MGMA's report page, work RVUs fell in 16 of the 23 specialties it tracks, and total encounters fell in all 23. Nonsurgical specialists' total patient visits fell 15.67% in one year.
• Pay plans are mixing incentives in. Hybrid models that blend base salary with quality and other incentives make up more than 75% of reported structures.
• Groups are adding APPs. 48% of medical groups added advanced practice providers relative to physicians over the past year.
• Burnout is costing groups physicians. One in three medical groups lost a physician to burnout in the past year, up from roughly one in four in late 2024.

The one specialty-group dollar figure MGMA has put on a free page recently comes from the previous cycle: in the 2025 report, surgical specialists' median total compensation went from $554,108 in 2023 to nearly $585,000 in 2024, up 5.57%. With CMS also proposing a lower Medicare conversion factor for 2027 (see our 2027 Medicare fee schedule guide), wRVU-based pay is worth watching closely.

• Free: MGMA's press release and headline findings, plus its 2026 Provider Compensation and Productivity Data report, which MGMA offers through a short form on its report page (members download it after logging in).
• Not free: specialty-by-specialty medians, the 10th through 90th percentiles, compensation per wRVU, and regional or ownership cuts. Those are in DataDive, and MGMA's product page invites you to talk to a DataDive expert instead of listing prices.
• Specialty pages without figures: MGMA runs salary pages for some specialties, such as its pediatrician salary page. They describe what the data covers and end with a form to contact MGMA about purchasing a report. They don't list salaries.

If you find a free "MGMA salary PDF" online with current figures for every specialty, treat it with suspicion: it is either an older report or a copy of licensed data, and you can't tell which edition or cut it uses.

Here is how MGMA compares with four other widely cited physician pay surveys. The first three are filled in by employers and sold; the last two are filled in by physicians and free to read.

Don't compare the headlines directly. MGMA and AMGA measure 2025 against 2024; SullivanCotter's 7.2% compares 2026 pay with 2025 for one group of specialties. The three employer surveys work from figures that organizations submit (MGMA and SullivanCotter report medians), while Doximity and Medscape report averages of what physicians say they earn, and Medscape models its estimates across 12 years of survey data and 69,571 physicians, weighted to the AMA's physician database. A survey's mix of employers matters too: one heavy in large health systems will not look like one heavy in physician-owned groups.

You can't see MGMA's specialty medians without buying them, but three free sources publish specialty pay. Use them as a check on any offer quoted against MGMA. Each specialty links to our full guide, which covers practice setting, subspecialties, and wRVU rates.

Employers don't cite MGMA only because it is big. Under the federal physician self-referral law (Stark), the exceptions for physician employment and service arrangements require pay consistent with fair market value, and a published survey is an easy way to document that. MGMA markets its data on exactly that point.

CMS has been careful about how far surveys go. In its 2020 Stark final rule, it said that common arrangements, where the services are the same whichever physician provides them, can use salary surveys to set fair market value (85 FR 77682), but also that "It is not CMS policy that salary surveys necessarily provide an accurate determination of fair market value in all cases" (85 FR 77557). That is one reason offers are framed as a percentile of a survey. If your production is well above the survey median, your own numbers are the strongest case for pay above it.

1. Ask which number they mean. "MGMA median" can mean base salary or total compensation, national or regional, physician-owned or hospital-owned practices, and this year's edition or last year's. Ask for the survey edition, specialty, region, ownership type, and metric in writing.

2. Match the pay percentile to the production percentile. If your pay is set at the 50th percentile for compensation but your bonus starts at the 75th percentile for work RVUs, you have to outproduce three-quarters of your peers to earn what half of them make. Ask for the compensation-per-wRVU rate and the wRVU threshold from the same survey and edition. Our wRVU guide explains the math.

3. Check the edition's age. A 2026 report describes 2025 pay. If raises in your contract are tied to "the current MGMA median," know which edition will be used each year and when it updates.

4. Bring a second source. Doximity, Medscape, and SalaryDr figures above won't match MGMA exactly, but a large gap in either direction is worth asking about. Our salary negotiation guide and contract negotiation guide cover how to make the case, and the contract analyzer can help you review the terms.