What the evidence says about patient financing

Who this is for

This is for the physician or medical professional who owns an aesthetic or plastic surgery practice and is weighing patient financing, and/or the operations lead who would set it up, place it on the website, and answer for it at the front desk.

Two questions usually sit underneath that decision. What do these products cost the patient, and does offering them move consultations or spending. Both questions have evidence. It comes from different places, and no aesthetics publication we found reads it together.

What does a patient pay for a financed procedure, and what can the card add?

Three layers of cost meet here. The surgeon's fee is one line of the patient's total bill, next to anesthesia and facility. Financing changes how the patient pays that total, never the price itself. What it can add is interest, a cost of the loan that the patient pays on top of the bill.

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons, an industry body, publishes average surgeon fees from its survey of surgeons. They exclude anesthesia and facility costs, so the total a patient finances is higher than any row below. The pages say "latest statistics" and give no year.^1,2,3

No source we read counts how many surgeons offer financing.

The advertised rate on a medical credit card is usually 0% for a promotional period. The cost comes from what happens after it ends.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal regulator, reported in 2023 that deferred-interest medical credit cards and financing plans paid for almost $23 billion of care across more than 17 million purchases between 2018 and 2020, and that people paid $1 billion in deferred interest on them. The $23 billion is patients' bills; the $1 billion is interest paid on top. The CFPB found these products are often offered by a trusted doctor or nurse, in the doctor's office.⁴

The most common structure in that market is deferred interest. The patient is offered a promotional period with no interest. Synchrony, which issues CareCredit, told US senators in 2023 that CareCredit had more than 6.3 million active accounts and 260,000 enrolled providers.⁵ CareCredit's provider pages in 2026 list promotional periods of 6, 12, 18 or 24 months.⁶

If any balance remains when the promotional period ends, the lender charges interest back to the original purchase date. CareCredit's own provider page describes the mechanism. A patient who clears most of the balance but misses the final stretch owes interest on the full original amount, from day one.⁶

The rate that applies is high. The CFPB put the typical medical credit card APR at 26.99%, against about 16% for a general-purpose card.⁴

Patients get charged that interest often. Of healthcare purchases made on deferred-interest terms, the CFPB found about 20% were charged interest. For borrowers with credit scores below 619 it was about 34%, and those patients have the least room to absorb back-dated interest.⁴ Synchrony told the senators that approximately 23% of CareCredit transactions were not repaid within the promotional period and were assessed interest, at an average rate of 26.44%.⁵

A $4,875 breast augmentation fee, before anesthesia and facility, carried at 26.99% through a deferred-interest plan adds up quickly if the patient does not clear the balance in time.

A 2023 commentary in Annals of Surgery, a peer-reviewed journal, titled "CareCredit: Profiting off Medical Debt", makes the ethical case against these products.⁷

Does offering financing bring in more consultations or more spending?

The strongest claims come from the companies selling financing, and the one study pointing toward higher spending was commissioned by one of them, in 2006.

CareCredit, which is Synchrony, published a provider-facing page claiming that 57% of people delay or forgo care because of cost, that 83% would purchase additional services if a payment option were available, and a $4,804 spending figure it does not define, so we cannot say which layer of cost it is. The page shows no sample size, no fielding dates, and no method.⁸

An earlier CareCredit survey, from 2021, reported that 41% would postpone medical-aesthetic care without a credit option, from a sample of 2,574 with a medical-aesthetic subset of 278. It is dated 2021, before the 2022-to-2026 window we used elsewhere, and it is a vendor survey measuring interest in a product the vendor sells.⁹

The closest thing to a study on spending is old, and it is not independent. In 2006 Inquire Market Research telephoned 200 people who had used CareCredit to pay for a cosmetic procedure, for a report CareCredit distributes through the ASPS Young Plastic Surgeons section. Nearly half said CareCredit let them proceed with treatment immediately, and the report puts average spend 71% higher when CareCredit was available, as the cardholders reported it. It surveyed only people who had already chosen the product, it is twenty years old, it is not peer-reviewed, and the card's issuer paid for it. The market has changed since.¹⁰

For context on how patients think about cosmetic spending, a 2024 NerdWallet survey of 2,082 US adults, run by Harris Poll, found 26% said they had purchased cosmetic procedures for themselves. The survey does not measure financing use. It shows the category is large. It says nothing about whether a payment plan changed anyone's decision.¹¹

A government regulator documents the cost side in detail. On the growth side, every source that measured spending was paid for by a vendor. There is no independent, current, peer-reviewed study showing that offering financing fills a schedule or lifts a ticket. The claim is plausible, and the only evidence for it comes from the companies that sell financing.

