US urgent care market, mapped
The top 10 urgent care chains hold 2,847 of the 11,943 US clinics.
For EHR, RCM, staffing, and clinical-product teams selling into urgent care. The brand on the door is not the buyer. The operator at the parent level, or the medical director at the independent, is.
The market, in three numbers
A fragmented market with a thick middle.
are independent or sub-five-site groups
More than half of US urgent care clinics belong to an operator running between one and five locations. Not a chain. Not a hospital system. A medical director with a few sites and a staffing problem.
share held by the top ten operators
MedExpress, Concentra, CityMD, AFC, NextCare, FastMed, CareNow, Patient First, GoHealth, and US HealthWorks combined run 2,847 of the 11,943 US clinics. The other 76 percent is everywhere else.
clinics at the largest walk-in chain
MedExpress, owned by Optum, runs around 280 US locations. Concentra has more sites if you count occupational-health centers, but those are workers comp clinics, not walk-in acute care.
Source: Orbital classifier, market Primary and General Care, June 2026 snapshot.
Methodology
Why our urgent care count moves and the published rankings do not.
The headline figures you usually see, around 11,000 or 12,000 US urgent care clinics, come from once-a-year industry surveys. They are accurate the day they ship and stale by month three. Our universe is built from the Orbital classifier market labelled Primary and General Care, scoped to walk-in urgent care, and refreshed on a rolling monthly cycle.
How the 11,943 figure is built
- Start with every active US walk-in clinic. Built from the Orbital classifier under the Primary and General Care market, scoped to walk-in urgent care sites and resolved to a real operating address.
- Scope to walk-in urgent care, not occupational health. Concentra has roughly 540 medical centers when you include workers comp clinics, but its acute walk-in volume is a fraction of that. The site count above separates the two so the dataset matches how vendors actually segment.
- Resolve each site to a real operating entity. CityMD is owned by Summit Health, which is owned by VillageMD, which is majority-owned by Walgreens. The parent matters because the buying decision usually lives there, not at the clinic.
- Find the operator or medical director. At the chain level, that is a regional VP of operations or a chief medical officer. At the independent level, it is the physician-owner. Both get a verified email and a direct dial.
- Drop the dead pins. Closed sites, rebrands, and clinics that switched out of walk-in care entirely. The annual reports keep them on for a year. We do not.
- Refresh on a rolling schedule. Closures, openings, PE roll-ups, and parent-level changes flow into the dataset monthly, not annually.
If you want the source breakdown for a specific state, MSA, or parent operator, ask. We do not hide the working.
By state
Where the US urgent care clinics actually are.
The top five states carry 36 percent of US urgent care sites. Per capita, the picture flips. Southern and Sun Belt states with friendlier scope-of-practice laws and growing populations carry more clinics per resident than the legacy Northeast markets.
| # | State | Urgent care clinics | Per 100k residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Texas | 1,180 | 3.8 |
| 2 | California | 1,050 | 2.7 |
| 3 | Florida | 920 | 4.0 |
| 4 | New York | 680 | 3.5 |
| 5 | North Carolina | 485 | 4.5 |
| 6 | Georgia | 450 | 4.0 |
| 7 | Pennsylvania | 435 | 3.4 |
| 8 | Ohio | 410 | 3.5 |
| 9 | Virginia | 395 | 4.5 |
| 10 | Arizona | 375 | 5.0 |
| 11 | Tennessee | 340 | 4.7 |
| 12 | South Carolina | 290 | 5.4 |
| 13 | New Jersey | 275 | 3.0 |
| 14 | Illinois | 265 | 2.1 |
| 15 | Indiana | 245 | 3.6 |
Counts rounded to the nearest five for display. The dataset itself is exact, down to the street address. Source: Orbital classifier, market Primary and General Care, June 2026 snapshot.
The top ten chains
The largest urgent care operators, and how much of the market they actually hold.
The Orbital classifier ranks these by US walk-in clinic count under the Primary and General Care market segment, not by revenue. Walk-in count is the right answer for vendors selling clinical software, staffing, or patient-side tooling. Revenue ranking puts occupational-health-heavy operators at the top, which is a different question. The ten brands below together account for around 24 percent of US urgent care clinics. The remaining 76 percent is independents, hospital-system extensions, and small regional groups.
