Locum tenens is temporary clinical coverage: a clinician works a shift, or a run of shifts, at a clinic that isn't their permanent employer. Urgent care clinics use locum tenens coverage for a structural reason. A walk-in clinic posts its hours in advance and has to staff every one of them, whether or not someone on the permanent team is on leave, out sick, or not yet hired.
What Locum Tenens Means in Urgent Care
The phrase is Latin for "one holding the place." In staffing it covers anything from one Saturday shift to several months of coverage. Our guide to what locum tenens is covers the definition and how it differs from per-diem and travel work.
Medicare uses the term more narrowly. Under its rules, a physician can be paid for services a substitute physician provides to their patients while the regular physician is unavailable. The arrangement has to be reciprocal or paid per diem or on another fee-for-time basis, and it can't run more than 60 continuous days unless the regular physician is a reservist called to active duty. CMS retired the phrase "locum tenens" from its claims manual in 2017 and now calls these fee-for-time compensation arrangements.
That rule is about how one physician's practice bills Medicare for a substitute. It isn't a definition of locum staffing, and it doesn't describe how a clinic bills for an NP, a PA, or a physician it brings in through an agency or a marketplace. How to bill for a locum clinician's visits is a question for the clinic's own billing and compliance staff.
Why Urgent Care Clinics Need Locum Tenens Coverage
An appointment-based practice can absorb an absence by moving appointments. A walk-in clinic can't move patients who haven't arrived yet, so an uncovered shift means shorter hours, longer waits, or a closed door. Every gap in the schedule is a coverage problem on a specific date, which is the kind of problem a single locum shift solves.
The number of schedules to fill has grown too. The Urgent Care Association counts about 15,000 urgent care centers in 2024, up from about 9,000 in 2016. Every one of those centers has a set of shifts to staff each week it's open, evenings and weekends included.
Permanent hiring doesn't close a gap on that timescale. Recruiting, credentialing, and onboarding a permanent clinician usually takes longer than the notice a clinic gets for a resignation, a leave, or a sick call. Locum coverage fills the dates in between.
The Clinician Supply Behind Locum Tenens Demand
Clinics are competing for a limited pool of clinicians. The AAMC projected in 2024 that the U.S. could be short by up to 86,000 physicians by 2036. In the same projection, physicians 65 or older made up 20% of the clinical physician workforce and those 55 to 64 another 22%, so more than two in five were within about a decade of traditional retirement age or past it.
That 86,000 is the top of a projected range, and it's a national number across all physician specialties. It doesn't tell you what any one city's urgent care market looks like.
The other two roles that see urgent care patients are growing quickly. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects nurse practitioner employment to grow 41% from 2025 to 2035 and physician assistant employment to grow 21% over the same period. Clinics that staff shifts with NPs and PAs, within what their state's practice rules allow, are drawing on that growth.
Burnout, Schedule Control, and Locum Tenens Work
Physician burnout rose sharply and then fell. In the national survey series published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, the share of physicians reporting at least one symptom of burnout was 38.2% in 2020, 62.8% in 2021, and 45.2% in 2023. The AMA's own survey of health systems put the figure at 43.2% in 2024. Burnout is down from its peak and still common.
Locum work changes one thing about a job: who sets the schedule. You choose which shifts to take and which weeks to skip. It doesn't change visit volume, charting, or the pace of a busy clinic once you're on shift, so it helps most when the schedule is the part you want to change.
If you're weighing it, you can test locum work with a few shifts before leaving a permanent job. If you already work at several sites, managing multiple locum assignments takes rules of its own.
Why Locum Tenens Fits Urgent Care
Three features of urgent care make shift-by-shift coverage practical:
- No hospital privileging. Urgent care doesn't grant hospital privileges, so there's no medical staff committee in the credentialing timeline for a physician, NP, PA, or CRNA. The clinic still has to credential you, and that still takes documents and time.
- A shift with a start and an end. Care is episodic, with no inpatient census and no patient panel, so the work is handed off when the shift ends.
- Clinics near where clinicians live. The Urgent Care Association classifies 81% of centers as metropolitan, so a shift often doesn't involve a flight or lodging.
Our guide to working locum shifts at urgent care compares the setting with hospital locum work in more detail.
Where the Locum Tenens Model Falls Short
Locum coverage doesn't add clinicians to the workforce. It moves available hours to the dates and clinics that need them, which helps a clinic with a gap and does nothing about the size of the pool.
It also comes with costs for the clinician. Each facility credentials you separately, locum work usually comes without employer benefits, and the tax treatment depends on the agreement you sign. Our guides to credentialing and taxes explain how each generally works, and an accountant can apply the tax side to your situation.
Urgent care isn't the right setting for everyone, either. If you want continuity with the same patients, primary care is a better match. If you want an assignment in another part of the country with travel and housing arranged for you, a traditional agency with a recruiter does that and a self-service marketplace doesn't.
Rediworks lists urgent care shifts for physicians, NPs, PAs, CRNAs, RNs, and medical assistants, with the rate shown on every listing before you apply. Sign up to see shifts.