NYC Health + Hospitals announced on January 26, 2026 that it has secured 75 new permanent, Medicare-funded residency positions to be phased in across seven of its facilities — including 17 each at Queens Hospital Center and South Brooklyn Health and 16 at Woodhull — out of 400 such slots CMS awarded nationwide for 2026, per the public system's announcement.
HEALTH WORK NY publishes information, not career or medical advice. The counts and distribution below come from the system's January 26 announcement and federal documents on the residency expansion program.
Where the new positions land
Per the announcement, the 75 full-time-equivalent positions break down as follows: Queens, 17; South Brooklyn Health, 17; Woodhull, 16; Lincoln, 13; Elmhurst, 7; Kings County, 3; and Metropolitan, 2. The slots cover high-need specialties — primary care, internal medicine, psychiatry, emergency medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, surgery, and medical subspecialties — and are permanent additions to the system's Medicare-supported graduate medical education base, not one-time training grants.
The positions come from the statutory expansion authorized by Sections 126 and 4122 of the Consolidated Appropriations Acts of 2021 and 2023, which together add 1,000 Medicare-funded residency slots nationwide. CMS distributed the most recent round — 400 positions for fiscal year 2026 — to teaching hospitals in December 2025, with priority given to psychiatry programs and hospitals in underserved communities, categories that describe most of the public system's campuses.
Related stories: Brooklyn's Maimonides moves to join NYC Health + Hospitals in a $2.2 billion New York hospital merger · New York's late budget directed $500 million to financially distressed hospitals.
What it changes for medical trainees
For medical students, 75 additional New York City residency positions are 75 chances to match inside the city's public safety-net system, where training exposes physicians to the patient populations — uninsured, Medicaid-covered, immigrant — that shape much of New York's care delivery. Match rates in competitive specialties depend on slot supply, and New York trains more residents than any other state while many of its own graduates leave for positions elsewhere; every added slot keeps a training position in-region.
For the system's own pipeline, the announcement notes that NYC Health + Hospitals plans to pursue additional positions in the upcoming CMS Round 5 application cycle, meaning the January count is a floor, not a ceiling. Residency slots are also an employment signal: residents who train in a system frequently stay in it, and safety-net systems have among the hardest vacancies to fill in attending and specialty roles.
The announcement arrives as hospitals nationwide compete for a limited supply of federal training positions. Because Medicare pays teaching hospitals for each approved slot, an awarded position is a recurring revenue and staffing asset, which is why systems track the application rounds closely and why the Round 5 cycle is already on the public system's calendar.
Why Medicare-funded slots matter
Medicare is the largest single funder of graduate medical education in the United States, and Congress capped Medicare-supported residency positions in 1997 — which is why the phased 1,000-slot expansion matters so much to teaching hospitals. Per a Government Accountability Office report, 600 of the 1,000 statutory positions had been allocated as of September 2025, with the remaining rounds still to be distributed. Hospitals in underserved areas receive priority in the award criteria, which is how a municipal safety-net system in New York City has ranked among the country's most successful applicants in this process.