- 22,189 individuals earned their MD degree in 2026. That’s up 2.7% from 21,604 in 2025 and up 15.2% from 19,262 in 2017.
- 55,189 individuals applied in 2021 for the class that entered medical school in 2022. Of those, 23,810 were accepted and 22,710 enrolled.
- 2,121 graduates who earned dual degrees, including 722 who earned an MD and a PhD
- 3.75 was the mean undergraduate GPA of those who matriculated into med school in 2022
- 511.9 was their MCAT score
- 84.6% did research as undergraduates.
- 93.7% had community service experience
- 27% took at least 1 community college class before attending a 4 year university
- 11.2% were the first in their family to attend college
- 53–the oldest MD grad this year was 53 when they started med school
- 55.6% of 2026 MD grads were women. Women made up 56.5% of applicants and 55.7% of those accepted.
- 52.1% identified themselves as white. Another 29.3% identified as Asian, 12.5% as Hispanic or Latino, 10.5% as Black or African American, 1% as American Indian or Alaska Native, 0.4% as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander and 4.1% as another race or ethnicity. Another 2.9% declined to respond. The total exceeds 100%, likely because applicants could select more than one category
- 73.6% speak more than one language. Of the class, 37.6% speak a language other than English at a native or advanced level, and one graduate speaks nine languages.
- 97% of new graduates say they want to focus their career on direct patient care. Another 80.4% want to teach and 49.5% want to do research.
- 53.7% say they chose medicine for stable, secure future.
- 2.3% of those who just graduated say they plan to work in a rural area. 45% said they preferred a urban or suburban setting. 52.7% had no preference
- 21,286 is the number of USMD grads who applied for residency programs in the US. 20,000 international medical graduates also applied for US residencies as did 8,409 osteopathic medical graduates.
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The reality is that we absolutely need to expand the number of seats available in med school classes. Of those 57% of applicants who were not accepted, probably most of them were highly qualified for admission, and would have made excellent, US-trained, doctors. This is without even considering the disparity in concrete admissions criteria being used in US med school admissions in order to “shape” the class to match some desired demographic goal.
The residency match offers >44K positions/year, so if 22K are being graduated from US schools annually, that means that a lot of positions are being filled with foreign trained doctors, many coming from third world nations which pay scarce public money to train their students, then lose them to wealthy nations like ours, when they have desperate need of keeping these MDs in their own countries. And then there’s the dirty little secret of admission to medical school in third world countries by bribery, and cheating on internationally-administered exams needed to apply for US residency slots.
There’s a lot more behind these stats than just the bare numbers. One of the most crucial ways for us to increase seats in MD/DO schools here, where we have so many well-qualified applicants who cannot get in, is to face up to the fact that our medical students can and should be doing more of their clinical training in outpatient settings, and spending less time in the hospitals. Yes, of course, hospital training is very important, but the reality is that most primary care doctors will spend most of their time in the office, and usually stop going to the hospital within a few years of starting outpatient practice. Those who actually wind up practicing in the hospital get more hospital time in residency. This would expand the available training space for medical students, since usually, there is a scramble to find enough hospital sites for rotations for medical students. As of now, outpatient clinic time in primary care is usually provided for free, as an honor to be asked, and as the right thing to do, to pass on medical knowledge to the next generation. Of course, if pay were offered for this outpatient training time (since it definitely slows the doctor down, to teach), surely more than enough outpatient clinic slots would open up, for more med student time.
The only such case I’m aware of was a few years ago with Nepalese students
If you include USDO medical graduates, the number of US med grads is 30,000. So many fewer seats are going to internationally educated applicants than you suggest @parentologist. A significant number of internationally educated applicants are US citizens who attended an overseas med school.
In 2026, 1300 US citizens IMGs matched into US residencies.
So the bulk US residencies are going to US med school grads and US citizens.
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Future doctors who want to do a lot of their rotations in medical office practices should consider applying to and attending D.O. schools. Lots of non-hospital based rotations with doctors. The students do go to the hospital but their rotation is based in the doctor office.
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Still a significant number of IMGs, and the reality is that they’re mostly not trained to the same level as US MD/DO grades. We need more med school slots in the US!
