For the First Time, Employers Fund the Majority of DPC Memberships

Five years ago, if you told a benefits consultant that employers would fund the majority of Direct Primary Care memberships in the United States, they would have laughed. Employers were the long-shot bet in DPC. Patients and physicians drove the model. Insurance skeptics and small practices kept it alive.

That just changed.

The Numbers

Hint Health released its 2026 Direct Primary Care Trends Report this week, drawing on data from more than 2,700 clinicians and 1.4 million members across its platform. The headline finding: employers now fund 60% of active DPC memberships. That’s the first time employer-sponsored memberships have exceeded direct-to-patient enrollment.

The broader growth numbers are striking too. DPC membership on Hint’s platform grew 837% from 2017 to 2025, reaching 409 active members per 100,000 Americans. The network now spans 49 states.

We’ve covered the 80% growth in DPC and concierge practice sites documented by researchers from Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Hint’s data tells a related but different story. Where the Health Affairs study tracked the number of practices and clinicians, the Hint report tracks actual membership enrollment and who’s paying for it. The answer is increasingly clear: employers.

Why Employers Are Buying In

The pricing data helps explain the shift. Employer-sponsored DPC rates have held within a $55 to $65 per member per month range for five consecutive years, according to the report. In a market where traditional health insurance premiums have climbed steadily year after year, that kind of pricing stability is hard for benefits teams to ignore.

For employers, DPC isn’t replacing insurance. It’s sitting alongside it. A growing number of companies are pairing DPC memberships with high-deductible health plans or health sharing arrangements, giving employees direct access to a primary care physician while keeping catastrophic coverage in place. The math works because DPC keeps routine care out of the claims cycle entirely.

The geographic spread backs this up. Minnesota and Colorado emerged as high-concentration hubs for DPC clinicians in the report, with New York, Illinois, and California rounding out the top five states for clinician growth.

The Clinical Case

The report’s clinical findings reinforce what DPC physicians have been saying for years, but now with data at a meaningful scale.

Clinician burnout dropped 48% among providers on the platform. Panel sizes fell from the traditional 2,000-patient load to approximately 500. And 62% of members used low-friction communication channels like text and email 11 or more times per year, suggesting these aren’t memberships sitting unused on a benefits card.

These numbers matter because they quantify the trade-off DPC physicians make. Smaller panels mean a lower per-doctor revenue ceiling, but they also mean physicians who actually stay in medicine. At a time when primary care is losing doctors faster than it can train them, retention is its own kind of ROI.

Hint Marketplace and the Platform Play

Alongside the report, Hint announced the launch of Hint Marketplace, an app-store-style platform designed to connect DPC practices with complementary services and tools. The move signals Hint’s ambition to become the connective layer of the DPC ecosystem, not just a billing platform.

“What began as a movement is becoming a new operating model for healthcare,” said Hint Health CEO Zak Holdsworth.

It’s worth watching how this plays out. If Marketplace gains traction, it could reduce the problem that many DPC practices deal with today, where billing, EHR, messaging, and scheduling each live in separate systems. It could also make Hint’s platform stickier, locking practices into an ecosystem rather than a single tool.

What This Means

If you’re running a DPC practice, the employer funding shift is the number to pay attention to. Sixty percent of DPC memberships funded by employers means the buyer profile for DPC has fundamentally changed. Practices that can package their services for employer benefits teams, not just individual patients walking in the door, are positioned to grow faster.

If you’re considering DPC, the pricing stability data should be encouraging. The model isn’t getting more expensive as it grows. Employer-sponsored rates haven’t inflated the way traditional premiums have, which suggests the economics are holding up at scale.

And if you’re watching the DPC market broadly, this report marks a milestone. DPC has spent years proving it works clinically. The Hint data suggests it’s now proving it works financially, at least for the employers and practices on its platform. Whether that translates across the full DPC landscape, including practices that don’t use Hint, is the next question worth asking.