Medical assistant shortages are becoming a persistent operational challenge for medical group practices, affecting recruitment, retention and daily clinical flow. Tight labour conditions, wage pressure, limited qualified applicant pools, training gaps and competition from larger providers continue to shape the market. A May 2026 MGMA Stat poll found that hiring had become more difficult for 56% of practices over the past year, while targeted sourcing, flexible scheduling and internal training helped some practices ease pressure.
Staffing Gaps Affect Access and Throughput
Medical assistant recruitment has remained a persistent staffing difficulty for practices for much of the past decade. In May 2025, nearly half of practice leaders identified medical assistants as the hardest staff role to recruit, ahead of nurses, billers, coders and other support roles. In 2021, nearly nine in 10 leaders had difficulty hiring medical assistants, showing the long-running nature of the constraint. Even where roles are filled, concerns about work readiness, experience and training can delay the point at which new staff members add stable clinical capacity.
The effects extend beyond vacancy management. Gaps in medical assistant staffing can slow rooming, lengthen patient cycle times, reduce provider productivity, increase overtime and add pressure on remaining staff. For practice leaders, medical assistant hiring therefore affects access and throughput as well as human resources capacity. The role sits close to the operational centre of ambulatory care, where staffing gaps can quickly affect clinical flow.
Recruitment pressure also interacts with retention. Practices that struggle to retain medical assistants often use hiring pipelines to replace departures rather than expand capacity. Burnout among remaining staff, longer training cycles for new hires and repeated onboarding into the same posts create an operational burden that can persist even when wages rise.
Local Labour Conditions Shape the Pipeline
National workforce growth does not automatically translate into a stronger local applicant pool. Employment projections for medical assistants indicate expansion, with 12% growth expected from 2024 to 2034 and approximately 119,800 openings projected each year. Total employment is expected to rise from 783,900 in 2023 to 901,900 by 2033. These figures suggest a growing occupation, but they do not remove the practical difficulties seen by practice administrators trying to fill roles in specific local markets.
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Some practices still face thin or absent qualified applicant flow for weeks, particularly outside large urban areas. Credentialing and training backgrounds also vary. Some applicants are uncertified, some hold credentials that local employers do not recognise for clinical work and some bring experience that does not match the specialty mix required. Candidate availability, certification relevance and practical readiness can therefore become separate barriers even when overall workforce numbers appear favourable.
Compensation remains part of the challenge. Median total compensation for medical assistants grew 4.67% year on year in 2024, down from approximately 7% growth the previous year. Over five years, compensation rose nearly 24.6%. The wage floor has reset higher than pre-pandemic levels, even as the rapid escalation phase appears to have stabilised. Smaller practices may still struggle to match the full employment package offered by larger systems.
Training and Retention Need Connected Strategies
Practice responses increasingly focus on taking greater control of the training and retention pathway. Larger organisations have developed their own medical assistant academies when local education pipelines have not supplied enough qualified candidates. A fully in-house programme may be unrealistic for some practices, but structured employer-supported pathways can still help candidates move into training while limiting pressure on staff already working in the clinic.
Lower-overhead measures can also strengthen recruitment. Partnerships with local education providers can create clinical-site or externship relationships that give practices earlier contact with students and early-career candidates. Standardised onboarding can reduce variation in time to productivity. Cross-training staff in basic clinical support tasks can stretch existing capacity while recruitment continues. Referral incentives, retention incentives, certification support and shared training cohorts can further strengthen the pipeline when used together rather than as isolated measures.
Retention investment matters because medical assistants who do not see a future within a practice may leave for employers offering more visible progression. A tiered structure, such as medical assistant I, medical assistant II, lead medical assistant and clinical coordinator, can define competencies and pay differentials. Clear progression pathways can make the role feel less static and reduce the risk that recruitment activity simply backfills repeated departures.
Competition from larger providers also goes beyond hourly pay. Bigger organisations may combine higher wages with signing bonuses, broader benefits, visible internal mobility, perceived stability and brand recognition. A practice that matches an hourly rate can still lose candidates if the wider offer appears stronger. The response therefore needs to combine pay, benefits, onboarding quality, career-path visibility and workplace stability.
Medical assistant staffing pressure now sits at the intersection of recruitment, retention, training, compensation and daily operations. Wage increases alone tend to plateau quickly when candidate supply remains limited and larger providers offer broader employment packages. Practices making progress combine wage adjustments with pipeline development, candidate-pool expansion, structured onboarding, retention investment and visible career paths. The issue is not limited to large organisations, as education partnerships, certification support, referral programmes and shared training models can operate at smaller scale. Connecting medical assistant strategy to access, throughput and provider productivity gives the workforce challenge clearer operational priority.
Source: MGMA
Image Credit: iStock