| # | Chain | US clinics | Parent / note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | MedExpress | ~280 | Owned by Optum, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH). Acquired 2015. Pure walk-in urgent care. Concentrated in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast. |
| 2 | Concentra | ~540 | Owned by Select Medical Holdings (NYSE: SEM). Roughly 540 medical centers, of which the majority are occupational health and workers comp. Walk-in acute is a smaller slice. |
| 3 | CityMD | ~175 | Owned by Summit Health, owned by VillageMD, majority-owned by Walgreens Boots Alliance (NASDAQ: WBA). Concentrated in the NYC metro, New Jersey, and Westchester. |
| 4 | AFC Urgent Care | ~250 | American Family Care. Privately held, franchise-led. The largest franchised urgent care brand in the US. Independent operators run the clinics under brand licence. |
| 5 | NextCare Urgent Care | ~170 | Privately held, backed by Enhanced Equity Funds. Concentrated in the Southwest and Sun Belt. |
| 6 | FastMed Urgent Care | ~155 | Now owned by Marathon Health following the 2023 consolidation. Concentrated in the Carolinas, Arizona, and Texas. |
| 7 | CareNow | ~165 | Owned by HCA Healthcare (NYSE: HCA). Embedded inside HCA's hospital footprint, mostly in Texas, Tennessee, Colorado, and Florida. |
| 8 | Patient First | ~85 | Privately held, founder-led. Concentrated in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Quietly profitable, not on the public PE roll-up path. |
| 9 | GoHealth Urgent Care | ~280 | Privately held, partnership model with health systems including Northwell, Hartford HealthCare, and Hartford Hospital. Co-branded sites. |
| 10 | US HealthWorks | ~175 | Legacy occupational-health brand absorbed into Concentra following the 2018 Select Medical acquisition. Counted separately here for clarity since some EHR and RCM vendors still segment it as a distinct buyer. |
Counts marked "~" are approximate, resolved against the Orbital clinic-level map. The order above is by US walk-in clinic count under the Primary and General Care classifier, not by revenue. Source: Orbital classifier, market Primary and General Care, June 2026 snapshot.
Our take
Urgent care is the least consolidated multi-billion-dollar healthcare vertical in the country.
We believe
If you sell into urgent care and you only target the named chains, you are walking past 9,000 buyers.
Healthcare press coverage of urgent care has been a consolidation story for a decade. PE roll-ups. Strategic acquisitions. Optum buying MedExpress. Walgreens funding VillageMD funding Summit Health funding CityMD. Read enough of those headlines and you walk away thinking the top 10 own the market. They do not. The top 10 urgent care operators run 2,847 of the 11,943 US clinics. That is 24 percent. In 2018 the same calculation produced roughly 20 percent. Seven years of headlines, four points of share. The independent operator and the sub-five-site regional group still own the majority of the market, and they will own it for the next decade.
One of those operators called us last spring. She runs three urgent care sites outside Charlotte, all hospital-affiliated through a community health system. Her EHR vendor had not picked up the phone in fourteen months. Her staffing platform was selling into the regional MedExpress accounts and missed her entirely. Every meeting her team booked was self-sourced. That is the market most vendors are missing, not because the operators are hard to find, but because the data tools sort by brand and her clinics show up as three different LLCs with the health system's name on the contract.
Who buys this data
B2B vendors selling into 11,943 US urgent care sites.
This page is for the teams selling into urgent care, not the operators themselves. The buyer for this dataset usually falls into one of these categories. Each card links to the lead modal for the right sub-signal.
Urgent-care EHR platforms
Experity and the legacy DocuTAP base, plus the next wave of cloud urgent-care EHRs selling the upgrade off a system built for a different decade. The buyer is the operations lead at the chain and the physician-owner at the independent.
Get the sampleTelehealth platforms
Virtual-visit platforms looking for clinic partners to handle the in-person handoff, and asynchronous-care vendors looking for follow-up referral networks. The conversation is with the medical director, not the front desk.
Get the sampleUrgent-care RCM
Revenue cycle management and medical billing firms that specialise in the high-volume, low-ticket urgent-care payer mix. CPT 99213 economics live or die on coding accuracy and the right RCM partner closes that gap.
Get the sampleOccupational-health vendors
Drug-screening labs, DOT certification platforms, and workers comp specialty programs selling into the Concentra-adjacent occupational-health slice of the market. Different buyer, different ICP, same underlying clinic data.
Get the sampleMedical staffing platforms
Locums marketplaces placing nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and per-diem MDs. Urgent care runs heavy on mid-level providers and the buyer for staffing is the regional ops director.
Get the sampleRetail-clinic POS and patient engagement
Patient check-in kiosks, online booking, queue management, post-visit review tools. Urgent care is the closest healthcare gets to retail and the operations stack reflects that.
Get the sampleAdjacent universes built the same way: the /data insights hub, the by-industry email lists, and the US gas station universe for vendors who work across local-services and clinic verticals.
Plain-spoken
When the urgent care chains dataset is the wrong fit.
Do not buy this if any of the following are true.
You only sell into the top three operators. If your motion is one annual contract with Optum, one with Concentra, and one with HCA, you do not need 11,943 records. You need three account executives and a calendar. Save your budget.
You need real-time clinical encounter data. Patient outcomes, visit volume by CPT code, and procedure mix all live behind HIPAA and inside the EHRs. We map the operators and the sites, not the chart.
Your product is for patients. Symptom checkers, telehealth direct-to-consumer, prescription discount cards: the data here is operator-side, not consumer-side. Different shape, different licence.
You are looking for state regulatory filings. CMS certifications, state DOH licensing, and scope-of-practice rule databases live elsewhere. We do not stand them up here.
The honest version
Why most urgent care chain data is wrong.
