Medical assistant hiring got harder for most medical group practices over the past year, and the difficulty is starting to look less like a temporary labor-market squeeze and more like a durable feature of how practices staff their clinical support roles.

What you told us

Our May 19, 2026, MGMA Stat poll finds that 56% of medical practices report MA hiring has gotten more difficult in the past year, while 37% said it’s about the same and just 7% say it got easier. The poll had 297 applicable responses.

Across all groups, MA hiring dynamics continue to be shaped primarily by a tight labor market and persistent wage pressure. Respondents who said hiring is harder overwhelmingly pointed to a shortage of qualified candidates — often compounded by concerns about experience, work readiness, and training pipeline gaps — alongside intensifying wage competition, particularly from hospitals. Even among those reporting conditions are unchanged, these same forces dominate, with steady competition on pay and benefits, constrained supply in some markets (especially rural areas), and ongoing limitations related to role scope and candidate quality.

By contrast, the few practices experiencing improvement largely attribute it to proactive strategies and favorable shifts in the labor market. Expanded sourcing — especially tapping into students and early-career candidates — combined with wage adjustments, flexible scheduling, and internal training or internship pathways, has helped increase applicant flow and quality while stabilizing turnover. Taken together, the results suggest that while underlying structural challenges are widespread, targeted recruiting approaches and modest market tailwinds can meaningfully ease hiring pressures.

How we got here

MGMA polling has shown that MA has been the most persistent hiring difficulty in practices for the better part of a decade. A May 2025 MGMA poll found nearly half (47%) of practice leaders identified MAs as the hardest staff role to recruit, well ahead of nurses, billers, coders and other support roles. That finding has held steady across multiple MGMA polls dating back to 2021, when nearly 9 in 10 leaders (88%) reported difficulty hiring MAs.

The downstream effects are familiar to most practice leaders: slower rooming, longer patient cycle times, provider productivity losses, increased staff overtime, and added pressure on remaining team members. MA hiring is as much about access and throughput as it is about HR.

And the hiring problem rarely stands alone. Practices that struggle to fill MA roles frequently struggle to retain them as well, which means the pipeline is replacing departures rather than expanding capacity. Burnout among remaining staff, longer training cycles for new hires, and the operational tax of repeatedly onboarding into the same positions are part of why MA hiring has stayed difficult even as wages have risen.

What the national pipeline numbers do and do not tell you

Federal employment data sketches a pipeline that looks reasonably healthy. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 12% employment growth for MAs from 2024 to 2034 — much faster than the 3% average across all occupations — with approximately 119,800 job openings projected per year. Total employment is expected to rise from 783,900 in 2023 to 901,900 by 2033.

But national figures rarely match what a practice administrator sees in a local applicant pool, however. Rural and small-metro markets often show thin or zero qualified applicant flow for stretches of weeks. Credentialing varies considerably: some applicants are uncertified, some hold certifications that local employers do not recognize for clinical work, and some bring experience that doesn't map to the specialty mix the practice needs. The wage band BLS reports nationally may also exceed what a smaller practice can match against hospitals and larger systems competing for the same candidates. Aggregate growth and local availability are different problems.

The wage picture: Growth has cooled, but the floor has reset

Our 2025 MGMA DataDive Management and Staff Compensation data set revealed MA median total compensation grew 4.67% year over year in 2024, down from approximately 7% growth the year prior. Over five years, MA compensation is up nearly 24.6%. Hourly rates rose $0.63 in the past year and $3.63 since 2020.

The 2025 report attributed the slowing growth in part to more organizations building out internal MA training pipelines and employer-based academies, which has eased some of the prior supply constraints driving wages up. The wage floor has reset higher than pre-pandemic levels and is unlikely to retreat, but the rapid-escalation phase of MA pay appeared to have stabilized in 2025. The upcoming release of the 2026 data set, paired with this poll’s findings, should confirm or revise that assessment.

In-house training has become a common response

For systems and larger groups that have given up on waiting for community colleges and technical schools to graduate enough candidates, the strategic shift in recent years has been to take ownership of the training pipeline. Some larger organizations, like Cone Health in North Carolina built their own certified MA academies after concluding the local pipeline could not supply enough qualified candidates. But building a credentialed training program may not be realistic for some practices.

That’s the gap MGMA Clinical Medical Assistant Certification, powered by U.S. Career Institute, was designed to address — an accredited, employer-sponsored path without the overhead of building a program in-house. The program is online and open enrollment, so practices can move a candidate into training without coordinating fixed semester start dates or pulling them out of the clinic for travel. Pacing is flexible — anywhere from 8 weeks to a year — which lets practices match training velocity to their staffing need and to a new hire's other responsibilities. Curriculum can be custom-sequenced to align with a practice's clinical skill mix, and employers get enterprise-level reporting on student progress, login activity, grades and exam readiness. Exam cost is bundled into tuition, and the program reports a 95% CCMA pass rate against an 83% national average. MGMA members receive a 25% discount on the list rate.

