Q: What is plastic surgery benchmarking?

How plastic surgeons compare their results

A:Plastic surgery benchmarking is comparing a practice's procedures, outcomes, and complication rates against aggregate data from other plastic surgeons, most often through a national registry. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) runs TOPS, a national database it says holds over 1.6 million plastic surgery procedures. ASPS designed TOPS to help surgeons find their clinical strengths and areas needing improvement on an individual level with national benchmarking.¹

ASPS will permanently end data collection for TOPS and GRAFT, its fat grafting registry, on December 31, 2026. Surgeons can still run reports and download their data until February 26, 2027, so a practice that wants its TOPS benchmark history should save it by then. Surgeons who enter data into the National Breast Implant Registry can also compare their practice performance and outcomes to that registry's aggregate.¹

Patients interact with benchmarking when a surgeon publicly compares results with published data points, typically as a way to instill confidence and communicate the quality of their work. A practice in Cartagena, Colombia, reported a 6.2% complication rate per patient in 2025 and said that rate compares favorably with benchmarks from board-certified US plastic surgeons. It compared its tummy tuck complications with TOPS data, 5.5% versus 9.7%, and credited a center of excellence model and strict safety protocols for those tummy tuck results.²

On our reading, clinical registries benchmark safety and outcomes, so a practice measuring how patients see it needs other comparisons, such as Google review counts. For more about how plastic surgery practices compare on reviews, see our review benchmarks.