MENA Bridge · Market Research
Jordan Health & Medical Facilities Tracker
Hospital capacity, where it sits and how hard it works — with the sector split that shows Jordan's private hospital estate running at half the occupancy of the public one.
Hospital beds, all sectors
16,316 2024
▲ 8.8% vs 2020
Beds per 10,000 people
14.0 2024
on a population of 11,734,000
Private share of beds
34.6% 2024
5,648 of 16,325 beds, Statistics Dept count
Private hospital occupancy
34.8% 2024
▼ 36.6 pp vs Ministry 71.4%
Total health spending
8.3% of GDP, 2022
current spend alone is 7.7% in 2023
Paid out of pocket
34.5% of current spend, 2023
▲ 1.5 pp vs 2016
Data labels
How hard each sector's beds work
The Ministry publishes beds, admissions, occupancy, length of stay, surgery and clinic visits for all five sectors in one table. Read together they say something the bed counts alone do not: capacity and use are distributed very differently.
Bed occupancy by sector
Share of available bed-days actually used, 2024. The private rate is the lowest of the five by a wide margin.
Admissions per bed
How many patients each bed took in over the year. High turnover with low occupancy means short stays, not busy wards.
Average length of stay
Days per admission. Private stays are the shortest in the system.
Share of beds against share of the work
Each sector's share of national beds, of surgery and of specialist clinic visits. Private is over-weighted on surgery and heavily under-weighted on clinics.
What this says
The private sector holds 29.5% of the beds in this table — 34.6% on the fuller Statistics Department count — and takes 27.6% of admissions, but runs at 34.8% occupancy against the Ministry's 71.4% — a gap of 36.6 percentage points. On the reporting universe that is roughly 2,880 beds standing empty on an average day.
The composition differs as much as the level. Private hospitals perform 30.3% of all surgery but receive only 11.9% of specialist clinic visits, and discharge patients in 2.0 days against the Ministry's 3.5. This is a procedure-weighted, short-stay estate, not a general-admissions one.
For anyone weighing a healthcare development, the constraint this points to is demand and payer mix, not floor area. Jordan does not obviously lack private hospital beds; it lacks patients able to fill the ones already built.
The reporting universe, and why the level is softer than the direction
22 private hospitals filed no 2024 data and the Ministry excludes them from both workload tables. The gap is not small: these tables count 4,417 private beds where the Department of Statistics counts 5,648 for the same year — about a fifth of the national private stock is outside the occupancy figure. Every private number on this page is therefore reporting hospitals only, and none of them is divided by a Statistics Department bed count.
A gap that size moves the level but not the finding: even if every missing hospital ran at full occupancy, the private sector would still sit below the Ministry. The Ministry column has its own definitional note — it counts effective beds (5,923) against a total bed count of 6,059.
Supply
Bed stock by sector across the three published yearbook editions, and the Ministry's own five-year total. Growth has been steady and modest.
Beds by sector
Ministry, private and other government — Royal Medical Services, the university hospitals and UNRWA. Yearbook editions 2022 to 2024.
Total beds, all sectors
Up 8.8% across the window, against population growth over the same years.
Ministry centres and clinics
Primary-care estate, 2018–2024. Village clinics have been consolidated; dental provision has grown.
Reading the supply side
Bed stock rose from 15,003 to 16,316 over 2020–2024, 8.8% in five years. The private share of beds is unchanged across all three editions — 34.56%, 34.61% and 34.60% — so the private estate has grown in step with the system, not faster than it.
That matters for how the occupancy finding is read. This is not a recent private build-out that has yet to fill. The capacity has been there, at about this share, for as long as the published series runs.
Where the beds are
Beds per 10,000 people on the Ministry's own population denominator, and the private share of each governorate's stock. The two maps tell opposite halves of the same story.
Beds per 10,000 people
Darker is better provided. The spread is 4.3-fold between the best and worst served governorate.
Beds per 10,000 people by governorate
National average 14.0. Provision is not a simple centre-periphery gradient.
Private share of beds by governorate
Where private capacity actually sits, 2024. Three governorates have no private hospital at all.
Private occupancy by governorate
Reporting hospitals only. The Ministry leaves this blank for Zarqa, Irbid and Mafraq while printing their bed turnover; those bars are absent rather than zero.
Concentration, and what it does to the average
Tafilah is the best-provided governorate at 26.0 beds per 10,000 and Jerash the worst at 6.0 — a 4.3-fold spread. Amman sits at 18.0, above the national 14.0, and holds 77.4% of the Kingdom's private beds in 47 private hospitals.
Private capacity is far more concentrated than public capacity. That concentration is why the national occupancy figure is mostly an Amman figure: the capital contributes 77.4% of the private beds in the reporting universe.
The Ministry's own record, 2018–2024
Seven years of Ministry hospital workload, assembled from the three yearbook editions. This is the public system only and is not comparable with the private figures above.
