How much should I pay my practice manager?
BLS reports a median annual wage of $123,860 for medical and health services managers (May 2025), with the bottom 10 percent under $73,390 and the top 10 percent above $224,340. Outpatient settings sit below that headline median: BLS puts offices of physicians at $105,770 and outpatient care centers at $116,060, so budget from those rather than from the all-industry figure.
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Definition
A practice manager is the operational lead responsible for staffing, scheduling, billing oversight, vendor management, and day-to-day administration of a medical or dental practice.
The detail
BLS reported a median annual wage of $123,860 for medical and health services managers in May 2025, with the bottom 10 percent under $73,390 and the top 10 percent above $224,340. That $150,950 spread between the tenth and ninetieth percentile is the useful part: this is not one job. At the bottom sits a senior front-desk lead with a new title; at the top, an administrator running multiple sites, payer contracting and a capital plan. Where a candidate falls depends less on the practice's size than on which of those two jobs you are actually hiring for. BLS also cuts the same wage by industry, and outpatient settings sit below the headline median: $116,060 at outpatient care centers and $105,770 at offices of physicians, against $136,130 in government and $133,580 at hospitals. If you run a clinic, the offices-of-physicians figure is the one to budget from. For pay by region, state and setting, MGMA's management and staff compensation dataset covers more than 157,000 healthcare professionals in 2,500 groups. The right salary is the one that buys a manager who takes day-to-day operations off the owner, so measure the hire against that, not against a percentile.
Median wage for medical and health services managers was $123,860 in May 2025.
Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook: Medical and Health Services Managers
The top 10 percent earned more than $224,340 a year and the bottom 10 percent less than $73,390.
By industry, offices of physicians pay a median of $105,770 and outpatient care centers $116,060, both below the $123,860 all-industry median and well below hospitals at $133,580.
MGMA's Management and Staff Compensation data covers more than 157,000 healthcare professionals in 2,500 groups and can be filtered by region and state.
Source: MGMA DataDive: Management and Staff Compensation Data
What this means for clinic owners
From Sorso
Underpaying your practice manager is an expensive mistake, because turnover in this seat disrupts billing, scheduling and staffing at once. Pay at or above the BLS median for your setting and tie a meaningful bonus to two or three KPIs you actually want to move.
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What is a good overhead ratio for medical practices?
A good overhead ratio depends on the specialty: 55 to 65 percent of collections in general dentistry, with a national median near 62 percent (ZenOne, citing Overjet's 2025 data), 72.9 percent of net revenue in medical dermatology and 75.1 percent in cosmetic (FTI Consulting), and 80.8 percent in outpatient physical therapy (U.S. Physical Therapy's FY2025 10-K). An 80.8 percent ratio is normal in physical therapy and would be far too high in dentistry, which is why a single cross-specialty target is worse than none.
What is the average revenue per provider?
There is no single average: revenue per provider depends on specialty, and the one broad survey that reports it, MGMA's, is a paid product. The published figures you can check are narrower. FTI Consulting's 2019 benchmarks put median revenue per FTE physician at $1.3 million in medical dermatology and $1.8 million in cosmetic dermatology, and in a Sorso calculation from CMS's 2024 provider-level data the median ophthalmologist received $167,145 in Medicare payments and the median orthopedic surgeon $96,684, from Medicare alone.
What is a good staff-to-provider ratio?
There is no single good ratio, because the published benchmarks count staff differently. AMGA's 2024 staffing survey of medical groups puts the median at 2.15 clinic staff FTEs per provider FTE, counting physicians and advanced practice clinicians as providers. MGMA counts total support staff per FTE physician instead: its analysis of 141 multispecialty groups found a median of 5.0, and physician-owned groups staff more heavily than hospital-owned ones.
When should I hire a fractional CFO?
Most clinics should hire a fractional CFO when they add a second location, raise debt or equity, start preparing for a sale or partner buy-in, or keep missing their numbers without knowing why.
How do you structure compensation for an associate physician in a private practice?
Most associate physician compensation packages in private practice combine a guaranteed base salary during the ramp-up period with a productivity-based incentive (typically a percentage of personal collections or wRVUs above a threshold), plus benefits and a defined partnership track. The right structure depends on specialty norms, payer mix, and whether the role is partner-track or career associate.
How much should outpatient clinics spend on staff training and continuing education per year?
Budget by role: AMN Healthcare's 2024 review of physician recruiting packages found an average continuing medical education allowance of $3,969 a year for physicians and $2,195 for NPs and PAs, and ATD's 2026 State of the Industry report put all-industry learning spend at $846 per employee in 2025. We found no survey that publishes a training budget for outpatient clinics specifically, so treat these as reference points: licensed providers carry mandatory continuing education, and billing staff need certification and payer-update training that an all-industry average does not capture.
Founder of Sorso and a CFA charterholder. Before Sorso, Stan spent 19 years in corporate finance at institutions including UniCredit and Société Générale — managing a $450M loan portfolio and making senior partner at a major mezzanine lender by 29 — then built a fractional CFO firm exclusively for outpatient healthcare clinics.
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