If you’re looking for current, reliable data on physician burnout, you’ve come to the right place. Healthcare leaders, CMOs, and clinician wellness advocates search every year for longitudinal data they can actually use — data that goes beyond headlines and helps organizations understand where their physicians stand right now.
The 2025–2026 State of Well-Being Report is one of the most comprehensive sources of that data available today. Published annually by the Well-Being Index — a clinician wellness platform developed and validated at Mayo Clinic — the 2025 report is built on 72,193 Well-Being Index assessments completed by healthcare professionals across the United States between January 1 and December 31, 2025. It tracks eight occupation groups, five years of trends, and six dimensions of well-being and distress.
This article shares a snapshot of what the data reveals — and points you to the full report for the complete picture.
How Physician Burnout Is Measured in This Report
Before diving into the numbers, it helps to understand the framework. The Well-Being Index uses a validated, nine-question assessment tool that measures clinician well-being across six dimensions:
- Burnout — whether work has left someone feeling burned out or emotionally hardened
- Suicidal Ideation Risk — measured through depression symptom and emotional problem indicators
- Severe Fatigue — including fatigue significant enough to affect daily function
- Work-Life Integration — whether work schedules allow adequate time for personal and family life
- Meaning in Work — the degree to which work feels meaningful
- Quality of Life — a composite of all dimensions combined
Based on their assessment results, individuals are placed into one of four well-being categories: Distressed, Struggling, Okay, or Thriving. The report also tracks two threshold concepts useful for organizational benchmarking: a Hotspot (50% or more Distressed & Struggling — a signal for priority intervention) and a Brightspot (60% or more Thriving & Okay — a model worth replicating).
This multidimensional approach is what makes the data meaningful for leaders. A single burnout rate doesn’t tell you whether your physicians are emotionally hardened, sleep-deprived, or struggling with work-life balance. The Well-Being Index measures all of it — and the State of Well-Being Report shows how those dimensions interact across groups.
The Headline: Healthcare Well-Being Is Improving — But Not Evenly
The top-line story from the 2025–2026 State of Well-Being Report is one of cautious progress. Across all 72,193 assessments, 2025 represents the strongest well-being outcomes in the five-year tracking period:
- 33.5% of healthcare workers are now Thriving — up 2.2 percentage points from 2024, and the highest point in five years of tracking
- The combined Distressed & Struggling rate fell to 40.1% — down from 44.1% in 2021
- The Distressed category alone dropped nearly 4 percentage points since 2022 (23.9% to 20.0%)
At the same time, burnout across all groups remains at 49% — stubbornly high even as other indicators improve. And critically, the progress is not evenly distributed. Some groups are improving fast. Others have flatlined. And physician burnout sits somewhere in between — with a story that’s more nuanced than either the optimists or the pessimists tend to tell.
Physician Burnout in 2025: Six Consecutive Years of Improvement
Among the eight occupation groups tracked in the report, physicians stand out for one important reason: they have improved every single year since 2019. According to the State of Well-Being Report, that makes physicians the occupation with the longest sustained improvement trajectory in the dataset.
Here’s what that looks like:
- Physician Distressed percentage dropped from 28.7% to 22.4% between 2021 and 2025
- The physician Thriving rate rose from 24.6% to 31.7%
- Physician burnout fell from 50.0% (2024) to 45.6% (2025) — a 4.3 percentage point decline in a single year
- The physician Distressed & Struggling rate declined 4.5 percentage points from 2024 to 2025, the second-largest single-year improvement of any group
Published research supports this trajectory. A study in Mayo Clinic Proceedings (Shanafelt et al., 2022) documented declining burnout and improving work-life integration satisfaction among physicians nationally — consistent with the multi-year trend visible in the Well-Being Index data.
Six consecutive years of improvement is meaningful. But with 42.8% of physicians still Distressed or Struggling, and 45.6% reporting burnout, there is no finish line in sight.
Where Physicians Stand Relative to Other Healthcare Workers
One of the most useful features of the State of Well-Being Report is the ability to compare physician well-being to other occupational groups — giving leaders important context for where physicians fall in the broader landscape.
In 2025, the Well-Being Snapshot by Role reveals a wide range of outcomes:
- Residents & Fellows have the strongest outcomes of any group — just 15.8% Distressed & Struggling and a remarkable 59.2% Thriving. The report notes they operate within organized support structures: ACGME duty-hour regulations, mandated wellness curricula, and cohort-based peer support systems.
- Physicians land in the middle of the pack — 42.8% Distressed & Struggling, 31.7% Thriving — improving steadily but still carrying significant strain.
- Nursing remains the most distressed occupation group at 50.3% Distressed & Struggling — essentially flat for three consecutive years and the only group currently classified as a Hotspot.
The contrast between Residents and Nurses raises an important strategic question the report addresses directly: the groups with the most structured institutional support show the best outcomes and the most consistent improvement. Groups without equivalent frameworks have stagnated.
For physician leaders, this context matters. Physician well-being is improving — but the conditions that drive that improvement are worth understanding and sustaining.
The Dimension Most Leaders Overlook: Work-Life Integration
One of the report’s most striking findings isn’t about burnout at all — it’s about the gap between two protective factors: meaning in work and work-life integration.
Across all occupation groups, 77–83% of healthcare workers report finding their work meaningful. But only 41–54% feel their work schedule allows adequate time for personal and family life. That gap — as wide as 39 percentage points for some groups — represents a persistent tension at the heart of clinician wellness.
For physicians specifically, the report shows a meaning-in-work agreement rate of 83.1% — the highest of any occupation group tracked. Their work-life integration agreement rate? Just 45.7%.
The report notes that work-life integration has shown the least year-over-year progress of any well-being dimension tracked. Improving it likely requires operational changes — scheduling reform, staffing model redesign, administrative burden reduction — rather than programmatic wellness interventions alone.
This is exactly the kind of insight that gets buried in a single-metric burnout survey. It’s also exactly the kind of finding that helps leaders make more targeted decisions.
What the 2025 Data Means for Healthcare Leaders
The State of Well-Being Report closes with six recommendations for organizational leaders, drawn from cross-cutting analysis of the multi-year data. A few themes emerge clearly for those focused on physician burnout:
Structured support drives results. Physicians and Residents — the two groups with the most organized institutional well-being investment — show the best outcomes and the most consistent improvement. This pattern is consistent across five years of data.
Meaning in work may be an early warning signal. The report notes that declines in meaning-in-work scores have, in past years, preceded broader deterioration in other well-being dimensions. Tracking this metric alongside burnout gives leaders an earlier view of emerging risk.
Work-life integration is the hardest problem — and the most important. With the lowest agreement rate of any protective factor and the least improvement year over year, it requires structural solutions, not just wellness programming.
See the Full Physician Burnout Data — Free
This article shares only a portion of what the 2025–2026 State of Well-Being Report contains. The full report — available free — includes:
- Year-over-year well-being trends from 2021 through 2025 across all eight occupation groups
- Physician-specific breakdowns by specialty, career stage, and years since graduation
- Burnout, emotional hardening, fatigue, overwhelm, depression indicators, and more — across all six dimensions
- Hotspot and Brightspot identification across the healthcare workforce
- Cross-cutting analysis revealing compound risk profiles and which groups face the greatest combined challenges
- Six strategic recommendations for healthcare leaders
If you’re making decisions about clinician wellness in 2025 — or building the case for a more data-driven approach — this is the report to start with.
