Which Medical Specialities Have the Highest Salary Progression? Here's What the Data Shows
How do physician salaries and work hours evolve over the course of their careers?
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In most professions, employees earn more money over time. It’s a simple concept: As people gain more experience and seniority, their salaries typically grow. After all, upward salary progression is a standard way to help employees stay motivated and eager to work hard, while helping companies hire and retain the best talent.
But as we know, healthcare is not like most industries, and healthcare employers don’t follow the same rules.
For this reason, we decided to do a data deep dive this week around the key question: How much more (or less) do physicians with 20+ years of experience and 6-19 years of experience earn compared to those in their first 1-5 years of working?
The idea for this post came from our recent How I Doctor podcast interview with Dr. Jim Dahle from The White Coat Investor, who shared that many physicians’ incomes peak sooner than you might think and the highest income a physician sees might be during their early attending years.
We suspect this has real implications on burnout and career satisfaction – various studies have shown that when employees don’t have salary progression, they are more likely to burn out. So we wanted to build a model to see what salary progression and hours worked look like over the course of a 20+ year career.
This data set is part of our effort at Offcall to bring more salary transparency to our profession. Over the course of the past several weeks, we’ve been releasing various findings – stories like how physicians really feel about overseeing APPs, a look at which cities physicians are most satisfied with their jobs, what the gender pay gap looks like in emergency medicine and more.
So what does the data show? See below for breakdowns for Emergency Medicine, Neurology, Family Medicine, and Anesthesiology.
No Salary Progression in Emergency Medicine Despite Similar Hours Worked
We selected a few specialities with the most users here at Offcall and came up with a model to control for all the relevant confounders (hours worked, specialty, state, etc.).
In emergency medicine, we found no statistical significance for difference in salary relative to more work experience. Or in other words, older and more experienced emergency physicians get paid less and work fewer hours than those early in their careers. This tracks with Dr. Jim Dahle’s insights from his podcast with Offcall co-founder Dr. Graham Walker.
Neurology Is a Similar Story: Lack of Salary Progression Over the Course of 20+ Year Career
Just like emergency medicine, a deep dive into neurology showed the same pattern: the Mean Salary actually decreased for neurologists working 20+ years vs. those working 1-5 years. Take a look:
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