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SeekerOfTheTree

SeekerOfTheTree

Full Member
15+ Year Member
Has anybody gotten a salary raise in the last 3 years? I feel like I am making less now than I did 5 years ago. Just curious. I saw this on a salary posting on reddit and this guy is going to clear 850k for working 1 on 2 weeks off in radiology nights. The partners are pulling 1.5 mil. Is rads this lucrative now? What the heck is our future?
 

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Highest market rate we had 10 years ago was around $275/hr. Currently it is around $315/hr. Personally, I was making around ~$250/hr back then. Currently I make around $270/hr.

I don't really feel like I'm making any more annually compared to 10 years ago but when I think back, I guess I am making slightly higher. That's for 1099 jobs in my region.

To answer your question specifically though, I have not seen a change in salary for my area in the past 3 years.
 
SeekerOfTheTree said:
Has anybody gotten a salary raise in the last 3 years? I feel like I am making less now than I did 5 years ago. Just curious. I saw this on a salary posting on reddit and this guy is going to clear 850k for working 1 on 2 weeks off in radiology nights. The partners are pulling 1.5 mil. Is rads this lucrative now? What the heck is our future?
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My pay overall is down compared to pre-COVID, but I also see fewer patients (it’s harder to move through those patients now though which is another story). That plus inflation has crushed my purchasing power (first world problems obviously I’m not starving).

I’ve definitely heard of crazy salaries for rads and anesthesia lately. Feels like before we were maybe reasonably close to those folks but now no way for the average EM situation.
 
Rofl

Yeah

I was excited to get "promoted" to partner. Then I ran the numbers and i actually made MORE, accounting for inflation, before I was a partner lol

What a scam. You're not the only one noticing we didn't get "raises"
 
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We are just P&L and there does tend to be a bit of increased overhead most years (insurance Etc).

I am making more but based on seeing more patients more quickly with better coding and billing, not a raise. The opposite of a raise in that per patient income hasn’t come close to keeping up with inflation.
 
MGMA average for rads is around 500-600k. About 25% less for academics.

There are always outliers in any specialty, depending on location/payor mix.
 
Porfirio said:
PRN and Locum docs get the raises.
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This was pre-Covid, but after working at the same locums site for years, I happened to get an email from a recruiter for a locums company for the same site, for 25% more per hour. (They almost never advertise either the exact location or the hourly rate. I got lucky.) So I forwarded it to my contact at the locums company I was working with, and the answer was, "Sure, of course we can pay you that." So... if you're working locums, ASK for a raise.
 
6 years at my job. We got a raise last year, and are about to have a 'restructuring' of our RVU/base divide which has been promised is going to be a significant raise for everyone but the bottom ~20% of producers.
 
SeekerOfTheTree said:
Has anybody gotten a salary raise in the last 3 years? I feel like I am making less now than I did 5 years ago. Just curious. I saw this on a salary posting on reddit and this guy is going to clear 850k for working 1 on 2 weeks off in radiology nights. The partners are pulling 1.5 mil. Is rads this lucrative now? What the heck is our future?
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Yeah we done ****ed up, mah dude/dudette. And no. Zero change aka salary drop accounting for inflation.
 
SeekerOfTheTree said:
Has anybody gotten a salary raise in the last 3 years? I feel like I am making less now than I did 5 years ago. Just curious. I saw this on a salary posting on reddit and this guy is going to clear 850k for working 1 on 2 weeks off in radiology nights. The partners are pulling 1.5 mil. Is rads this lucrative now? What the heck is our future?
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I saw the same post today. It briefly made me wish I had gone into rads....until I remembered that I hated rads. And that this person is a significant outlier according to MGMA data and a nocturnist to boot.
 
And keep in mind that the shelf life for radiology as a specialty is short with the exponential rise of AI combined with their overwhelming cost to the health care system.

When you can identify someone's face in a third world country through a camera or drive a semi across country using sensors alone, it won't be long before AI is doing 99% of diagnostic radiology, likely with just a final sign off from a human being.
 
I made the most I ever made(hourly real dollar not inflation adjusted) in 2002. Granted it was as weekend nocturnist at a busy place. It's been a bit down and up every year since then but overall trend was always down a bit. At least until I started doing locums but that isn't exactly consistent work.
hoot504 said:
...about to have a 'restructuring' of our RVU/base divide which has been promised is going to be a significant raise for everyone but the bottom ~20% of producers.
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I call this rearranging the deck chairs. Seems like every 2 years my old CMG would do it. Always promised it was going to be better. Mostly just seemed like a way to obfuscate that it was worse.
 
