Direct Primary Care Growth: What 5 Years of Data Show

Five years ago, a DPC physician at a community talk usually spent the first ten minutes explaining what direct primary care was. Some still do. The difference in 2026 is scale. Direct primary care growth has pushed practices into all 50 states and into employer benefits packages across the U.S., and as of January 1, 2026, federal tax law treats DPC memberships as HSA-eligible.

Below is the data, including the places where the trackers flatly disagree, and what it means if you run a DPC practice or plan to open one.

Direct primary care growth, by the numbers

Start with the awkward part: nobody agrees on the exact count.

Hint Health, which makes membership software for DPC practices, put the national total at more than 3,600 distinct practices as of Q1 2025, with annual growth above 19% since 2022. Connectedly Health counted 2,109 active practices in its July 2026 report. The DPC Frontier mapper listed roughly 3,163, according to Healio's September 2026 coverage.

The gap comes down to definitions. Some trackers count non-physician-owned clinics and hybrid practices. Others only count clinics with a verifiable public listing. Every count moves in the same direction, though.

The best independent evidence is a peer-reviewed analysis published in Health Affairs in December 2025. Researchers from Oregon Health & Science University, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard found that concierge and DPC practice sites grew 83.1% between 2018 and 2023, from 1,658 sites to 3,036. The number of clinicians working in those practices rose from 3,935 to 7,021. One caveat: the study groups DPC and concierge together, so it measures membership medicine as a whole.

Membership data points the same way. Hint's 2026 trends report, drawn from more than 2,700 clinicians and 1.4 million members, found that DPC membership grew 837% per capita between 2017 and 2025.

Why physicians and patients kept choosing DPC

Physicians left traditional primary care for a reason. Jane Zhu, the Health Affairs study's lead author, told Healio that the rise of concierge and DPC reflects dissatisfaction with the traditional system. She pointed to administrative burden, time pressure and burnout on the physician side, and slow access to care on the patient side.

DPC goes after both problems with the same structure: the practice drops insurance billing, charges a flat monthly fee, and keeps its panel small enough that patients can actually get an appointment.

That fee stayed accessible. Connectedly Health found a median adult membership of $80 a month across the 1,348 practices that publish pricing. Access widened too: 62% of active practices now offer telehealth, which lets a single clinic serve patients well beyond its zip code.

Employers noticed. A company can give employees unlimited primary care for a predictable per-member cost, and one contract can add dozens of members to a panel at once. If you haven't built that channel yet, our guide on how to market your DPC practice to employers walks through the pitch step by step.

The 2026 HSA law changed what DPC costs patients

For years, DPC had an awkward tax problem. The IRS treated a DPC membership as "other coverage," which knocked patients out of eligibility to contribute to a health savings account (HSA, a tax-advantaged account for medical costs). People on high-deductible plans had to choose between their HSA and their DPC doctor. Employers pairing DPC with a high-deductible plan hit the same wall.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, ended that choice. Starting January 1, 2026, a DPC arrangement no longer disqualifies a patient from HSA contributions, and patients can pay membership fees with HSA dollars. The limits are $150 a month for an individual and $300 a month for arrangements covering more than one person. On December 9, 2025, Treasury and the IRS issued Notice 2026-05 explaining how DPC arrangements qualify under the new HSA rules.

The fine print matters for your pricing page. The arrangement has to cover primary care services only, paid through a fixed periodic fee. The DPC Alliance's State of DPC report found that 76.4% of practices use age-based pricing tiers. If any of your tiers run above $150 a month, members on those tiers fall outside the HSA provision. Review your tiers with a benefits attorney before you advertise HSA compatibility.

More practices means more competition, and some of it is corporate

The same Health Affairs study found a shift that gets less attention. Independent ownership of concierge and DPC practices fell from 84.0% to 59.7% between 2018 and 2023, while corporate-affiliated practices grew 576%. The clinician mix changed too. Physicians dropped from 67.3% to 59.7% of the workforce as nurse practitioners and physician assistants took on more of the care.

For an independent physician, the practice down the road may now have a corporate parent company and a paid ads budget. Clinical skill is still what keeps members. Getting them in the door now takes deliberate marketing, too.

There's an opening, though. Connectedly Health found that 954 of the 1,292 U.S. cities with a DPC practice (74%) have exactly one. In most markets, the first practice to own local search results gets a head start that costs a competitor real money to take back. That's why it pays to know what patients actually search for when they look for a DPC doctor.

What DPC practices should do with this

Five years of growth changed the marketing job. A practice that launched in 2021 mostly had to explain the model. A practice launching in 2026 has to explain the model and beat other practices offering it.

A few moves follow directly from the data:

Add clear HSA language to your pricing page, including which tiers qualify.
Build an employer outreach list before a larger operator signs your local businesses.
Claim your Google Business Profile and local search terms while your market still has one or two practices.
Publish content that answers patient questions in plain language, because plenty of patients still haven't heard of DPC.

JumpStart DPC Solutions works only with direct primary care practices, from launch-stage clinics to established panels. If you want a plan built for the 2026 version of DPC (HSA-eligible patients, employer contracts and corporate competitors down the street), schedule a free consultation with our team.

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Get out of your office: Set up a booth at your local farmers market Sponsor a youth sports league and attend the games Host a free health screening event at a community center Attend your local Chamber of Commerce meetings Speak at a Rotary Club or business networking group Every one of these puts you face to face with potential patients in a low-pressure setting. They see you as a real person, not a website. That matters more than any ad you'll ever run. If you're looking for seasonal ideas on how to translate community outreach into panel growth, read our guide on back-to-school marketing for DPC practices for a tactical example of how this works. The Strategy Behind the Tactics These seven strategies aren't random. They map to the three things every DPC practice needs: Visibility: Can people find you? (Google Business Profile, content, community events) Credibility: Do they trust you when they do? (Reviews, partnerships, your website) Conversion: Can they easily take the next step? (Clear CTAs, referral programs, employer pitches) If you're strong on visibility but weak on credibility, people find you and then choose someone else. If you have great credibility but no visibility, nobody finds you in the first place. All three have to work together. Building a strong brand identity ties all three together: it makes you more findable, more trustworthy, and easier to choose. The Summer Slowdown Is Your Runway Don't wait until September to panic about panel growth. Use June, July, and August to build the infrastructure: set up your Google Business Profile properly, write three blog posts, build your employer outreach list, launch a referral program. When the fall rush hits and patients start searching for new doctors, you'll be the one they find. If building all of this feels overwhelming (because you're also, you know, practicing medicine), that's exactly why JumpStart exists. We build DPC marketing systems so you don't have to figure it out alone. 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The Rise of Direct Primary Care: Five Years of Growth