Pharma companies paid providers $14.7 billion in 2025. What does that mean?

In 2025, pharmaceutical and device companies paid medical professionals and teaching hospitals a record $14.67 billion, per federal database Open Payments.

That’s up from 2024’s approximately $13.2 billion.

About $9.5 billion of 2025’s whopping payout went toward research. But last year providers also received $3.92 billion in general payments, a category that can include consultant fees, speaker payments, and meals.

The American Medical Association emphasizes that industry payments don’t necessarily imply undue influence. Research suggests, however, that physicians who receive general payments from a drug company are more likely to prescribe that company’s drug.

One study, presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in late May, found that oncologists were more likely to prescribe a treatment if they received a related general payment—even if that treatment wasn’t considered best practice.

The study suggests “whatever drug a given company is promoting, they can get doctors to prescribe that through these promotional payments, whether or not it’s clinically appropriate,” Aaron Mitchell, study author and a medical oncologist at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, told Healthcare Brew.

Follow the money. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has collected this payment data since 2013 and published it since 2014, with the goal of creating a “transparent and accountable healthcare system,” according to its website.

But the data can also serve as intel for pharmaceutical companies about what their competitors are doing, Tong Guo, associate professor of marketing at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, told Healthcare Brew.

“They can build a dashboard to visualize how much more they’re paying Doctor A—comparing to their competitor firms—or on the flip side, how Doctor A maintains different relationships with different firms,” she said.

A 2017 paper in the Journal of the Pharmaceutical Management Science Association, coauthored by several employees of pharmaceutical company Bayer, details how pharmaceutical companies can use Open Payments data to their advantage. It helps them understand how competitors interact with healthcare providers and identify new healthcare providers their sales teams can target, the paper says.

Life sciences analytics company Iqvia advertises custom analysis of Open Payments data in a 2022 blog post, calling it “a unique and powerful tool for life sciences companies to analyze how their spending compares to peers in certain categories.”

A 2020 study coauthored by Guo found that, after the US began mandating certain medical professionals and teaching hospitals report this data, payment patterns changed.

Hidden costs. Open Payments doesn’t tell the whole story, however.

Mitchell noted there are also ways for drug and medical device companies to compensate medical professionals without needing to report it publicly. For instance, many drugmakers fund nonprofits. If payment comes from a nonprofit, it doesn’t need to be reported, Mitchell said.

Gaps in disclosure requirements may allow manufacturers of AI devices to avoid reporting payments to providers, too, Stat News reported in 2025.