I have a good friend who did forensics, and this is his takeaway: most of the money is in civil, and likely there's money to be made in child civil forensics. However, the supply appears to exceed the demand, in that a few forensic psychiatrists take most of the lucrative civil caseload, and it's difficult to break in without developing clients, which takes a long time. There's no general salary estimates as there's no facility driven salary figures for this particular subspecialty (forensics). In criminal forensics, the jobs often don't require formal forensics training, and hence there's no competitive advantage. In civil private practice, the general impression I got is that if and when you do fill, it rivals the highest private max for any psychiatric specialty in your area, but it appears that even the best forensics fellows have a problem developing a forensics practice. Whereas, this is not true for a child psychiatrist. Even bottom barrel child psychiatrists can easily fill a practice. Hope this helps.
