A medical biller prepares, submits and follows up on the claims that turn completed patient care into payment for a physician practice, hospital, outpatient center or billing company.
BLS describes the work as calculating charges, generating bills, reviewing documents such as hospital records to calculate fees, and contacting customers to get or give account information.
This guide covers the job, the settings, the training, the pay and where to find openings.
What does a medical biller do?
Postings for this work carry several titles — medical billing specialist, medical insurance biller, medical office biller — and our research found no source that draws a formal distinction between them; BLS counts the work within billing and posting clerks (below).
What the titles share is one stretch of the revenue cycle — the claim.
A medical biller is the person who turns the charges a provider's visit or service produced into a claim, and then follows that claim until the provider is paid.
BLS describes billing and posting clerks, the occupation medical billers are counted in, as workers who calculate charges and generate bills, review documents such as hospital records to calculate fees, and contact customers to get or give account information.
In a medical setting, that breaks into a handful of recurring responsibilities:
- Claim preparation and submission — assembling the charges for each encounter into a claim a health plan can process.
- Claim follow-up — tracking submitted claims, working rejections and denials, and resubmitting or appealing where the payer's process allows.
- Payment posting and reconciliation — recording payments and adjustments against patient accounts.
- Patient billing — generating bills for patients and getting or giving account information when they contact the office about a bill, the customer contact BLS describes.
- Compliance hygiene — handling claims and patient information under HIPAA and fraud-and-abuse rules.
AAPC's outline of its Certified Professional Biller (CPB) credential is a fair map of the job's territory.
It spans claim submission for commercial payers, Medicare and Medicaid; coordination of benefits, medical necessity and prior authorization; denials, appeals, payment posting, reconciliation and collections; and HIPAA and fraud-and-abuse compliance.
Billing is not coding.
BLS says medical coders assign the diagnosis and procedure codes, for patient care, population health statistics and billing purposes; the biller's job is the claim that carries them.
The two halves also exist combined in one billing-and-coding job — AAPC lists billing and coding specialist among the entry-level roles open to coders holding its apprentice credential.
BLS's SOC system has no separate code for that combined specialist: coders count under 29-2072 and billing and posting clerks under 43-3021.
Where do medical billers work?
BLS counts medical billers inside billing and posting clerks (SOC 43-3021), an all-industry occupation that also includes billing staff outside health care.
In 2025, 42.6% of the occupation's 418,000 jobs — 178,100 — were in health care and social assistance.
That healthcare slice is where the growth is: BLS projects healthcare employment of these clerks to grow 6.6% to 190,000 by 2035 even as the occupation overall stays flat.
Where billing and posting clerks worked in 2025, per the BLS National Employment Matrix.
| Industry | Employment, 2025 | Share of occupation |
|---|---|---|
| Offices of physicians | 66,800 | 16.0% |
| Hospitals (state, local and private) | 38,300 | 9.2% |
| Accounting, tax preparation, bookkeeping and payroll services | 30,200 | 7.2% |
| Outpatient care centers | 11,300 | 2.7% |
Offices of physicians are the occupation's single largest industry line.
The accounting and bookkeeping line is not a count of billing company staff: BLS publishes no separate industry line for medical billing companies, so third-party billing shops cannot be read out of the matrix.
In practice, billers sit in the business office of a physician practice, in a hospital's billing operation, in outpatient care centers — and at third-party medical billing companies, the employers BLS's matrix does not break out as a separate industry line.
AAPC, listing employers of billing and coding staff beyond physician offices and hospitals, adds ambulatory surgery centers, walk-in clinics, long-term care, home health agencies, hospice, telehealth companies, labs and imaging centers.
BLS says the majority of financial clerks, including billing clerks, work full time.
What skills and training do billers need?
BLS says financial clerk jobs — the group that includes billing and posting clerks — typically need a high school diploma or equivalent, with workers learning their duties through on-the-job training.
The qualities BLS lists for the group are communication skills, math skills and organizational skills.
BLS's own descriptions of them read like the job: communication means explaining policies and procedures to colleagues and customers; math means calculating charges and updating financial records; organizational skills round out the group.
The job's knowledge base is the claim itself.
CMS defines professional claims as those submitted on the ASC X12 837 professional transaction or the CMS-1500 paper form, and institutional claims as those on the 837 institutional transaction or Form CMS-1450 (the UB-04).