Brigade4Radiant said:
If AI can do 99% of diagnostic radiology it won't be long till most doctors except for surgeons are out of work.

Still 850k for 1 week one and two weeks off is pretty nice and being at home can't be beat to bad i did my rads rotation late in 4th year it was boring but that's because rads as a student is boring.
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Possibly but despite their protests over on the radiology subforum, I don't see how AI doesn't have a massive impact on DR in the next 20 - 30 years. Rads' basic argument against this is that DR is much more than pixels on a screen. While that's probably true in many scenarios all you need is a system that's 'good enough' for insurance and hospital systems and it will probably lead to a situation where 1 DR is signing off on AI reads and doing the work that 3 prior DRs used to do.
 
SeekerOfTheTree said:
Has anybody gotten a salary raise in the last 3 years? I feel like I am making less now than I did 5 years ago. Just curious. I saw this on a salary posting on reddit and this guy is going to clear 850k for working 1 on 2 weeks off in radiology nights. The partners are pulling 1.5 mil. Is rads this lucrative now? What the heck is our future?
Click to expand...

We’re set to receive a $30/hr raise as part of a large university group starting January 2025. Also had the number of hours for 1.0 FTE dropped for my critical access from 1872 to 1536.
 
hoot504 said:
Possibly but despite their protests over on the radiology subforum, I don't see how AI doesn't have a massive impact on DR in the next 20 - 30 years. Rads' basic argument against this is that DR is much more than pixels on a screen. While that's probably true in many scenarios all you need is a system that's 'good enough' for insurance and hospital systems and it will probably lead to a situation where 1 DR is signing off on AI reads and doing the work that 3 prior DRs used to do.
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Agree--AI probably deserves its own post but we already get calls in the morning about missed PEs that got picked up by AI overnight after being missed by radiology the day before. With the sheer amount of data available and accuracy of AI image interpretation, I think diagnostic radiology as a specialty will eventually cease to exist.

That said, I think we could also get to a point where someone presents to the ED, has a panel of labs drawn along with protocolized imaging and gets a diagnosis. An ED would really just need someone around to do any necessary procedures.
 
Brigade4Radiant said:
If AI can do 99% of diagnostic radiology it won't be long till most doctors except for surgeons are out of work.

Still 850k for 1 week one and two weeks off is pretty nice and being at home can't be beat to bad i did my rads rotation late in 4th year it was boring but that's because rads as a student is boring.
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They're already training models to do robotic surgery without the surgeons.
 
The VA is Congressionally mandated to do a salary review every 3 years and make sure that all physicians are paid the average specialty salary the area the hospital is located in. Always results in a raise that at least matches inflation, generally a bit more. There are also Congressionally mandated seniority raises. I like really not having to think about these things.
 
Tiger26 said:
Agree--AI probably deserves its own post but we already get calls in the morning about missed PEs that got picked up by AI overnight after being missed by radiology the day before. With the sheer amount of data available and accuracy of AI image interpretation, I think diagnostic radiology as a specialty will eventually cease to exist.

That said, I think we could also get to a point where someone presents to the ED, has a panel of labs drawn along with protocolized imaging and gets a diagnosis. An ED would really just need someone around to do any necessary procedures.
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I really have to get my half medicine half snake oil clinic up and running...
 
I'm making about 50/hr more now compared to 5 years ago but switched jobs and moved from the east coast to the midwest.

Nearly everyone I know makes about the same now as in previous years with the exception of docs that switched jobs.
 
I'll mention though locums rates have definitely increased over the last few months.

At least in the midwest its fairly easy to find 300+/HR shifts at sleepy rural 1 PPH shops.
 
The average EM salary decreased over 10 years, while family medicine (they deserve it) increased along with urology (LOL why?) urology average pay is now 580k
 
Best per diem rates couple hours drive away in 2019: $250/hour days, $300/hour nights (W2)

Same job in 2022: $225/hour days, $250/hour nights. I quit and never returned.

2024: local rates are $225-230/hour 1099 or $200-210/hour W2 with a negligible night differential. Some worse sites might offer $250 or $225, respectively. Overall definitely a decrease from a few years ago, egregiously so when accounting for inflation.

I live in a saturated urban/suburban area in the northeast.
 
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I feel less bad knowing this guy is an outlier. We brought up a raise and they laughed at the idea. The field is depressing. I’m jealous of you guys getting the raises.
 
