September 09, 2026 | Plastic Surgery News
My specialty published its 2025 numbers last month, and by now you have read the list in about two hundred places. Liposuction is number one. It has been number one for five years running.
Here is what almost nobody printed. Liposuction did not grow. It fell 1 percent, to 317,196 procedures. The top five is, with one exception, a list of operations that stayed roughly where they were.
| Procedure | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Liposuction | 317,196 | -1% |
| Breast augmentation | 304,234 | +11% |
| Tummy tuck | 173,251 | +2% |
| Breast lift | 156,131 | +8% |
| Eyelid surgery | 118,978 | +19% |
Why liposuction stays on top even when it shrinks
People assume the number one procedure is the one patients ask for most by name. That is not why it wins.
“Liposuction is certainly the most common procedure in my practice, and the main reason is that it’s part of any body contouring procedure. When I perform a tummy tuck, liposuction is included in the abdomen and the lower back. When I perform an arm lift, I do liposuction first. When I do a thigh lift, I do liposuction first. When we perform many breast procedures, we’re often doing liposuction of the lateral chest, the axilla, or the upper back.”
It also feeds the operations that move fat rather than remove it.
“On top of that, procedures like the Brazilian butt lift and fat transfer involve taking fat from other areas using liposuction to transfer to the buttock, and even to the breast.”
“Therefore, liposuction really is a very common procedure in the practice, well over a thousand cases per year.”
Number one is partly a component. Count it that way and a 1 percent dip tells you very little.
The year was slower than the list suggests
“These are the usual procedures that made the top five, and they really didn’t move much during 2025. I could see that during 2025 there was a bit of a slowdown in plastic surgery procedures, and I think that was due to changes in the economy. But we’re seeing an increase in 2026.”
This report covers 2025 and lands most of a year late. It is a photograph of a year that already ended.
Eyelid surgery is the one that actually moved
Blepharoplasty rose 19 percent to 118,978 procedures, which makes it the fastest-growing operation in the top five and, by the report’s own reckoning, the most popular facial surgery of the year.
“Eyelid surgery did blow up a lot, and it’s also a procedure we’ve performed increasingly over the last two years. It seems to be the first part of the face that patients notice as they age, especially the upper eyelid skin, which can hang and even rest on the eyelashes, giving the patient the impression of being tired and even making makeup hard to put on.”
“The lower eyelids are also quite popular, as more and more patients with fat loss can see the lower eye bags more easily, along with the tear trough deformity.”
Fat loss. That phrase runs through almost every facial conversation I have now.
What I would rank it by instead
Volume rewards whatever gets bundled into other operations and hides whatever is actually accelerating. Ranked by what changed in my own operating room, 2025 looks nothing like the ASPS top five.
“In my practice, I’ve really seen a huge increase in face procedures, specifically the deep plane face lift and deep plane neck lift, as well as the total endoscopic deep plane face lift, otherwise known as the ponytail lift. These face lifts are often combined with facial fat grafting, upper and lower eyelid surgery, microneedling with radiofrequency or laser resurfacing, sometimes an upper lip lift, fat transfer to the lips, and earlobe reduction.”
“The reason we’re seeing this increase exponentially is that patients are noticing signs of facial aging earlier, or they’ve been on GLP-1s and have had accelerated aging from fat loss in the face and skin sagging.”
The national table backs this up without ever saying so. Facelift rose 13 percent, neck lift 21, forehead lift 29, and facial fat grafting 39 percent, the largest percentage increase of any cosmetic surgical procedure in the report. None of them are in the top five. Rank by volume and the entire facial story disappears.
The arithmetic of doing it earlier
“The most interesting thing about a face lift procedure is that it can make you look ten to fifteen years younger. Of course, that depends on the age at which you get the procedure. If you get it at forty, you’re probably going to look like you’re in your early thirties, or even late twenties. But time keeps moving forward, so if we repeat the procedure ten years later, we take you back to that earlier stage of yourself. Now you’re in your fifties, looking like you’re in your thirties.”
“So the earlier we do the procedure, the sooner we can keep bringing you back to a younger age. That has really changed the game, because these procedures are not as invasive, we don’t have to make as big changes, and we can maintain that youthfulness.”
Most people carry a different model, where you wait as long as possible and then have one large operation. Smaller, earlier, repeated is a real strategy now.
One caveat about all of these numbers
ASPS builds these estimates from member surgeons, CosmetAssure and a national claims dataset, representing more than 3,000 board-certified plastic surgeons, then extrapolates. Estimates, not a census, and they count only board-certified plastic surgeons. Whatever is being done outside that group is invisible here. For a top five list, that hardly matters. For any question about safety, it is the whole story.
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Source: American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 2025 Procedural Statistics Report, national table. All percentages recomputed from the published 2025 and 2024 counts. Commentary from Dr. Agullo’s dictation of 2026-09-07, Q&A Transcriptions/Procedure-Trends-Commentary.md.
