US urgent care market, mapped
Optum owns MedExpress. Walgreens funded CityMD. The urgent care chains still hold less than a quarter of the US market.
Updated June 8, 2026
For Experity, occupational-health labs, NP staffing platforms, 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.
Clinics held by the top 10 chains
iActive US urgent care sites across ~700 operator entities
Independent or sub-five-site operators — not chains
The top ten chains
The ten largest US urgent care operators, by clinic count.
Ranked by US clinic count, not by revenue. Revenue ranking puts occupational-health-heavy operators at the top, which answers a different question than the one most vendors are asking. The full parent-and-brand breakdown, with who actually buys at each chain, sits in Chain-by-chain notes below.
Who buys this data
Urgent-care EHR, RCM, occ-health, and clinical-staffing vendors selling into 11,943 US sites.
This page is for the teams selling into urgent care operators, not the patients walking in. The buyer for this dataset is usually an Experity-adjacent EHR rep, a CPT 99213 billing specialist, a locums staffing platform, or an occ-health lab targeting the Concentra-adjacent slice.
EHR & clinical software
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
Telehealth 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 sampleRevenue cycle
Urgent-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
Occupational-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 sampleStaffing
Medical 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 samplePatient ops
Retail-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 by-industry email lists, and the rest of the Orbital data hub.
The long version
Detail, on demand.
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 by the Orbital data team, 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 by the Orbital data team, 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 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.
Ranked by US clinic count. The interesting column is the parent company: a corporation you have never heard of often controls the brand you call every month. AFC Urgent Care is 250-odd independently owned franchises. CityMD is Walgreens via three intermediate holding companies. Knowing the real parent is the difference between a cold call and a warm intro.
| # | Chain | Parent / owner | US clinics | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | MedExpress | Owned by Optum, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH). Acquired 2015. | ~280 | Pure walk-in urgent care. Concentrated in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast. The largest single-brand walk-in urgent care chain by pure acute-care site count. |
| 2 | Concentra | Owned by Select Medical Holdings (NYSE: SEM). | ~540 | Roughly 540 medical centers, of which the majority are occupational health and workers comp. Walk-in acute care is a smaller slice. Counted here because many EHR and RCM vendors still segment Concentra as a single buyer. |
| 3 | CityMD | Owned by Summit Health, owned by VillageMD, majority-owned by Walgreens Boots Alliance (NASDAQ: WBA). | ~175 | Concentrated in the NYC metro, New Jersey, and Westchester. The ownership chain is the most convoluted of any US urgent care brand. The buying decision sits at the VillageMD level, not at CityMD. |
| 4 | AFC Urgent Care | American Family Care. Privately held, franchise-led. | ~250 | The largest franchised urgent care brand in the US. Independent operators run the clinics under brand licence. Each franchisee is a distinct buyer on its own contract, not a rollup account. |
| 5 | NextCare Urgent Care | Privately held, backed by Enhanced Equity Funds. | ~170 | Concentrated in the Southwest and Sun Belt. One of the few remaining pure-play PE-backed urgent care platforms that has not been absorbed into a hospital system or payer-owned group. |
| 6 | FastMed Urgent Care | Now owned by Marathon Health following the 2023 consolidation. | ~155 | Concentrated in the Carolinas, Arizona, and Texas. The Marathon Health integration shifted focus toward employer-sponsored health, which changes the buyer profile for EHR and staffing vendors. |
| 7 | CareNow | Owned by HCA Healthcare (NYSE: HCA). | ~165 | Embedded inside HCA’s hospital footprint, mostly in Texas, Tennessee, Colorado, and Florida. Buying decisions follow HCA’s enterprise procurement cycle, not individual clinic budgets. |
| 8 | Patient First | Privately held, founder-led. | ~85 | Concentrated in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Quietly profitable, long-operating, and not on the public PE roll-up path. The buyer is the corporate operations team, not a PE sponsor. |
| 9 | GoHealth Urgent Care | Privately held, partnership model with health systems including Northwell, Hartford HealthCare, and Hartford Hospital. | ~280 | Co-branded sites. The buying decision splits between GoHealth corporate and the health-system partner depending on the service being sold. Two contacts per site is the working assumption. |
| 10 | US HealthWorks | Legacy occupational-health brand absorbed into Concentra following the 2018 Select Medical acquisition. | ~175 | Counted separately here for clarity since some EHR and RCM vendors still segment it as a distinct buyer. Operationally merged with Concentra for most procurement purposes. |
Counts marked “~” are approximate, resolved against the Orbital clinic-level map. Order is by US clinic count. Source: Orbital data team, June 2026 snapshot.
The top five states carry 36% 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 data team, June 2026 snapshot.
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 hold 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.
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.
If you Google “largest urgent care chains in the US,” the top results are usually a revenue-ranked top 25, a market-research summary, and an industry-association press release. All three are good. None of them was built to feed a B2B prospecting motion. The revenue-ranked top 25 puts Concentra at or near the top because workers comp pays more per visit than a walk-in flu test. 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 annual industry benchmarking report is the gold standard for industry context. Ownership splits, payer mix, wait-time benchmarks. It is also a member survey, fielded once a year, with a self-selected sample. It does not give you the named operator at every site. It was never trying to.
Market-research aggregators publish 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.
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 data team 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 pure walk-in urgent care footprint in the US at around 280 locations across roughly 18 states. Concentra has more total medical centers when occupational-health clinics are counted, but its model is workers comp and pre-employment rather than walk-in acute care. By walk-in site count alone, MedExpress and GoHealth are the two largest operators.
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 other industry lists?
The widely cited industry lists publish revenue-ranked or member-ranked top tens that update once a year. 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 share math has not moved as much as the deal volume would imply. The top 10 operators held about 20 percent of clinics in 2018. Seven years later that figure sits at 24 percent. Four points of shift across a decade of deal-making. 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