I’m confused. I see several threads saying 150/hour is a very low salary for a physician but if you are working 50 hours a week that is about 335k annually right with holidays, which is about average for a doctor/attending right? Am I doing the math wrong? For example, for emergency medicine physicians, I see that they can potentially work 60 hours/week and that would 400k at 150/hour. What is the typical hourly pay by specialty? I hear ER nurses are making 150/hour now commonly. Isn’t over 300k a rare salary for a nurse? These numbers aren’t adding up that I am seeing in these threads.
Post-Residency Salary Hourly vs Annual
- Thread starter wheatbar
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No physician working 50h/wk should be doing it for $150/h. And an EM attending working 60h/wk would do that for a year or so before putting a bullet in their head...that kind of workload is insane as an EM attending and if it didn't come with a solidly 7 figure income wouldn't be anything close to "worth it".
I've never worked more than 32 clinical hours a week in more than a decade of being an attending and my current hourly pay based on those numbers is ~$275/h.
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You're not doing the math wrong. It's just people's expectations on these forums are on the end of the bull curve because of anecdotal experience and selection bias.
www.healthgrades.com
| Specialty | Hourly Rate | Average Annual Salary | Average Hours Worked |
| Neurosurgery | $272 | $773,201 | 58.0 |
| Plastic Surgery | $242 | $619,000 | 52.2 |
| Orthopedic Surgery | $221 | $573,000 | 52.9 |
| Dermatology | $205 | $443,000 | 44.2 |
| Radiology | $199 | $483,000 | 49.6 |
| Gastroenterology | $195 | $501,000 | 52.3 |
| Otorhinolaryngology (ENT) | $189 | $485,000 | 52.4 |
| Urology | $189 | $506,000 | 54.7 |
| Cardiology | $184 | $507,000 | 56.2 |
| Oncology | $180 | $463,000 | 52.6 |
| Anesthesiology | $177 | $448,000 | 51.8 |
| Ophthalmology | $175 | $388,000 | 45.3 |
| Emergency Medicine | $162 | $352,000 | 44.4 |
| Surgery, General | $146 | $412,000 | 57.4 |
| Pulmonary Medicine | $145 | $378,000 | 53.3 |
| Critical Care | $144 | $406,000 | 57.7 |
| Pathology | $144 | $339,000 | 48.2 |
| Psychiatry | $135 | $309,000 | 46.6 |
| Allergy & Immunology | $131 | $282,000 | 44.1 |
| Ob/Gyn | $128 | $337,000 | 53.9 |
| Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation | $125 | $306,000 | 49.9 |
| Rheumatology | $121 | $281,000 | 47.2 |
| Neurology | $121 | $313,000 | 53.0 |
| Nephrology | $116 | $312,000 | 54.9 |
| Diabetes & Endocrinology | $111 | $267,000 | 48.9 |
| Public Health & Preventive Medicine | $111 | $249,000 | 45.9 |
| Internal Medicine | $109 | $273,000 | 51.0 |
| Pediatrics | $109 | $251,000 | 47.0 |
| Family Medicine | $108 | $255,000 | 48.0 |
| Infectious Disease | $101 | $262,000 | 53.1 |
Physician Salaries Ranked by Hourly Rate
The same specialties typically get ranked at the top of annual compensation surveys year after year. This analysis factors in hours on the job.
www.healthgrades.com
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Many of the hourly rates posted are for locums rates…since they are usually 1099 independent contractor positions, the hourly rate is higher, since they dont include any benefits .
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What physician is working 50hrs a week post residency? 😳
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Someone who makes poor choices, in many cases. "One or fewer houses, one or fewer spouses", "Cheaper to keep her", "Don't do what I did", and so on. We're human. It happens to some people (not me, but saw a guy, over 10 years ago, that was near 60, and working 60hrs/wk in the ED, because his divorce sliced and diced him).
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Many...🙋♂️
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I am continually amazed that people think most specialties are 9-5 jobs with scheduled lunch breaks.
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lmbo ok?
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I don't think it's fair for academics to calculate their per-hour earnings based only on their clinical hours. You have academic responsibilities that come with the job, too, that should be counted even if it doesn't generate money per se.
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I’m not an academic. And I don’t do work I don’t get paid for.
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Many especially if you take into account being on call.
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Your profile says faculty. Is that fake?
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"Faculty" and "academic" are often different things.
Not that you deserve an explanation (and if you hadn't just emerged out of the woodwork, you would have no question about my bona fides as I've been quite open for the 15+ years I've been on SDN) up until 10 days ago, I was on faculty at an academic institution but had an appointment that was 75% clinical and 25% administrative. It was 0% research and teaching.
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Administrative faculty! What a concept.
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What crawled up your butt?
The biggest issue is that call somehow doesn’t qualify as “work” and is rather just an aw shucks “it’s part of what you signed up for” mentality by many parties (admin and even doctors). So those hours are often not accounted for or fairly compensated for what it truly entails.
So me being “on-call” where i have to be anxious all night where at any second im called into some train wreck code or me having to take dumb nursing calls every two hours isn’t really calculated into the 40 direct patient hours per week.
So me being “on-call” where i have to be anxious all night where at any second im called into some train wreck code or me having to take dumb nursing calls every two hours isn’t really calculated into the 40 direct patient hours per week.
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There are a lot of ways to get paid. Hourly quotes are often locums gigs. But you can get hourly employee pay. You can get salary. You can get bonus money based on all kinds of criteria. You can get paid by RVUs or salary/hourly plus RVUs or bonuses.
I work on RVUs. I work in the hospital about 14 days a month. I’m not usually there for 12 hours but if you were to base it on that I average anywhere from $190 to $240 per hour over a month, depending on how busy it is and the acuity.
But I also work in other outpatient settings when I’m not there. I’m kind of a workaholic. I take a few days off per month. The least amount I’ve made in the last 10 years is still over 400 thousand. The most is over 600 thousand. But I work all the time.
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