Ministry bed occupancy
The pandemic trough and the recovery above it are both visible. Peak 75.9% in 2023.
Admissions and surgery, rebased
Both series indexed to 2018 = 100, so the growth rates can be read against each other directly.
Specialist clinic visits
Outpatient demand on the Ministry system, 2018–2024.
Seven years, not one
Ministry occupancy fell to 57.8% in 2020 and has run above 70% every year since 2022, ending at 72.4%. Admissions rose from 401,619 to 446,498 and surgery from 97,951 to 150,541 — surgery up 53.7% against admissions up 11.2%.
Set against the sector table, the picture is consistent: the public system is working harder each year on a bed stock that has barely moved, while the private estate alongside it runs at a third of capacity.
What it costs and who pays
Eight unbroken years of health financing. This is the demand side of the same question, and the reason the empty private beds are not simply a supply mistake.
Current health spending as a share of GDP
Current expenditure excludes capital, which is why this reads 7.66% in 2023 where the Ministry's total-spend basis reads 8.3% in 2022.
Who finances health care
Government, private and external shares of current health spending. Private has been the larger of the two domestic sources every year in this window.
Paid directly by households
Out-of-pocket spending as a share of current health expenditure — the share that never passes through an insurer or a budget.
Ministry budget and its share of the state budget
Bars are the Ministry budget in thousand dinars; the line is its share of total state expenditure.
The payer picture behind the empty beds
Private sources finance 48.1% of current health spending and have been the larger domestic payer in every year of this window, peaking at 53.8% in 2018. 34.5% is paid directly out of household pockets — a level reached by 2019 and roughly flat since, not a figure still climbing.
That flatness is the point. A third of the country's health bill has been settled at the point of use for half a decade, while total spending has risen from 6.98% to 7.66% of GDP. Households are already carrying as much as they appear able to; the payer base is not deepening.
Read against the occupancy table, that is the most plausible account of why private capacity sits idle. The beds exist and the private sector pays for most of the care delivered in the country. What is missing is a widening pool of patients who can afford the private price at the moment they need it.
Why this section uses a different source from the rest of the page
The Ministry publishes Jordan's national health accounts at table 7:5, but that table has five points and a two-year hole — 2020 and 2021 are absent. The WHO Global Health Expenditure series is the same underlying national accounts reported annually, and across the five overlapping years it agrees with the Ministry to within 0.07 percentage points on the GDP share and on all three financing shares. The charts therefore use the gap-free series and the Ministry's table is kept as the cross-check.
The finance window starts at 2016. Between 2014 and 2016 the government share of health spending moves from 64.5% to 45.8%, the private share from 29.6% to 49.5% and out-of-pocket from 20.9% to 33.0%. A shift of that size in three shares at once is a re-basing, not an economic event, and nothing on this page compares across it.
Workforce and pharmacy
The Ministry's own staff, and the retail pharmacy estate — the one facility class published by governorate on a long window.
Ministry of Health professions
Staff in post, 2018–2024. This is the Ministry only — the one sector where the published figures are employment.
Pharmacies
National count, 2018–2024. The 2018 dip is real and appears in every edition covering the year.
Why there is no cross-sector workforce chart
Both official sources publish a 2024 workforce table split by sector, and both put private physicians at about 38,336 — against 5,648 private hospital beds in the same year. Those are professional registrations, not posts. The Ministry's table carries a footnote to that effect and the Statistics Department's carries another. Neither is charted here, because there is no honest way to plot a registration count beside an employment count.
Where the sources disagree
Five things on this page are reported as published even though they are visibly wrong or mutually inconsistent. Correcting a national statistic silently is worse than showing it.
Carried, not corrected
The two official sources disagree about beds. For 2024 the Department of Statistics counts 16,325 beds and the Ministry 16,316. The 9-bed national gap resolves to Amman (+17), Zarqa (−3) and Aqaba (−5). Both are published as found.
The Ministry's own totals do not add up. The printed all-sectors row of MoH table 2:15 understates surgeries by 25,026 and specialist visits by 340,747. Every sector percentage in the table matches the column sum, not the printed total. The sector figures are used throughout this page; the printed total row is not.
The health accounts skip two years. The Ministry's national-accounts table skips 2020 and 2021 entirely, so the finance charts use the WHO series, which is the same data reported annually and agrees with the Ministry to within 0.07 points on every measure except one.
The two sources disagree on out-of-pocket spending. That exception is out-of-pocket spending. For 2016, 2017 and 2018 the Ministry prints 29.7%, 30.4% and 33.8% where the internationally reported figures are 33.0%, 34.0% and 35.3%. The two agree from 2019 on. The charts use the gap-free series and the Ministry figures are shown here.
Three governorates have no private occupancy. The Ministry leaves private occupancy blank for Zarqa, Irbid and Mafraq while printing their bed turnover.