The upward trend in the number of doctors in regular activity is confirmed in 2026, with a clear increase of 2% in one year as of January 1, 2026, according to figures from the Observatory of Medical Demography published Tuesday by the Order of Physicians.
According to these figures, there were 205,214 doctors in regular activity (doctor in activity, without replacements and active retirees) on January 1, 2026, or almost 4,000 more than on January 1, 2025.
And the increase will continue, estimates the Order of Physicians. “By 2040, there is now a consensus that there will be an increase of around 40% in active doctors,” indicates the Order of Physicians in a press release.
The Order recalls, however, that despite this improvement, “access to care remains a very relevant difficulty, with a persistent majority of territorial inequalities, affecting primary care (general medicine) and even more so access to medical and surgical specialists”.
In detail, such an annual increase in the number of doctors in regular activity had never been observed since 2010, the last reference year of the atlas.
At that time the number of doctors in regular activity was 200,045, before falling more or less regularly until reaching a low in 2023, at 197,417.
“The increase continues and accelerates” compared to those already observed in 2024 and 2025, commented Doctor Jean-Marcel Mourgues, vice-president of the Order of Physicians.
“It’s no longer a shudder, it’s a slight, moderate increase”, which unfortunately “is not enough to change the perception of the difficulties of accessing care”, he indicated.
“And all the more so as inequalities in access to care between territories are growing,” he said. There are departments where certain specialties such as dermatology are now completely absent, he said.
Medical demography has suffered for several years from the effects of the numerus clausus, a policy of controlling the number of medical students that began in the 1970s and which peaked in the 1990s, with only 3,500 students trained each year. year.
The quota was first loosened from the end of the 1990s (reaching 7,000 at the turn of the 2010 decade), then abolished under President Emmanuel Macron.
The number of second-year medical students is now close to 12,000.
AFP / Paris (France) (AFP) / © 2026 AFP
