MGMA compensation data cost for a small practice: what the $399 membership includes, and what it does not

MGMA publishes what membership costs and does not publish what the data costs. A one-year individual membership is $399, or $349 on auto renew, or $699 for two years. DataDive, which is where the compensation data actually lives, is not included with individual membership and needs a separate purchase whose price appears nowhere on MGMA's site. Organizational membership includes DataDive, and its price is not published either. So for a small practice the honest answer is that you cannot find out what MGMA costs without a sales call.

That is not a complaint, it is a budgeting problem. If you are a practice administrator with an open medical assistant req and a partner meeting on Thursday, you need a number this week. Below is every price MGMA does publish, what each one buys, which competing surveys print their prices, and how to decide whether a small practice needs any of it.

MGMA individual membership prices

The line that matters is on MGMA's own individual membership page, and it is easy to miss: DataDive access is not included with individual membership, it requires an additional purchase, and it is included with organizational memberships. So the $399 is not a data subscription. It buys membership benefits, which currently include an individual-member data report and the Principles of Practice Management course that MGMA values at $625. If what you came for is the compensation benchmarks, $399 is the entry fee, not the price.

Which healthcare surveys print a price

I checked the public pages of the five publishers a US practice is most likely to consider. Two print prices. Three do not.

Read those two published prices as the shape of the market rather than as MGMA's number, because they are not the same products. Still, a practice budgeting for benchmarks should plan in four figures a year, and should notice that the SullivanCotter gap between a participant and a non-participant is four times the price. Submitting your own data is the single biggest lever on what any of this costs.

What a 12-provider practice is actually buying

Split your payroll before you split your budget. In a practice with 12 providers and 40 staff, the providers are the bigger dollars per head and the staff are the bigger headcount, and the two need completely different data.

Provider pay is where MGMA and AMGA are irreplaceable. If your associate contracts pay a rate per work RVU, or if a partner wants to know whether 5,800 wRVUs is a strong year for family medicine, no public source answers that. The federal wage survey records wages, not productivity, and it does not separate interventional cardiology from general cardiology. AMGA reports metrics for 181 physician and advanced practice specialties plus 145 subspecialties, built from nearly 188,000 providers across 451 medical groups. That is the thing you are paying for, and it is worth paying for.

The staff side is a different story, because the federal wage survey publishes offices of physicians and offices of dentists as separate industries. In offices of physicians, the May 2025 median for a medical assistant is $45,520, for a biller $47,570, for a medical secretary $44,610 and for a registered nurse $85,000. That nurse figure is the useful one: the cross-industry registered nurse median is $97,550, so a practice that benchmarks its nurses against the number most salary sites quote is pricing about 14.8 percent high on every hire. The full 15-role comparison, including the dental numbers, is on our healthcare compensation surveys page.

There is one staff role where I would not argue against buying a survey. The federal occupation code for practice managers runs from $80,210 at the 25th percentile to $160,230 at the 75th inside offices of physicians, because the same code holds the office manager of a three-provider clinic and a hospital system vice president. A 100 percent spread is not a band. If the role you are pricing is the administrator, buy data that cuts by provider count or revenue.

The renewal, not the purchase

One thing gets left out of these decisions. A compensation survey is a renewal. Whatever you pay in 2026 you pay again in 2027, because pay data a year old stops being persuasive in a partner meeting and stops being defensible in a pay equity review. Four figures a year for one report, on top of the practice management system, the clearinghouse, the phone system and the rest, is the kind of line nobody notices until someone goes through what the practice actually spends on subscriptions each month. Price the five-year version of the decision, not the invoice in front of you.

If you do decide to buy, participate first. MGMA says survey participation is open to member and non-member organizations, that participants get discounted prices on DataDive data sets, and that participants see their own data preloaded beside the national benchmarks. MGMA's page says data upload for the next cycle starts in January 2027. Submitting costs staff hours, not money, and it is the difference between list price and participant price at every publisher that prints both.

The short version

Budget four figures a year if you pay providers on production, and treat the $399 individual membership as the door rather than the data. For the medical assistants, billers, hygienists and front desk staff you hire far more often, use industry-specific federal wage data and build a band per role, which is the part general-market survey publishers also charge four figures for. If you are hiring in a state that requires a range in the job ad, that band is not optional anyway: see job posting salary ranges.

Sources: MGMA individual membership, DataDive Management and Staff, DataDive pre-order, data collection and membership pages; AMGA Medical Group Compensation and Productivity survey page; SullivanCotter Health Care Staff Compensation Survey page; ASHHRA healthcare compensation surveys resource page; BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, industry codes 6211 and 6212, retrieved through the BLS public API. Confirm current pricing with each publisher directly.