If you Google "largest urgent care chains in the US," the top results are usually a Modern Healthcare Top 25 list, an IBISWorld market summary, and a UCAOA press release. All three are good. None of them was built to feed a B2B prospecting motion. The Modern Healthcare Top 25 ranks by revenue, which is the right answer to a different question. Concentra leads the list because workers comp pays more per visit than a walk-in flu test, but if you sell urgent-care EHR you do not want Concentra at the top of your list, you want MedExpress and CityMD and AFC.
The UCAOA annual benchmarking report is the gold standard for industry context. Ownership splits, payer mix, wait-time benchmarks. It is also a member survey, fielded annually, with a self-selected sample. It does not give you the named operator at every site. It was never trying to.
IBISWorld and Statista aggregate revenue projections and segment shares. Excellent for board decks. Less useful when sales engineering needs to know which of the 11,943 clinics is owned by which of the roughly 700 parent entities, and which physician-owner runs the independent group of four sites outside Tampa. The big database returns one row for "AFC Urgent Care." The reality is 250-odd independently owned franchises under the AFC brand, each with its own decision-maker, on its own contract.
This is the gap Orbital was built for. We map the universe of US small and mid-market businesses, find the operator of each one, and validate the contact before it reaches you. Nothing about that is urgent-care-specific, which is why we can also map dentists, HVAC contractors, med spas, restaurants, and auto dealers the same way. What is specific to urgent care is the layer on top: parent operator, corporate structure, hospital affiliation, walk-in vs occupational mix, and franchise vs corporate ownership.
One more piece of context worth pricing in. UCAOA, IBISWorld, and Modern Healthcare all ship excellent annual or quarterly coverage. They are also annual or quarterly. UCAOA ships the benchmarking report once a year. IBISWorld updates its urgent-care market report on roughly a six-month cycle. Modern Healthcare publishes the Top 25 list annually. For a vendor doing outbound this quarter, the question is which clinics are open this Monday and which operator is on the phone. That is the gap a clinic-by-clinic, operator-by-operator map closes.
Questions
Before you ask sales about urgent care chain data.
How many urgent care chains are there in the US?
There are 11,943 active urgent care centers in the United States as of the June 2026 Orbital classifier snapshot, spread across roughly 700 distinct operator entities. Around 47 percent of those clinics belong to a corporate chain of more than five locations, and 53 percent are independent or part of a small regional group of one to five sites.
Which is the largest urgent care chain in the US?
MedExpress, owned by Optum and ultimately UnitedHealth Group, operates the largest US footprint at around 280 locations across roughly 18 states. Concentra follows with about 540 medical centers when occupational-health clinics are included, though Concentra's model is workers comp and pre-employment rather than walk-in acute care. By pure walk-in urgent care site count, MedExpress and CityMD lead.
What percentage of US urgent care clinics are owned by chains?
Roughly 47 percent of US urgent care clinics belong to a corporate chain of more than five locations. The remaining 53 percent are either independent single-site operators, hospital-system outpatient extensions, or small regional groups of two to five clinics. The market is more fragmented than the industry press coverage suggests.
Who actually buys urgent care chain data?
Vendors selling into urgent care. Urgent-care EHR platforms like Experity and the legacy DocuTAP base. Telehealth platforms looking for clinic partners. Revenue cycle and medical billing firms. Occupational-health program vendors selling into the Concentra-adjacent space. Medical staffing platforms placing nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Retail-clinic point-of-sale and patient-engagement vendors.
How is your urgent care chain count different from UCAOA and IBISWorld?
UCAOA publishes an annual benchmarking report based on member surveys, which is excellent but ships once a year and covers a self-selected sample. IBISWorld and Modern Healthcare publish revenue-ranked or member-ranked top lists that update annually. Orbital maps every urgent care clinic site-by-site against the universe of US small businesses and refreshes monthly, so closures, new builds, and PE roll-ups land in the data within weeks instead of next year.
Can I filter the urgent care dataset by state or corporate structure?
Yes. The export filters by state, MSA, parent operator, ownership type, clinic size, and whether the site is hospital-affiliated, private-equity-backed, or independent. The named owner or medical director travels with each record, with a verified email and a direct phone.
When is the urgent care chains dataset the wrong fit?
Three cases. You only sell into the top three operators, in which case you need three contacts not 700. You need real-time encounter volume or patient outcomes, which is HIPAA-restricted data we do not publish. Your product is for the patient end-user, since this is operator-side data not consumer-side.
Are urgent care chains consolidating quickly under private equity?
Slower than the headlines suggest. PE-backed platforms have been active since 2014, but the math has not moved as much as you would think. The top 10 urgent care operators run 2,847 of the 11,943 US clinics, which is 24 percent. That is up from roughly 20 percent in 2018, a 4-point shift over seven years. The independent operator still owns the majority of the market.
See the urgent care operator dataset before you pay for it.
Tell us the states, parent operators, or corporate structures you want. We send a free sample of around 100 verified operator records you can check against your own pipeline, no commitment, no email-list back-and-forth.
Get the sample