The 2026 medical billing benchmarks report
We pulled anonymized data from 1,400 practices to answer the question every practice manager asks: how do my numbers actually compare?
The four numbers that matter
Clean-claim rate, days in AR, net collection rate, and denial rate. Everything else is downstream of these four. We report each by specialty so you can compare against your actual peers, not a blended average that hides the truth.
Where the median sits in 2026
Across our dataset, the median days-in-AR is 41 and the median denial rate is 11%. The top quartile runs AR under 25 days and denials under 5%. The gap between median and top quartile is almost entirely process — not payer mix.
How to read your own numbers
Pick the one metric that's furthest from the top quartile for your specialty and start there. Improvements compound: cutting denials lifts clean-claim rate, which cuts days in AR, which lifts net collection. You don't have to fix everything at once.