Not only have physicians not kept up with inflation, but our reimbursements are cut by CMS and the insurers making it worse.

An ER doc making $350,000 in 2004 should be making more than $580,000 today if we had kept up with inflation. Source: What is $350,000 in 2004 worth in 2024?

There is a bill in Congress to get rid of the payment reductions with CMS and tie it to inflation. One group of people who have kept up with (and even outpaced) inflation is the CEOs of the insurance industry.
 
southerndoc said:
Not only have physicians not kept up with inflation, but our reimbursements are cut by CMS and the insurers making it worse.

An ER doc making $350,000 in 2004 should be making more than $580,000 today if we had kept up with inflation. Source: What is $350,000 in 2004 worth in 2024?

There is a bill in Congress to get rid of the payment reductions with CMS and tie it to inflation. One group of people who have kept up with (and even outpaced) inflation is the CEOs of the insurance industry.
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Yes. I have looked into this in great detail and I’ll say at least pre-covid the numbers suggest different. Go look at the EM salary surveys. Our incomes have gone way up. when I finished residency a non desireable high paying job (non locums) was 160-180/hr. I made significant less than that due to being at a good site on a partnership track. That same exact job is now paying 240 and other jobs in the same area of AZ can make 240-270/hr.

So my premise is EM docs did not on average make 350k/yr in 2004.

This is for academic jobs which back then were real academic jobs and not some HCA nonsense.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine's 2004-2005 emergency medicine faculty salary and benefit survey - PubMed

Reported salaries for full-time emergency medicine residency faculty continue to rise overall but fell for the first time in one region (the Midwest). Academic rank continues to correlate directly with salary. Fellowship training continues to show a negative correlation with salary. Significant...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Mean salary 189k. Today would be higher since many are really academic in name only as they are just clinicians with little if any protected time.

The best I could find was the ACEP Survey.. 2014 avg EM hourly looks like it is around $200/hr or less
www.acepnow.com

How Much Do Emergency Physicians Make? A National Job Market Survey

2014–2015 Job Market for Emergency Physicians Part 2: Compensation Report
www.acepnow.com www.acepnow.com

Today EM docs are making 350-380k depending on the survey you look at. I would say it’s not hard to find a job in the 230-250/hr. Are we keeping up with inflation? Nope… But its not like we dont make good money.. Should we be paid more? For sure.. but it’s hard to say we are struggling with a straight face.

One thing I will point out.. the new crop of docs graduating residency are not only more likely to fail their boards but many dont want to work a lot of hours. Be it fear of burn out.. or whatever. When i finished a group of us worked a job working a required minimum of 144 and i averaged 160hours plus and the couple of other guys with me worked around 180 hours a month. This was at very high acuity hospitals. Today docs think it is near abuse to work over 120 hours a month. I think the most likely reason the salary survey will be off (which i still think will severely crash EM pay) is that the young docs wont want to work a bunch of hours.
 
EctopicFetus said:
many dont want to work a lot of hours. Be it fear of burn out.. or whatever. When i finished a group of us worked a job working a required minimum of 144 and i averaged 160hours plus and the couple of other guys with me worked around 180 hours a month. This was at very high acuity hospitals. Today docs think it is near abuse to work over 120 hours a month. I think the most likely reason the salary survey will be off (which i still think will severely crash EM pay) is that the young docs wont want to work a bunch of hours.
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This statement irks me. My last job, after covid, the coverage hours changed forever. I was a nocturnist. Our ancient medical director that refuses to work nights cut one pa out and slashed night doc coverage in half. The result was seeing 3-4 pph on my own with boluses of 10-15 patients in an hour at a high acuity shop. I'd run a code and come out to 5 new patients to see. No one wants to do that.

If those don't seem like realistic numbers I ss my trackboard numerous times to @Tenk In frustration before I left.

Those are not safe or sustainable numbers. So of course no one wants to work 120 hours. That director is equally confused why turnover is so high and people are leaving the group in droves. They hire 10 people a year but 11 leave.

Also the pay was ass for that much unsafe work. Nursing turnover was even worse and that volume of patients combined with acuity is why the number of lobby deaths went from 1/year to 1 every other week or so by the time I left.
 
Brigade4Radiant said:
In the EM Jobs facebook group USACS is spamming 160 hour jobs in awful locations while working 2 pts an hour
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Did you see the one that someone dropped for the “opportunity” to get into a locums spot with the first shift being Christmas Eve for some **** rate, and the promise you could get a few shifts going forward!

