how many interviews should we plan?

Voice of inexperience here, as I am also applying this year, so certainly welcome dissenting views… but from rumblings I have heard ~10 interviews is a reasonably sure match (>90%). On the other hand my understanding is that most people match at one of their top 3 places (sorry I cannot offer stats to back this up). However, I would say there are many variables to consider. If your 3-5 interviews are the top 3-5 progams in the country, it may be a more difficult match, as so many people will also rank them highly. Also, if you only receive 3-5 interviews, you may have a lower chance based on the possibility of a relatively weaker application than if you were offered interviews everywhere you applied, and you simply chose to go to 3-5 interviews. While financial considerations are certainly not insignificant, I would caution against limiting the number of interviews to 3-5 just based on cost. After $xxx,xxx for med school, it would be unfortunate not to make the home run based on skimping an extra $x,xxx for interviews. Most people I have talked to (who matched) did 12-18 interviews. (I haven’t personally spoken with those who did not match, so cannot comment there). This year, with a more spread out interview schedule, I wonder if some may try to squeeze in more interviews. I would say if you are a super strong candidate, you may be able to afford to do fewer interviews, so long as you include a range of programs. If your application is less stellar, I guess I would try to get to as many as possible - cut costs by driving, geographically clustering interviews and finding cheap accomodation rather than by doing fewer interviews. Thoughts from others?

Good advice above. 

The other thing to think about is not so much how many programs YOU rank, but how you’ll probably BE ranked by the programs where you interview.  Your goal is to interview at 3-5 places where you look better on paper than their current residents did, another 3-5 where you look about the same, and another 3-5 where you are on the low end of their range.

Most people will end up at a program where they look, on paper, pretty much like the other residents.  If you interview well, you could end up at a slightly better program, and if you don’t interview well, you could end up at a program where your stats were so much better than those of the current residents that they outweighed your interview performance.

10-15 and try searching before asking questions that may have been addressed already.

All good replies above.  3-5 interviews is an absurdly small number.  The consensus last year seemed to be that anything under 10 was risky.  Like someone said above, successful match applicants last year seemed to be in the 12-18 range.  I did 14.