Where the orthopedic surgeons are.
And where they aren't.
Every county in the United States, colored by how many orthopedic surgeons practice there per 100,000 residents. Switch to miles from the nearest surgeon, hospitals with no orthopedic surgeon in their county, hand surgery and sports medicine, or how close the workforce is to retirement. Built on the method behind the American College of Surgeons Surgical Workforce Mapping Tool, then extended. Read the data brief.
States by orthopedic surgeons per 100,000
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Ask a question about the orthopedic workforce.
Answers come from this map's dataset only. Name a county or a state for its numbers.
Claude answers from the CMS, Census, CDC, NHTSA and CMS Medicare Advantage figures behind this map. Check any number you plan to quote against the panel or the CSV.
Who is counted
Every clinician whose primary Medicare specialty is Orthopedic Surgery in the CMS Doctors and Clinicians National Downloadable File (refreshed 18 Aug 2026). Residents and fellows do not enroll as billing clinicians, so trainees are excluded, as in the ACS method. Practice locations where the enrolled organization is a rehabilitation or physical-therapy company are billing reassignments for therapy services and are excluded (one such company lists 627 orthopedic surgeons at a single address). Surgeons not enrolled in Medicare (a small share, mostly pediatric and military practice) are not in this file; hand surgeons enrolled under the separate Medicare “Hand Surgery” specialty are not included.
How counties are assigned
Each practice-location ZIP code is assigned to the county that contains the Census internal point of its ZIP Code Tabulation Area (2024 ZCTA gazetteer, located in the map's own county polygons), falling back to the county holding the largest share of the ZCTA in the Census 2020 ZCTA-to-county relationship file for the 62 ZCTAs whose point misses every polygon. A surgeon with locations in several counties is counted once in each (“any location”) and split evenly across locations for the weighted count, so weighted counts sum to the number of surgeons. ACS weights a primary location at 0.6; this file does not mark a primary, so we split evenly.
Beyond the ACS tool
Miles to the nearest surgeon is the great-circle distance from a county's Census internal point to the nearest county that has an orthopedic surgeon (2024 county gazetteer); it is a floor on travel distance, not drive time. Hospitals are acute-care, critical-access, rural emergency, children's, VA and DoD hospitals in the CMS Hospital General Information file, assigned to counties by ZIP. Metro / nonmetro uses the USDA ERS 2023 Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (1–3 metro). Hand surgery is the Medicare primary specialty (orthopaedic and plastic hand surgeons); sports medicine is orthopedic surgeons who list it as a secondary specialty. 30+ years counts years since medical-school graduation as reported to CMS.
Demand and risk layers
Per 100,000 aged 65+ divides the weighted count by the county's population aged 65 and over (Census vintage 2024 county characteristics; Connecticut's counties use vintage 2021). Arthritis prevalence is the crude share of adults with doctor-diagnosed arthritis from the CDC PLACES 2024 county release (187 small counties are suppressed by CDC; Connecticut's counties carry the state value). Road crash deaths are NHTSA FARS fatalities summed for 2021–2023, divided by three and by population, a proxy for trauma demand. Medicare Advantage share is enrolled ÷ eligible from the CMS state/county penetration file, September 2026 (CMS suppresses small counties and does not list Connecticut).
Population and rates
Rates use the Census Bureau Vintage 2024 county population estimates. Connecticut replaced its eight counties with nine planning regions in 2022; the ZIP crosswalk and the county map still use the counties, so Connecticut is shown by county with its last county estimates (vintage 2021). Rate = weighted surgeons ÷ population × 100,000. Practice-location rows with a ZIP outside the 50 states and DC, or not in the ZCTA file (PO-box-only ZIPs), are dropped: — of 58,743 rows. Rebuild: scripts/build_ortho_workforce.py.
Reference: American College of Surgeons, Surgical Workforce Mapping Tool (NPPES, April 2025) and the press release “15 million Americans live in a county with no general surgeon.” This map measures where surgeons list a practice address, not travel time, surgical volume, or hospital privileges. Not affiliated with the ACS. Educational use.