Bro you want me to do my first ever locums shift somewhere on Xmas eve we are going straight Jerry McGuire show me the money. Terribly out of touch ads.
 
i Have gotten a raise. It was ~9%, but it was because the chair surveyed other chairs and found we were behind on pay. So now we're averaged with them, so in 7 years when were back down to 20th %ile (or less), we'll get a boost of some sort. But it hasn't kept up with inflation.

Not as bad as Pulm/CC guys at UPenn who found out that they were being paid at the 4th %ile and subsequently got a 40% raise to get to the median. But thats Ivy League academics for ya - they may not be PE-backed, but they'll F you in other ways.
 
carbonizedeyesockets said:
Not as bad as Pulm/CC guys at UPenn who found out that they were being paid at the 4th %ile and subsequently got a 40% raise to get to the median. But thats Ivy League academics for ya - they may not be PE-backed, but they'll F you in other ways.
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The consultants who fixed up Penn have moved onto Hopkins, where the story is similar, outside of the Ivy League.

Tiger26 said:
Agree--AI probably deserves its own post but we already get calls in the morning about missed PEs that got picked up by AI overnight after being missed by radiology the day before. With the sheer amount of data available and accuracy of AI image interpretation, I think diagnostic radiology as a specialty will eventually cease to exist.
Click to expand...
Why would they run AI overnight on studies from the day before as opposed to contemporaneously?
 
EctopicFetus said:
Yes. I have looked into this in great detail and I’ll say at least pre-covid the numbers suggest different. Go look at the EM salary surveys. Our incomes have gone way up. when I finished residency a non desireable high paying job (non locums) was 160-180/hr. I made significant less than that due to being at a good site on a partnership track. That same exact job is now paying 240 and other jobs in the same area of AZ can make 240-270/hr.

So my premise is EM docs did not on average make 350k/yr in 2004.

This is for academic jobs which back then were real academic jobs and not some HCA nonsense.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine's 2004-2005 emergency medicine faculty salary and benefit survey - PubMed

Reported salaries for full-time emergency medicine residency faculty continue to rise overall but fell for the first time in one region (the Midwest). Academic rank continues to correlate directly with salary. Fellowship training continues to show a negative correlation with salary. Significant...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Mean salary 189k. Today would be higher since many are really academic in name only as they are just clinicians with little if any protected time.

The best I could find was the ACEP Survey.. 2014 avg EM hourly looks like it is around $200/hr or less
www.acepnow.com

How Much Do Emergency Physicians Make? A National Job Market Survey

2014–2015 Job Market for Emergency Physicians Part 2: Compensation Report
www.acepnow.com www.acepnow.com

Today EM docs are making 350-380k depending on the survey you look at. I would say it’s not hard to find a job in the 230-250/hr. Are we keeping up with inflation? Nope… But its not like we dont make good money.. Should we be paid more? For sure.. but it’s hard to say we are struggling with a straight face.

One thing I will point out.. the new crop of docs graduating residency are not only more likely to fail their boards but many dont want to work a lot of hours. Be it fear of burn out.. or whatever. When i finished a group of us worked a job working a required minimum of 144 and i averaged 160hours plus and the couple of other guys with me worked around 180 hours a month. This was at very high acuity hospitals. Today docs think it is near abuse to work over 120 hours a month. I think the most likely reason the salary survey will be off (which i still think will severely crash EM pay) is that the young docs wont want to work a bunch of hours.
Click to expand...

"Those millennials just don't want to work hard!!!"

#Eyeroll
 
Tiger26 said:
Agree--AI probably deserves its own post but we already get calls in the morning about missed PEs that got picked up by AI overnight after being missed by radiology the day before. With the sheer amount of data available and accuracy of AI image interpretation, I think diagnostic radiology as a specialty will eventually cease to exist.

That said, I think we could also get to a point where someone presents to the ED, has a panel of labs drawn along with protocolized imaging and gets a diagnosis. An ED would really just need someone around to do any necessary procedures.
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Bold coming from a specialty that is a glorified triage service that an online pill mill graduates can do
 
johhnybgood said:
I don’t think his post was a shot at radiology. That is just the field that AI can be most easily trained and effective in currently.

