There is no easy answer. Biggest variables obviously include specialty and location. My experience is with IM, not specialists, so I can generalize a bit about medicine.
Generally starting salary at VA, out of residency, all totaled, approx 145-165k (plus retirement). VA salary is based on 3 factors:
1) base salary (e.g. GS-14/15) [[this is what is often erroneously quoted as "the" salary
2) market based pay (e.g. how difficult it is to recruit/retrain in a given location)
3) pay for performance (maximum of 7.5% of #1 plus #2, depending on your performance as monitored by the bean counters)
Example compensation
1) base salary 99k
2) market pay 51k
3) performance pay 10k
net: 160K
TSP (i.e. ~401k) matching is 5%. Thus, assuming you save at least 5% of savings into tsp, you can "add" another 8K to the above compensation (of course 8k not realized until retirement).
If you need student loan repayment, VA offers ~50K over 5 years.
Thus, out of residency you could have a total package including ~401k matching of 160-180k+ for IM (assuming board eligible/certified, and including student loan stipend that will disappear in 5 year).
Govt retirement: if you retired today from 20 years service as a VA doc you'd receive ~40-50K/year from a position outlined above.
Work schedule, generally 8 hour work days, 40 hour weeks, call/rounding with residents. Some hospitals (particularly rural) have no residents and have schedules more comparable to private practice.
Is this a lot? I'll leave that up to you do decide. Pay goes up relatively flat after.
If you are willing to take a job in a difficult to recruit area (e.g. Nowhere, AK), you might get a bonus/moving allowance etc.
Regarding VA staff/physicians vs private. This is a personal preference issue. VA certainly has historically been an employer of last resort. This is increasingly less the case, particularly around larger cities.
VA as an academic medicine venue I believe is becoming more attractive than state-level systems (insofar as federal retirement seems a safer bet than state level retirement).