The codes those claims carry come from the code sets HIPAA adopts: CPT-4 plus HCPCS for physician and other health care services, ICD-10-CM for diagnoses, and the ADA's Code on Dental Procedures and Nomenclature (CDT) for dental services.
Per BLS, assigning the diagnosis and procedure codes is the coder's work; the biller's is the claim that carries them.
The credential built for this work is AAPC's Certified Professional Biller (CPB).
AAPC says the CPB demonstrates proficiency in claim submission, payment posting, insurance guidelines and revenue cycle workflows.
AAPC listed CPB exam vouchers starting at $425 as of October 2026 — online with a live remote proctor or at a testing center — and CPB holders keep the credential with an annual AAPC membership and 36 CEUs every two years.
Confirm credential details with AAPC
How do billers fit in the revenue cycle?
HFMA, whose CRCR credential is built on the cycle, organizes it into pre-service, time-of-service and post-service financial care, and its patient-access metrics measure pre-registration, insurance verification and service authorization rates — the work that happens before a charge exists.
Coders then assign the diagnosis and procedure codes, per BLS.
The biller's stretch of the cycle starts at the charge.
From there, the biller builds and submits claims, tracks each one through payer processing, and works the results.
Payments and adjustments come back on the ASC X12 835, the HIPAA-standard electronic remittance advice (ERA) that payment posters and billers post from.
Deadlines anchor the work.
Under 42 CFR 424.44(a)(1), a Medicare claim for services furnished on or after January 1, 2010 must be filed no later than 1 calendar year after the date of service, with limited exceptions.
Federal Medicaid rules cap the window at 12 months from the date of service under 42 CFR 447.45(d)(1).
Payment speed is regulated on Medicare's side too.
CMS's Medicare Claims Processing Manual requires clean Medicare claims to be paid or denied within 30 days of receipt, with interest owed on clean claims not paid within that ceiling.
Not everything that comes back is a denial.
CMS treats a Medicare claim returned as unprocessable for incomplete or invalid information as not a claim at all — it is not denied, it has no appeal rights, and it must be corrected and resubmitted.
That is the practical line between a rejection and a denial that claim follow-up has to sort.
Downstream, the baton passes to payment posting, accounts receivable follow-up and denial management, and to patient accounts staff for the balances that remain.
Federal claim deadlines are payer-specific
How much do medical billers make?
BLS reports a median annual wage of $48,500 for billing and posting clerks (SOC 43-3021) in May 2025 — the closest available group to medical billers, since BLS has no separate medical biller code.
In the same May 2025 data, BLS's OEWS counted 404,060 billing and posting clerk jobs nationally, with a median hourly wage of $23.32.
Industry medians sit close together: in OEWS May 2025 industry data, billing and posting clerks earned a median $47,570 in offices of physicians (65,230 employed) against $48,810 in general medical and surgical hospitals (35,330 employed).
The medical biller salary page carries the full BLS national and state pay tables for the occupation, labeled by SOC and statistic.
Is medical billing a good career?
Start with the honest outlook.
BLS projects billing and posting clerk employment to be essentially flat from 2025 to 2035: 418,000 jobs in 2025 against 417,700 in 2035, a 0% change.
Two details sharpen that flat number.
Employment is expected to rise in fast-growing healthcare industries, and the healthcare slice of the occupation is projected to grow 6.6% to 190,000 jobs by 2035.
The flattening force is automation.
BLS says automated invoice processing software will raise these workers' productivity and reduce overall employment growth — the occupation's own outlook already accounts for the technology.
There is a ladder.
BLS notes that some medical and health services managers begin their careers as medical records specialists, administrative assistants or financial clerks in a healthcare office, and that these managers' typical duties include preparing and monitoring budgets and managing finances, including patient fees and billing.
Whether the career suits you comes down to the work itself: payer rules that change by plan, accounts that need consistent follow-up, and numbers that have to be right.
If you like detail work and steady process, the day-to-day matches those strengths.
Find medical biller jobs
Openings for this role live on the medical biller jobs page, where positions from physician practices, billing companies, hospitals and health plans are posted as employers list them.
Hiring a medical biller?
Post a job to put the opening in front of billers and revenue-cycle staff on this board.
Career information, not coding, billing-compliance, legal or tax advice. Confirm credential details with AAPC, and filing or payment rules with CMS, your Medicare Administrative Contractor or the payer named, before you act on them.