2025 Physicians Practice best states to practice

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The time has come once again to lay out the definitive Physicians Practice ranking of which states in the union are the best suited for practicing medicine in 2025.

Least year, we based our list on seven factors:

• Cost of living
• Physician density
• Amount of state business taxes collected
• Average malpractice insurance rates
• Quality of life
• Women's health care
• Geographic Practice Cost Indices (GPCI)

For 2025, we kept all those measures but added an eighth:

• Physician happiness with pay

This new measure reflects the reality that even in states with favorable economic or quality-of-life factors, dissatisfaction with compensation can significantly influence physicians’ feelings about practicing there.

Methodology

Physicians Practice averaged each state’s ranking in the eight criteria. The GPCI was used to break any ties.

Sources

Cost of living

The cost of living ranking was based on the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center, which itself based its ratings on averaging the indices of cities and metropolitan areas in each state.

Physician density

The physician density rankings are based on the Association of American Medical Colleges’ U.S. Physician Workforce Data Dashboard. The dashboard contains data from the 2023 American Medical Association Physician Professional Data, various AAMC sources, and U.S. census data.

State business taxes collected

This ranking was based on the Tax Foundation’s Facts & Figures How Does Your State Compare? 2025. In particular, Physicians Practice used Table 3 which ranked the states on five criteria: corporate tax, individual income tax, sales tax, unemployment insurance tax, and property tax.

Average malpractice insurance

The raw data used to calculate the average malpractice insurance cost was provided by the Cunningham Group. That data was then averaged out by Physicians Practice.

Quality of life

For the quality of life metric, Physicians Practice used Wallethub’s Best States to Retire rankings which were based on adjusted cost of living, lowest annual cost of in-home services, their own taxpayer ranking, the percentage of the workforce aged 65 and older, museums per capita, theaters per capita, percentage of population aged 65 and older, life expectancy, and property crime rate.

Physician happiness with pay

For this year’s new criterion, Physicians Practice looked at Marit Health’s community‑sourced data, which derives physician pay satisfaction on a 5‑point scale from thousands of verified, anonymized salary submissions collected through its transparency‑focused platform, as of May 11.

Women's health

The women's health metric is based on the 2024 State Scorecard on Women’s Health and Reproductive Care from The Commonwealth Fund. The scorecard is based on 32 different metrics across three areas: health outcomes; health care quality and prevention; and coverage, access, and affordability.

GPCI

CMS uses the Geographic Practice Cost Indices (GPCI) to adjust Medicare physician payments to account for geographic differences in physicians’ costs. Each GPCI corresponds to one of the three main components of a Medicare physician payment. They are: physician work, practice expense, and malpractice expense. For the purposes of these rankings, Physicians Practices averaged the three GPCI’s together for each state, and major municipalities contained in each state. The lower the GPCI, the higher the ranking. Because of the importance of these criteria, specifically practice expenses, Physicians Practice used GPCI rankings as a tie-breaker in the event of a tie.