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Download the article PDF: How Often Do Urgent Cares Close Unexpectedly
The average urgent care center goes unexpectedly “dark” 2.3 days a year—which means it closed on a day it otherwise should have been open (eg, staff illness, building repair, power outage, etc.). And the range of unexpected closure days is wide. Centers run by operators that have only a single location experience unexpected closures 4.6 days a year. Centers with 76 or more locations have 1.7 days of unexpected closures per center per year. The lower number of closure days among large groups may reflect their ability to borrow staff from nearby sites as well as more efficient, centralized scheduling.
A parallel analysis looking at days of the week reveals Saturday and Sunday are the most common days to go dark—about 10 closures per 1,000 operating days, compared with 6 closures per 1,000 operating days on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Together,
Friday through Monday disproportionately account for two-thirds of all unexpected closures while making up just 56% of total operating days.
These findings were drawn from a center-by-day analysis of 4,416 Experity-platform urgent care centers, covering 93 million visits during January 2024–August 2026.
In the analysis, a closed day was an operating day with no visits posted in the EMR. Each center’s schedule was inferred from a rolling 13-week window of the same weekday, so for example, a center that never opens Sundays was not included in unexpected closures for Sundays. Also excluded were new location ramp-ups, permanent closures, and relocations. Holidays and days with regional weather events were excluded as well.
