Georgia’s locum tenens market combines the scale of a major Southeast hub with persistent rural shortage geography that extends well beyond the Atlanta metro. Emory Healthcare, Wellstar Health System, Grady Memorial, and Piedmont Healthcare anchor the urban and suburban market, while community hospitals and federally qualified health centers across the state’s rural counties create steady…
South Carolina’s locum tenens market is shaped less by a single flagship employer than by one of the most widespread rural shortage geographies in the Southeast. More than 40 of the state’s 46 counties carry federal HPSA designations, creating sustained demand for primary care and hard-to-fill specialties across community hospitals, regional health systems, and federally…
CompHealth, Weatherby Healthcare, and AMN Healthcare collectively dominate the locum tenens placement market. Between them they place more physicians than any other combination of agencies — which means most locum physicians will encounter at least one of them, and many will work with two or all three simultaneously. This comparison covers the structural differences that…
AMN Healthcare is the largest healthcare staffing company in the United States by revenue — a publicly traded enterprise operating at a fundamentally different scale and with a fundamentally different business model than the agency-focused brands most locum physicians think of first. AMN is not primarily a locum tenens placement agency in the way CompHealth…
Weatherby Healthcare is the second major locum tenens brand within CHG Healthcare’s portfolio — the same parent company that owns CompHealth. Where CompHealth leads with breadth and volume, Weatherby positions itself as a specialist-focused agency with deeper expertise in hard-to-fill roles, faster credentialing logistics, and more experienced recruiters for complex placements. Whether that positioning holds…
CompHealth is the largest locum tenens staffing agency in the United States by most measures — broad specialty coverage, a nationwide facility network, and decades of market presence. For locum physicians, that scale is both an asset and a liability. CompHealth can open doors that smaller agencies cannot. It can also operate with the institutional…
Indiana punches above its weight as a locum tenens market. A 3.23% flat income tax — one of the lowest in any state that taxes income at all — a 2025 law that voided physician non-competes with hospitals and hospital systems, a functional IMLC compact pathway, and a large rural shortage footprint across a state…
Tennessee sits at the intersection of two things that matter most to locum physicians: no state income tax on wages and a healthcare market anchored by Nashville — the corporate headquarters of HCA Healthcare, the largest for-profit hospital system in the world. Add persistent rural demand in eastern Appalachian counties, a significant safety-net market in…
Virginia offers one of the more compelling regulatory environments for locum physicians in 2026. A functioning IMLC compact pathway, a non-compete framework that has become progressively more physician-friendly through three significant legislative changes since 2020, and a market anchored by the Northern Virginia/DC corridor on one end and persistent rural Appalachian and Shenandoah Valley shortages…
New Jersey is one of the most complex locum tenens markets in the country — high demand, high compensation, high taxes, and a regulatory environment that shifted materially in the first quarter of 2026. The state’s density, proximity to New York City, and persistent physician shortage create a consistent assignment market across specialties. But NJ’s…