Employers Now Fund More Than Half of All DPC Memberships. That Has Never Been True Before.

There’s a number that DPC advocates have been waiting for since the model started gaining real traction a decade ago. In 2026, Hint Health published it.

Sixty percent. For the first time in direct primary care’s history, employers fund the majority of active DPC memberships. Not individual patients choosing to opt out of insurance. Not physicians building solo practices on word-of-mouth. Employers — companies adding DPC to their benefits packages and routing workers toward it.

Hint Health released its 2026 Direct Primary Care Trends Report in April, drawing on data from more than 2,700 DPC clinicians and 1.4 million members across 49 states. The report documents eight years of growth and a structural shift in who is driving it.

Eight Years of the Headline Number

DPC membership grew 837% from 2017 to 2025. That figure outpaces U.S. population growth by a wide margin. By 2025, the model had reached 409 active members per 100,000 Americans.

The 837% figure is the kind of number that wins a slide deck. It captures the growth arc cleanly. “What began as a movement is becoming a new operating model for healthcare,” said Zak Holdsworth, CEO of Hint Health.

That word — operating model — is deliberate. Movements run on conviction. Operating models run on economics. The 60% employer-funding figure is what converts the phrase from aspiration to description.

What the Employer Majority Changes

DPC’s origin story is a patient-physician relationship built outside insurance. Physicians who wanted to exit the billing machine. Patients who joined them because they wanted a physician who answered the phone. Both parties opted in with some intention behind it.

Employer-sponsored DPC changes the entry point. When a company adds DPC to a benefits package, employees encounter it as an option in an enrollment system — sometimes the default, sometimes one item in a menu. The physician still controls panel size and schedule. The patient still gets direct access. The relationship can look the same once it’s established. But the path in is different.

That difference carries two implications for DPC practices.

The first is scale. A single employer contract might add dozens or hundreds of members in the time it would take individual marketing to add a handful. The employer channel compresses the growth curve in ways that solo patient acquisition doesn’t.

The second is operational. Practices that were built on individual memberships haven’t necessarily developed employer contracting as a skill. Negotiating with HR departments, integrating with third-party administrators, reporting outcomes data to self-funded plan sponsors — these are a different set of capabilities than patient relationship building. Practices that haven’t built them may find themselves sitting outside DPC’s next growth phase.

The Geography Is Shifting

The other major finding in the report: California, Illinois, and New York are now among the fastest-growing states for DPC clinician growth. Traditional concentration leaders like Colorado and Minnesota still show high density. But some of the fastest movement is now in markets where DPC hasn’t historically been strong.

This is notable because those three states don’t look like obvious DPC territory. They’re heavily regulated. They’re expensive to operate in. They have large, entrenched health systems. Individual patient acquisition in those markets has historically been harder than in less-concentrated states.

The employer channel may be part of the explanation. An employer adding DPC to a benefits package doesn’t require a local market to have extensive DPC awareness first. It requires the employer to be persuaded that DPC belongs in their benefits structure — a different sales conversation than convincing individual patients to try something unfamiliar.

If DPC achieves meaningful density in California, Illinois, and New York over the next few years, the “niche alternative” framing becomes factually unsupportable, not just rhetorically contested.

The Physician Side of the Data

The 2026 Trends Report includes two physician-side findings that connect to the growth story.

Panel sizes have dropped from approximately 2,000 patients in a traditional primary care practice to around 500 in DPC practices within Hint’s network. That’s the design — DPC practices cap panels deliberately to make the access model work. The data confirms that practices in the dataset are actually holding to that range rather than quietly expanding panels as membership pressure grows.

Clinician burnout dropped 48% among DPC physicians in the report’s dataset. That number should be read with the comparison group in mind: it’s drawn from physicians who chose to build a DPC practice, not a representative sample of all primary care physicians. People who design their own practice structure and keep their panel deliberately small are more likely to report lower burnout than the population of all employed primary care physicians. The direction is consistent with what DPC proponents have argued for years. The magnitude reflects a self-selected group.

The Pricing Signal

Employer-sponsored DPC rates held between $55 and $65 per member per month for five consecutive years, according to the report. In a period when employer healthcare costs have risen sharply across most benefit categories, that stability is a concrete selling point. A fixed monthly rate with no claims volatility is a different budget line than a self-funded plan where costs move with utilization.

The fee cap established in the One Big Beautiful Bill — $150 per month for individuals, $300 for families — sits well above the $55–$65 range where most employer contracts currently land. For the practices in Hint’s network, the cap isn’t binding today.

What This Means

The 2026 Trends Report is the clearest picture the DPC industry has produced of where it stands. 837% growth, 1.4 million members, 49 states, and a majority of memberships now employer-funded for the first time.

For DPC physicians, the employer majority is both an opportunity and a question. The opportunity is scale the individual membership channel can’t match. The question is whether practices are equipped to pursue it — the contracting, the reporting, the operational integration that employer clients expect.

For patients, the model you might encounter in 2026 looks structurally similar to what DPC offered in 2016: smaller panel, direct access, membership fee. The entry point is different. The physician relationship, when it’s working, doesn’t have to be.

For the broader primary care landscape, DPC expanding into California, Illinois, and New York is the signal worth tracking. If the employer channel can establish density in those markets, the argument that DPC is a regional experiment runs out of geography to hide behind.