Medical Physician Assistant: how many are there, and how many are in private practice?

National totals

Reading the sole-proprietor share

For this specialty, the 14.5% sole-proprietor share means that 6,048 of the 41,748 active records are marked this way in NPPES. The field is self-reported and does not identify every clinician who works in private practice, so the share is an imperfect proxy rather than a direct measure of practice ownership or employment arrangement.

By state

New NPI registrations by year

Counts reflect the year each NPI was first issued, among records still active today. The final year is partial: this data covers through 2026-01-11.

Data notes

• The sole-proprietor field is self-reported by the provider in NPPES and is an imperfect proxy for private practice.
• A sole-proprietor count shown as <11 is suppressed: the true value is below 11, which could include zero.
• - This page counts active NPI records with the taxonomy as primary; NPI records are not a direct headcount of people, jobs, or visits.
• - NUCC publishes no official definition for this classification, and taxonomy assignment may not capture every provider who performs this work.
• Providers are counted once, by their primary taxonomy code only.

Source: CMS National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) Data Dissemination file, FOIA-disclosable public data under CMS-6060-N. Aggregated by Hero EMR on 2026-08-03; deactivated NPIs excluded; specialty assigned from the primary taxonomy code (NUCC 25.1). Counts below 11 are suppressed. Individual providers are never published. All provider data pages.

Common questions