That being said, if you think you can do ED, come work a shift.
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I don't, I probably wouldn't last an hour, but undertrained APPs sure think they can. AI has also been in "training" in radiology for 20 years and the field is only getting better and advancing
 
AlmostAnMD said:
This statement irks me. My last job, after covid, the coverage hours changed forever. I was a nocturnist. Our ancient medical director that refuses to work nights cut one pa out and slashed night doc coverage in half. The result was seeing 3-4 pph on my own with boluses of 10-15 patients in an hour at a high acuity shop. I'd run a code and come out to 5 new patients to see. No one wants to do that.

If those don't seem like realistic numbers I ss my trackboard numerous times to @Tenk In frustration before I left.

Those are not safe or sustainable numbers. So of course no one wants to work 120 hours. That director is equally confused why turnover is so high and people are leaving the group in droves. They hire 10 people a year but 11 leave.

Also the pay was ass for that much unsafe work. Nursing turnover was even worse and that volume of patients combined with acuity is why the number of lobby deaths went from 1/year to 1 every other week or so by the time I left.
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I get it.. I would say about 20% of the new grads want to work.. Like really work.. high hours, high acuity high volume and high pay.

We have become so worried about burnout that it prevents even starting. It is like a sprinter not wanting to go all out in a track meet because they are worried about pulling a hamstring. I get it.. I have seen people get burnt out that being said at some point a new grad needs to put their big boy/girl pants on and get to work. But Im probably the old dude who is yelling at the clouds.. its fine..

Sounds like you got the short end of the stick on a craptastic job. I have said this years back.. If you work a job and are making under $100/pt seen then you are getting screwed.. Full stop.. not talking about mLP charts.. just the ones you see. The MLP discussion is tricky.. I think docs deserve maybe 30-50/chart.. haven't really thought about it.. the risk is incredibly overblown but the effort matters and varies.. is this signing a note on a patient I never saw which is low actuity or is this an ICU level player I need to see and help with etc.. that varies what I think it would be worth for the doc.
 
carbonizedeyesockets said:
i Have gotten a raise. It was ~9%, but it was because the chair surveyed other chairs and found we were behind on pay. So now we're averaged with them, so in 7 years when were back down to 20th %ile (or less), we'll get a boost of some sort. But it hasn't kept up with inflation.

Not as bad as Pulm/CC guys at UPenn who found out that they were being paid at the 4th %ile and subsequently got a 40% raise to get to the median. But thats Ivy League academics for ya - they may not be PE-backed, but they'll F you in other ways.
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Also shows how incredibly stupid the "Ivy League" docs are.. its hilarious..
 
hopefulraddaddypls said:
Bold coming from a specialty that is a glorified triage service that an online pill mill graduates can do
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@hopefulraddaddypls -- It seems my earlier comments might have come across as a critique of radiology, but that wasn’t my intention. My point is that when AI surpasses human accuracy in interpreting images—one of the costliest and most frequently ordered aspects of healthcare—it raises valid questions about the future of specialties like diagnostic radiology unless they add find a way to add more value to the system.

Many physician roles face similar challenges as technology evolves. While emergency medicine might have a buffer due to 1) people still not taking care of their bodies and 2) the human propensity to do dumb things, advancements like at-home diagnostics or personalized medication delivery could fundamentally reshape how we provide care. How far off is that future?

Also--"glorified triage service"? Absolutely—it’s a cornerstone of healthcare that no other specialty does as effectively. We prioritize, stabilize, and sort a system's chaos with precision, and we do it incredibly well. But don’t forget: without us, there's nobody to intubate your mom, stop your bleeding, or deliver your baby emergently. Emergency medicine thrives where others hesitate, sorting the life-and-death decisions from the more mundane alongside a level of versatility most specialties can’t touch. You're welcome
 
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hopefulraddaddypls said:
Bold coming from a specialty that is a glorified triage service that an online pill mill graduates can do
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I hate to agree with this, but this is 100% what EM has become.

The old guard here on SDN will fight against this sentiment tooth and nail, but ultimately this is correct.

It's a dead and/or peri-arrest "specialty." To give you an idea, EM isn't even a thing in many other countries/medical systems. Our 50-60 (?) year stint was an interesting one, and effectively born out of a gap in a tragically pathetic healthcare system.

To all the young ER docs reading this, or EM residents, or even (delusional) medical students thinking about EM:

GET UP AND GET OUT, The Ship Is Sinking

This is where taking the entrepreneurial approach might have some upside, particularly as we look down the pipeline of a new administration gutting regulation.

Maybe this will be a renaissance for physicians that break free from insurance, ABMS, and medicare/medicaid.
 
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