The best states for physicians in 2021: The complete ranking

Welcome to Best States to Practice, a data project that analyzes each state for how physician friendly it is. This project is conducted by our partner publication, Physicians Practice.

For the full results, check out Physicians Practice.

For our analysis, our editors ranked the states based on 2020 data covering five categories:

• Mean salary
• Malpractice premium costs
• The 2020 cost of living index
• Tax climate (state collections per capita)
• Physician density

We obtained the data from publicly available sources and partner organizations. The Cunningham Group provided malpractice premiums for each state. Averages, published in the report, were calculated by Physicians Practice.

Here’s a brief description of our methodology: We ranked each state on the criteria described desirable outcome per criteria, then averaging those scores resulted in the ranks of the states below and in other sequences in the slideshow series.