Nearly half of GP practices in New Zealand cannot fill a doctor vacancy

For anyone who owns or runs a general practice, the headline out of the latest GenPro survey is deceptively upbeat. The numbers are moving in the right direction. The problem is the direction of travel matters less than the pace, and the pace is glacial.

The survey of 206 practices, released on 14 September 2026, found 47% of New Zealand general practices still have GP vacancies, down from 54% a year earlier. That is a seven percentage point improvement over roughly twelve months. At that rate, a fully staffed sector is years away. This is not recovery. It is a slow crawl out of a very deep hole.

The economics remain hostile

The financial picture is the same story of marginal gains masking structural weakness. Sixty percent of practices remain concerned about their future financial viability, just five points better than the year before. Twelve percent reported making a financial loss, down from 18%, but that still leaves a significant tail of businesses running in the red.

What those owners are doing to survive tells the real story. Fifty-six percent now charge for services that used to be free, including referrals and medical certificates, and 22% cut services in the past six months. These are not abstract metrics. They are the decisions of operators trying to keep the lights on by charging patients more for less.

GenPro chair Dr Angus Chambers put the stakes bluntly, warning that if 12% of practices went out of business it would mean 500,000 patients without doctors and nurse practitioners. That is the scale of the exposure sitting behind a modestly improving loss figure.

More GPs on paper, less capacity in practice

Supply is where the optimism really breaks down. The Medical Council’s 2026 workforce survey counts 4,144 GPs, up 8.1% on 2025. A genuine increase, until you look underneath. GPs as a share of the active medical workforce have fallen from 37% in 2000 to 23.5% today, and average GP working hours have dropped to 33.9 a week from 39.6 in 2006, with 62.1% now working under 40 hours. More doctors on the register does not equal more appointments available.

The clearest statement of the problem comes from the government’s own planning agency. Health NZ’s workforce plan, updated in July 2026, projects a 25.5% GP FTE shortage. That is not the language of a temporary blip. It is a structural deficit baked into the system.

Back in October 2025, when GenPro described the sector as out of intensive care but still in recovery, Dr Chambers made a point that still holds. He noted then that the government had increased primary care support and was overhauling the funding model, but that neither step had increased the supply of medical professionals. A year on, the vacancy data says the same thing.

The funding fix that doesn’t fix supply

Health Minister Simeon Brown acknowledged the improvement but conceded more work was needed, pointing to record primary care funding and new funding models introduced from 1 July 2026 that follow patient need through multimorbidity, rurality and deprivation. The new model is a genuine structural improvement on the old capitation approach and deserves credit. But money that follows patients does not conjure doctors to treat them. The vacancy rate is the proof.

The corporate endgame

Here is the trend that should concern anyone thinking about where primary care lands in five years. A joint report from the Resident Doctors Association and Apex Union, released on 4 September 2026, found one in four GPs is now employed by a corporate, and flagged a looming retirement bulge among existing GPs. The same report noted about 320,000 people are not enrolled in primary care at all, concentrated in deprived areas.

For the independent owner-operator, the logic is grim. You cannot fill your most critical role, you are charging patients more for less, and the funding model, however improved, does not touch supply. The rational exit for many is a sale to a consolidator. That is precisely what the one-in-four corporate figure signals is already happening.

The 25.5% projected FTE shortage is the number that should anchor every medium-term decision in this sector. It says the shortage is not a cycle to be waited out. Without a real lift in supply or a fundamental rethink of how primary care is delivered, the slow erosion of the owner-operated clinic continues, and a fragile recovery is no recovery at all.

Sources

• GPs remain worried about financial viability despite fee hikes, survey finds (2026-09-14)
• Nearly half of NZ general practices still looking for GPs (2026-09-14)
• General practice ‘out of intensive care but still in recovery’ (2025-10-14)
• General practice less pessimistic but recruitment problem persists – GenPro Survey (2025-10-14)
• Union calls for GP practice revamp: ‘Let’s try a different model’ (2026-09-04)
• The New Zealand Medical Workforce in 2026 (2026)