Since 2020, all these new medical schools have opened or established schools added additional campuses
- Frist SOM at Belmont University
- Alice Walton SOM
- Meritus SOM
- Baptist Health Sciences COM
- Duquesne COM
- Kansas Health Sciences COM
- Noorda COM
- California Health Sciences COM
- Sam Houston State University COM
- Valley COM
- Northern Colorado COM
- LECOM- Jacksonville
- University of Georgia SOM
- Touro COM – Idaho
- UT-Tyler SOM
- Charles Drew SOM
- Methodist University Cape Fear Valley SOM
- Univ of Minnesota- St Cloud campus
- Roseman University SOM
- D’Youville COM
- Illinois COM at the Chicago School
- Burrell COM – Melbourne, FL campus
- Creighton SOM --Phoenix campus
- Kaiser Permanente SOM
- University of Missouri-Springfield campus
- Wake Forest – Charlotte, NC campus
- Jefferson-- Allentown, PA campus
- Temple University – York County campus
- Temple University–Atlantic City, NJ campus
- MCG–Savannnah campus
- Arizona State SOM
- Ponce University SOM–St Louis campus
Opening in the next year or 2-
- Jefferson–Newark, DE campus
- Mark & Mary Stevens SOM at Santa Clara University
- LMU-DeBusk COM–Orange Park, FL campus
- Xavier Ochner SOM (XULA)
- Xavier College COM
- Jacqueline Nicole Michel COM at Larkin University
- Texas A&M Engineering Medicine
- BYU SOM
- American University of Health Sciences SOM
- Aria University SOM
- Maryland COM @ Morgan State
- University of the Pacific SOM
- Benedictine COM
- Indiana University of Pennsylvania COM
- Universidad Ana G. Méndez SOM (Carolina, PR)
- The University of Dubuque John and Alice Butler COM
- Eastern Kentucky COM
- Franciscan Alliance COM (Indiana)
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Late edit to above
Xavier College COM is open and accepting applications.
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Wonderful news! We need more! We need to be graduating every year as many MD/DO’s as there are residency slots in the US. It is interesting that so many of these new seats are at osteopathic schools, but everyone seems to consider osteopathy to be the same as MD, with a class in osteopathic manipulation and possibly some more emphasis on nutrition and preventative medicine. We have plenty of DO docs practicing in the US, and we need more physicians!
D.O.s ARE physicians. And there should be no disputing about this.
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Only non-U.S. trained osteopaths do not hold DO degrees are not recognized as physicians in the U.S.
There is no difference between and DOs and MDs in the US. They get essentially identical educations in med school, except that DOs get 2 years of training in OMM (osteopathic manual manipulation). MDs and DOs train side-by-side in the same residency programs.
Both MD and DO schools are adding nutrition education into their curricula, at the behest of the current Secretary of Health and Human Service.
The reason why DO school are opening faster is that the AOA has easier to meet requirements for new schools. (Like no requirement for research facilities or $XX million in endowment funding.)
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Which is fine. The training they offer is what matters.
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A non-US educated DO cannot be considered for US medical residencies because they are not trained as physicians.
And as such would not be able to get a license to practice medicine here.
But domestics DO trained physicians can.
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But not as equal as the DDS, Doctor of Dental Surgery & the DMD, Doctor of Dental Medicine, degree in dentistry. DMD and DDS programs are different only in name. Both titles represent identical educational requirements, clinical training, and licensing standards.
DMD vs. DDS: Is There Any Difference?
@maijem11 how familiar are you with the educations and qualifications of DOs, and their licensing requirements?
For anyone interested, I’d be happy to share my first hand knowledge of this via private message. You can message me, or ask me to message you.
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I am not a medical professional but have family members that have pursued both degrees. The training and licensing requirements are different. But from the perspective of a patient seeking out a family care doctor, the DO & MD professional are equally qualified.
DO vs. MD: How much does the medical school degree type matter? by B. Murphy (9/8/2026)
Don’t understand your post.
A DO saved my life-- correctly diagnosed a life threatening issue when three different MD specialists gave the old “watch and wait” line. A few months later at a routine check up when I asked “how did you catch it?” his answer was “I was trained to diagnose. They are trained to operate”.
When you show up in the ER with a gunshot wound, you want someone who is trained to operate. When you present at your PCP’s office with multiple, conflicting, irregular symptoms AND a thick file of diagnostic tests which show that something is wrong but no clear next step- I think you want the highly trained diagnostician. It’s not a “higher or lower” situation.
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You clearly do not understand the training and licensing requirements for DOs.
I won’t debate this any further.