Mayo Clinic

Is Mayo Clinic a nonprofit organization?

Yes. Mayo Clinic is a private nonprofit academic medical center. It is governed by a board of trustees and reinvests all surplus into care, research, and education. It has no stock and no owners in the equity sense.

Who owns Mayo Clinic?

No individual or company owns Mayo Clinic. It is a charitable organization overseen by trustees and led by physician-executives, with Dr. Gianrico Farrugia serving as president and CEO.

When was Mayo Clinic founded?

The institutional founding is 1889, when Saint Marys Hospital opened in partnership with the Sisters of Saint Francis. The medical practice it grew from dates to 1864, when Dr. William Worrall Mayo began practicing in Rochester.

How many employees does Mayo Clinic have?

Mayo Clinic employs nearly 85,000 people worldwide as of 2025, after adding more than 12,400 staff during the year. It is the largest private employer in Minnesota.

What was Mayo Clinic's revenue in 2025?

Operating revenue was $21.5 billion for 2025, up 8.7 percent from $19.8 billion in 2024. Core operating income was $473 million, and income from current activities reached approximately $1.5 billion.

Where is Mayo Clinic located?

The main campus is in Rochester, Minnesota, with destination campuses in Phoenix/Scottsdale, Arizona, and Jacksonville, Florida. The Mayo Clinic Health System operates across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa, and Mayo maintains a clinic in London.

The organization began with Dr. William Worrall Mayo, an English immigrant who settled in Rochester, Minnesota, in 1864 and established a medical practice. His sons William James Mayo and Charles Horace Mayo, both trained as surgeons, joined in the 1880s and gradually built a collaborative practice that attracted patients and visiting physicians from across the country.

The formal institution emerged in 1889 after a tornado devastated Rochester and the Sisters of Saint Francis offered to build a hospital if the Mayos would staff it. Saint Marys Hospital opened that year and became the clinical foundation of what became Mayo Clinic.

The Mayo brothers' innovations defined the institution: an integrated group practice where specialists cooperated on single cases, a unified patient record, and salaries that removed incentive to over-treat. The practice incorporated as the nonprofit Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research in 1919 when the brothers donated their assets, a foundational act that embedded charitable ownership.

Through the twentieth century Mayo built Mayo Clinic Hospital at the Saint Marys and Methodist sites, expanded its research laboratories, and created one of the country's most competitive residency programs. Geographic expansion added Jacksonville, Florida, in 1986 and Scottsdale and Phoenix, Arizona, in 1987, converting a regional center into a three-campus destination system.

The Mayo Clinic Health System extended the organization into dozens of community hospitals and clinics across the Upper Midwest. Mayo Clinic Laboratories built a global reference testing business serving thousands of hospital clients.

Under CEO Gianrico Farrugia, appointed in 2019, Mayo pursued the Bold. Forward. strategy combining a multibillion-dollar transformation of its Rochester campus with Mayo Clinic Platform, an initiative to commercialize clinical data and artificial intelligence with technology partners. Fiscal 2025 produced record results: operating revenue of $21.5 billion, up 8.7 percent, core operating income of $473 million, income from current activities of roughly $1.5 billion, and net asset growth of $4.55 billion.

As a nonprofit, Mayo's ethical framework centers on charitable mission delivery, research integrity, and community benefit obligations. It publishes annual community benefit reporting covering charity care, Medicaid shortfalls, education, and community programs.

Environmental programs address the substantial footprint of its hospital campuses through energy efficiency, waste reduction in clinical operations, and sustainable procurement standards. Research activities operate under institutional review board oversight and conflict-of-interest disclosure policies standard to major academic centers.

Mayo Clinic has been ranked number one in the U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals honor roll more times than any other institution and topped Newsweek's World's Best Hospitals ranking for multiple consecutive years through 2025.

Specialty rankings place it first or near first across most major disciplines, and its nursing organization holds Magnet designation, the highest nursing excellence credential. It is consistently cited as a top academic medical employer.

The most persistent scrutiny concerns whether Mayo's charity care and community benefit justify nonprofit tax exemptions, an issue Minnesota legislators have examined given the institution's scale and wealth.

Service consolidation and reductions at Health System communities have generated local criticism about rural access, and the organization has faced standard litigation over billing practices, employment disputes, and occasional high-profile malpractice cases inherent to complex medicine. Periodic debate over executive compensation and commercialization of research also arises, consistent with scrutiny applied to large academic nonprofits.