The state of clinician supply, 2026.

This is not the whole registry — the Talent Graph covers 7.37M NPI-registered clinicians across every specialty. It is the eight roles Kandidate tracks by role and state on the clinician data page, counted the same way, from the same August 2026 pull. Across those eight roles alone there are 3,047,868 licensed people, and where they sit is far less spread out than a role's national count suggests.

Eight roles, one registry

Each row below is a live count from the same Talent Graph pull that generates Kandidate's role-by-state pages — the physician total carries no snapshot date in that pull, so it is footnoted rather than dated like the rest.

Physical therapists alone are 288,413 people in this August 2026 pull — a different registry count on this site, from July 2026, put the same role at 260,298. Both are real counts from the same registry family, taken with different scope or timing. That gap is itself the point: "the market" for one role is a modelling choice, not a single fixed number, which is why a probe against your own radius and role beats any national figure.

The same four states, role after role

California, Texas and Florida rank in every single role's top 5 — nurse practitioners, physicians, both therapist types, all of it. New York misses that only once, for physical therapy assistants. Combine the eight roles into one map and the concentration is stark:

Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan hold the next tier — real depth, but each with under half of California's combined count. A hospital system in one of the top four states is drawing from a genuinely different pool size than one in the next eight, and a national "clinician shortage" headline flattens that difference into one number that describes neither.

What doesn't fit the state view

The physician row is the outlier worth naming rather than smoothing over: 1,271,621 nationally, with no snapshot date attached in this pull. Treat it as approximate order-of-magnitude, not a figure to quote to a decimal — the other seven roles all carry an August 2026 date and the same 55-or-56-state coverage, which is why the combined map above uses only those with a clean date where precision matters.

What this means for a search

A national count tells you almost nothing about whether a specific role in a specific city is fillable. Run the same role and city through a market probe before deciding a requisition is hard, or query the Talent Graph directly if you're checking more than one at a time — OIG-excluded providers are filtered out of every Talent Graph search before it returns a number.

The state-by-state breakdowns behind every row above are public: physical therapists in California and nurse practitioners in New York are two of the role-and-state pages built from this same pull.