Healthcare staffing has spent three years working off its pandemic boom, and the correction was real: industry revenue fell 6% in 2025 alone. Now the turn is in sight. Staffing Industry Analysts' latest forecast, reported by StaffingHub in late July, has the market growing again in 2027, from $38.7 billion this year to $39.6 billion next.
The detail that matters for physicians and facilities is buried in the segment table. The recovery is not one number. It is five very different ones.
One of these segments is not like the others
- Locum tenens: growing roughly 5% a year through 2027, described in the analysis as the only segment that never really stopped.
- Allied health: up 1% in 2026 and 2% in 2027.
- Nurse staffing overall: down 2% in 2026, up only 1% in 2027.
- Travel nursing: flat in 2026, held up largely by strike coverage.
- Per diem nursing: down 7% in 2026 and still down 2% in 2027.
Why does physician staffing keep growing while nurse staffing shrinks? Because the forces behind it are structural rather than cyclical. The physician shortage did not spike with the pandemic and it will not settle with it. Definitive Healthcare's provider data tells the same story from the supply side: the number of clinicians working locum tenens grew more than 23% between 2022 and 2025.
What this means if you run a facility
Locum coverage is not a boom-era luxury that the market is correcting away. It is the part of the market the correction never touched, because the underlying scarcity of physicians never eased. Facilities that build a reliable locum relationship now are planning around the decade ahead, not the last cycle.
And if you practice medicine
A segment growing 5% a year through a market correction is a segment that wants you in it. More demand means more choice over where, when, and how you work, which has always been the honest pitch for locum tenens.
WPA Medicine Staffing is physician-owned and places emergency medicine, anesthesiology, and hospitalist clinicians nationwide. If the market data has you curious, a recruiter can make it concrete: 888-461-0860.