Surgery Partners Lowers Growth Forecast as Volumes, Payer Mix Shift

Investors hammered the company’s shares on the “prudent” guidance, even though CEO Eric Evans said he doesn’t see the slowdown being a long-term trend
Nov. 11, 2025
3 min read

Key Highlights

  • Surgery Partners has lowered its 2025 revenue growth forecast to around 5 percent, down from earlier projections.
  • The company faces delays in new facility profitability due to construction, licensing, and regulatory issues.
  • Fewer patients are using commercial insurance in Q4, impacting elective procedure volumes.
  • Despite short-term setbacks, CEO Evans remains optimistic about long-term growth and acquisition opportunities.
  • The stock price dropped to $16.03, reducing market value by 25%, and is significantly below Bain Capital’s previous offer.

The leaders of Surgery Partners Inc. have lowered their 2025 volume growth expectations and pushed out the timeline for some of their new ambulatory surgery centers to start turning a profit.

In addition, CEO Eric Evans told analysts that fewer of Surgery Partners’ patients are using better-paying commercial insurers going into the fourth quarter, which is very important for volumes as some people schedule elective procedures after they have met their deductibles for the year. Considering those trends, Evans said his team is taking “a measured stance” about where the Nashville-based company, which runs more than 200 ASCs in 30 states, is headed in the near future.

“It was broad enough and apparent enough to us that we had to react to it,” Evans said of the slower patient volume growth during the third quarter. “We’re still looking at that. We don’t expect this to be a long-term trend but it was, again, material enough that we wanted to make sure we are prudent in our guide.”

Evans and CFO David Doherty said on a Nov. 10 conference call that they now expect Surgery Partners will produce same-facility revenue growth for the year of around 5 percent, which is down a percentage point from their August forecast. Speaking to the slower journey to profits of some facilities, the executives pointed to construction delays in some places as well as licensing and regulatory issues elsewhere.

The lowered outlook led investors to cut Surgery Partners’ market capitalization by a quarter. At the end of the regular trading session Nov. 10, the company’s stock (Ticker: SGRY) stood at $16.03, their lowest level since mid-2020. At that price, the company’s market value is about $2 billion.

At around $16, Surgery Partners shares are worth about 40 percent less than what private-equity firm Bain Capital offered to pay in January for the roughly 60 percent of Surgery Partners it doesn’t already own. Bain acquired about 54 percent of Surgery Partners in 2017 but the latter’s board said in June it had declined the investor’s offer to fully acquire Surgery Partners.

In the three months that ended Sept. 30, Surgery Partners produced a net profit of $25.3 million on revenues of nearly $822 million. Those figures were up from $6.4 million and $770 million, respectively, in the same period of last year. Same-facility revenues for the quarter were up 6.3 percent year over year, which pushed that metric to 5.4 percent year-to-date—implying that fourth-quarter growth will be below 4 percent.

Still, Evans told analysts he has confidence in Surgery Partners’ longer-term prospects—among other things, he pointed to his team working on more than $300 million worth of possible acquisitions—as well as the role of ASCs in the broader healthcare system.

“I want to be very clear: We’re going to have volume and rate growth in the fourth quarter,” Evans said. “But we have a very detailed look into this as we head into the fourth quarter. It’s a huge quarter for us and we are just reacting to a trend that’s not quite as strong as we would normally expect.”

About the Author

Geert De Lombaerde

A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience and writes about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications Healthcare InnovationIndustryWeek, FleetOwner, Oil & Gas Journal and T&D World. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post for more than a decade and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.

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