Private vs public hospitals in Nigeria: what the register shows
Of the 31,001 Nigerian facilities with a recorded owner, 11,235 are private and 19,766 are public. Private providers run 36% of the country's health facilities. Yet public hospitals hold most of the beds. Both facts are true, and together they explain how Nigerian healthcare is really structured.
Private wins on reach
By sheer count, the private sector dominates: 11,235 facilities to the public sector's 19,766. Most are small: clinics, maternity homes and primary practices spread through towns and cities, often the first place a patient goes. This is the layer that makes care physically reachable.
Public wins on capacity
Turn from counting buildings to counting beds and the picture inverts. Public facilities hold 162,923 recorded beds against the private sector's 121,544. The average public facility carries about 8 beds; the average private one about 11. The big tertiary hospitals, the teaching hospitals and federal medical centres with hundreds of beds each, are almost entirely public.
Private leads on reach, public leads on capacity. A patient is most likely to walk into a private facility, and most likely to be admitted into a public one.
The split by level of care
| Level | Public | Private | Share (pub / priv) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary | 18,518 | 5,802 | 76% / 24% |
| Secondary | 1,155 | 5,345 | 18% / 82% |
| Tertiary | 91 | 88 | 51% / 49% |
The pattern is clear down the table: private ownership dominates primary care, then falls away sharply at the tertiary level where the state runs almost everything.
Who actually pays
The reason the private sector is so large sits in how Nigerians pay for care. Roughly three-quarters of the country's total health spending is out-of-pocket (World Bank), one of the highest rates in the world, and private health expenditure, most of it paid in cash at the point of care, makes up about 70 to 75% of the total. Health insurance still covers only a small share of the population. So the private facilities that dominate this count are not a sign of a thriving market so much as a sign that, for most people, paying a private clinic directly is the path of least resistance to being seen at all. Public hospitals hold the beds; private providers hold the everyday demand, and households carry the cost.
See the full ownership and level breakdown on the Nigeria dashboard, or how many hospitals Nigeria has in total.
Facility and ownership counts are from Nigeria's national health facility register (2026). Health-financing figures on out-of-pocket and private expenditure are from the World Bank and WHO health-financing data.
Sources
- Nigeria Health Facility Registry, Federal Ministry of Health, ownership, level and capacity as registered (2026)
- World Bank: current health expenditure, context on financing
Register figures are shown as recorded; anomalies are flagged, not edited. Method and limitations: how Veligraph is built.