For a practice running thin on MAs, investing in training is a given; the operational question is about how to do it without taxing the staff still on the floor. A structured, externally administered program lets the practice control the pipeline — selection, pacing and curriculum alignment — without absorbing the curriculum-design and instructor burden a fully in-house academy requires.

What smaller and independent practices are also doing

For many independent and small group practices, there are several lower-overhead tactics that consistently surface in MGMA polling and responses from practice leaders:

• Local school partnerships: Becoming a clinical site or externship host for community college and technical school MA programs gives a practice early visibility into graduating students and often a first-look hiring relationship without ongoing program costs.
• Standardized onboarding: A documented onboarding checklist — even without a formal academy — can reduce the variability in time-to-productivity for new hires and lower the burden on the staff doing the training.
• Cross-training existing staff: Front-desk team members trained in basic rooming, LPNs or EMTs deployed for clinical support, and reassignment of administrative tasks off MAs' plates can stretch existing capacity while hiring continues.
• Referral bonuses and retention bonuses: Modest staff referral bonuses tied to a six- or 12-month retention threshold consistently outperform untargeted advertising spending.
• Certification support: Covering the cost of a certification exam (typically $150 to $400) for an experienced uncertified candidate is often cheaper than the wait for a new credentialed hire.
• State workforce board partnerships: Many state workforce development boards co-fund registered apprenticeships and can sponsor MA training in partnership with local employers, including small practices.
• Shared training cohorts: Several small or independent practices pooling new hires for a joint orientation or skills training cohort can deliver some of the benefits of a centralized academy without any one practice carrying the full cost.

These tactics rarely produce a dramatic single-year improvement on their own. A combination of two or three — a sourcing partnership, a structured onboarding approach, and a retention or referral incentive — is what practice leaders most often credit when hiring conditions improve.

Hiring difficulty meets retention difficulty

Hiring and retention act on the same lever from different ends: When MAs don't see a path forward at a practice, they tend to leave for one that offers more — and the practice ends up running its hiring pipeline to backfill rather than to grow. Career-path investment is, in that sense, a hiring strategy as much as a retention strategy.

Tiered career structures within an organization — even something as straightforward as MA I, MA II, lead MA, and clinical coordinator, each with defined competency and pay differentials — also signal an internal future to employees who might otherwise leave for one. The 2025 MGMA report recommended that practices launch tiered career ladders to maintain compensation differentiation, with specific pathways from MA to LPN and from PCA to CNA.

Hospital and system competition: not the same as wage competition

Wage competition and competition from hospitals or large systems are related but distinct, and the difference matters when thinking through why practices lose candidates. Wage competition is primarily about the hourly floor: whether the offered hourly rate is competitive with what other ambulatory employers in the market are paying.

Competition from hospitals and larger systems goes beyond hourly rate. Larger employers can typically stack a signing bonus, more generous benefits (better health insurance, more PTO, retirement matching), visible internal mobility (an MA in a large system has defined next steps to other roles in the same organization), perceived job stability, and brand recognition that matters in candidates' professional and family networks. A practice that has matched the hourly wage can still lose finalist candidates on the rest of the package.

Distinguishing the two helps target the response. If the issue is wage floor, a market adjustment may resolve it. If the issue is the full package against a hospital competitor, the response usually has to combine wage, benefit design, career-path visibility and onboarding experience to be persuasive.

Pipeline gaps and burnout remain

The community college and technical school programs that feed the MA workforce have not fully recovered enrollment to pre-pandemic levels in many markets, narrowing the upstream pipeline. Burnout remains a factor on the retention side as well: the 2026 Indeed Pulse of Healthcare report found that two in five healthcare workers describe their jobs as "unsustainable." Even where practices have stabilized hiring, retention work has to continue, and the operational costs of burnout in remaining staff — overtime, errors, callouts — can be as significant as a vacancy itself.

Conclusion

What separates practices reporting progress from those that aren't is usually breadth of a single approach. Wage increases alone tend to plateau quickly; the practices reporting better hiring outcomes layer wage adjustments with pipeline work, candidate-pool expansion, retention investment, and a visible career path for existing MAs. None of those tactics is reserved for large systems — partnership-based sourcing, standardized onboarding, certification support, and referral programs are all feasible at smaller scales.

The MGMA DataDive Management and Staff Compensation data last year revealed a structural wage reset for MA roles. Connecting MA strategy back to the access, throughput and provider-productivity outcomes it ultimately serves — rather than treating it as a standalone HR challenge — tends to be where the practice leaders making progress focus their attention.