How do the newer installment lenders differ from a medical credit card?

The deferred-interest card is no longer the whole market. A set of companies now sell installment financing built for aesthetic and elective practices. We have provider pages from Cherry and PatientFi, and Cherry's own materials discuss a rival, Sunbit. An owner comparing vendors is usually comparing these.

Cherry, on its own 2026 pages, states APRs to the patient of 0% to 35.99% and terms of 1 to 60 months.¹² The top of that range sits above the 26.99% the CFPB cited as typical for medical cards, and the bottom is zero.⁴ The two products work differently, so the comparison is rough. For the patient, the questions are what happens if the promotional rate ends with a balance, and whether the interest is back-dated.

The practice pays its own cost on each financed sale. In a 2026 comparison page, Cherry describes transaction fees to the practice of roughly 1.7% to 1.9%, and describes Sunbit with data points including a 1.9% per-transaction fee, loan amounts up to $20,000, and terms up to 72 months. That fee comes out of what the practice receives and does not appear on the patient's bill. This is a vendor describing both itself and a rival, with no audit.¹³

PatientFi published a page contesting Cherry's and Sunbit's claims, citing data points such as 52.5%, 23.68%, 29.99%, and approval over 87%. The page does not define what each data point measures, and there is no shared dataset behind any of them.¹⁴ The companies contradict each other on their own core metrics, none of the three publishes an audit of its own, and so none of their self-reported approval or rate data points can be taken at face value.

Buy-now-pay-later carries a risk the single-product pages do not show. The CFPB reported in 2025 that more than three-fifths of buy-now-pay-later borrowers had more than one loan at once, and that about one-third used multiple providers. A patient can be approved by a practice's point-of-sale lender while already carrying several plans the approval screen never sees.¹⁵

What should a practice weigh before it offers a payment plan?

Patients ask for financing and the procedures are expensive, but the evidence that it lifts spending was paid for by the vendors, and the oldest of it is twenty years old. Expectations can come from that evidence, with the provider-page headline discounted.

Whoever presents a no-interest promotional plan can say in one plain sentence what happens if a balance remains at the end: interest from the original purchase date, at a rate near 27%. Patients with lower credit scores are charged it most often, and one who signs without understanding it can become a complaint later, with the surgeon's name on the review. Amounts a patient can clear inside the promotional period, such as the laser and resurfacing fees, carry less of this risk than the surgical ones.

Vendors dispute each other's approval rates in public, so the terms each would give the practice's patients at the practice's own prices make a firmer comparison, checked against the CFPB's 26.99% for the old card product, a data point no vendor disputes.

Financing can sit on the website where a patient is already looking at a procedure's price, with its terms stated plainly. We sell digital marketing and growth strategy and benefit when a practice takes site advice from us, so "add a financing widget" is easy advice for us to give, and nothing independent that we read shows that moving a financing badge higher on the page fills a schedule.

About this review

The government data points come from two CFPB documents, the 2023 report on medical credit cards and financing plans and the 2025 research note on buy-now-pay-later, and from a 2023 letter from five US senators that quotes data points Synchrony reported to them. We took procedure fees from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons' cost pages, read in October 2026; the pages say "latest statistics" and give no year. We read the 2023 Annals of Surgery commentary as a published opinion. For vendor claims we read the 2024 and 2021 CareCredit provider materials, CareCredit's deferred-interest page, Cherry's 2026 pages, and PatientFi's 2026 page, and we labeled each by its publisher. Vendor numbers are reported as vendor claims and were never used as evidence. We used a 2024 NerdWallet survey and a 2006 ASPS survey for context, each flagged by date. We favored sources from 2022 to 2026 and marked the two that fall outside it.

The CareCredit provider pages give no sample sizes, fielding dates or methods. The vendor APR, fee, and approval data points are self-reported and unaudited, and the companies contradict one another. The only data pointing toward higher spending is a 2006 telephone survey of 200 CareCredit cardholders, commissioned by the card's issuer and not peer-reviewed.

Fractional Aesthetics is a growth strategy practice for aesthetic medical businesses.