Physician Salaries: Latest Compensation Benchmarks Revealed

As a full time anesthesiologist in a leadership position, I have your typical responsibilities of running the board, managing staff, and dealing with administration – but what I didn’t appreciate when I came into leadership was how much of my job would be bouncing from issue to issue trying to keep the peace and keep things moving.

In this mediator role, I get to see every day just how “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”  – whether it’s a surgeon wanting a case added after hours or a patient with unrealistic expectations of what our healthcare system can deliver. Squeaky wheels are relentless, and yet consistently effective.

A “squeaky wheel” that I think about often was actually one of our own, an anesthesiology resident applying to our group. I was the lead recruiter for our clinical group (part of a larger PE-backed corporation) and he was on the other side negotiating his first contract.  We were short-staffed, and he was in demand. I watched with a mixture of pride and frustration as he played every card he had in this negotiation.

He was not the typical resident who was simply happy to be talking about their first 6-figure contract, he was going to negotiate hard. He first tried to negotiate his base and bonus, but a change like that would require a compensation change across our entire group. So he moved on to signing bonus, and eventually moving expenses.

He tried to move everything in his package that was open to negotiation, and ultimately won meaningful increases to his compensation. For all his effort, he would now start his career in a much better spot than many of his peers.

It was a great reminder, even for a later career clinician like myself, that compensation increases aren’t going to come on their own – they require the “squeaky wheel” and having enough information to know what a fair compensation even looks like.  And yet, for some reason these compensation conversations carry so much more stigma in medicine.

Whether it’s your employer stoking fear that salary sharing is not permitted as part of your contract (which is not enforceable – there are legal protections allowing sharing of salary information), or it’s the idea that talking about compensation is not fitting of someone who’s in medicine for the right reasons (after all we’re supposed to be here for the patients and not the money), the idea of openly discussing or sharing salaries just hasn’t taken hold in medicine as it has in other parts of the workforce.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  I know this because my twin brother, Tim, was part of the early team at a startup called Glassdoor, which introduced anonymous salary sharing to the workforce and helped rewrite the rules around workplace and salary transparency.

Glassdoor was at the forefront of efforts to make salary sharing more broadly accepted, to highlight the gender pay gap, and ultimately to legally require salaries to be shared in job listings.

Since then every other sector of the workforce has embraced anonymous salary sharing as a way to achieve more salary transparency, and yet medicine has stayed stuck in the past even as we clinicians feel more burned out and undervalued than ever (with both government and private insurance companies applying consistent downward pressure on our compensation).

Something needed to change if we were going to reclaim some sense of control over our compensation.

That’s why, with the help of my twin brother, Tim, I decided to do something about it.

Tim was part of the early team at Glassdoor, where he saw firsthand how salary transparency could transform how we make career decisions. By crowdsourcing pay data, Glassdoor gave employees the leverage they needed to negotiate fair pay. It helped expose gender pay gaps. It even influenced legislation that now requires salaries to be disclosed in job postings.

Medicine, somehow, missed the memo.  We seem to be the last remaining sector of the workforce that hasn’t embraced free and open salary sharing. So we built our own version specifically for the specialized needs of medicine.

We started with a simple, anonymous salary survey for anesthesiologists and CRNAs. Within 36 hours, we had over 450 responses. It was clear we had tapped into something bigger. We then expanded to all physicians and APPs, and today, our platform has over 7,000 anonymous salaries across every specialty and location.

Not only do we have the same benchmarking summary data as the big paid benchmarking services, but we also have all the underlying details – the anonymized salary information shared by each clinician – including all the details that matter (i.e., hours worked, call schedule, benefits, and more).

This is more than just a database. It’s the beginning of a movement — a people-powered alternative to MGMA — more transparent, more detailed, and, most importantly, always free.

Here are a few snapshots to show the power of this new data-set:

Community-Powered Salary Sharing vs Other Benchmarks

There are a number of salary benchmarking surveys out there, and they vary widely – some rely on employer-reported data, while others rely on clinicians, and there are biases in size of panel, distribution (academic vs community hospitals) and survey methodology.

So, it’s useful to compare multiple benchmarks to get the full picture. We have compiled mostly publicly available benchmarks in one place, and compared with the clinician-powered dataset.

Notably, when N > 20, the community-driven data compares well with established benchmarks, suggesting that the community data-set can very quickly become a strong and reliable reference point and substitute for paid compensation benchmark reports.

PS: MGMA tightly controls access to its data and does not permit sharing, even for transparency efforts like this. As a result, we’re unable to include its figures in the table below.

Specialty	Community-Powered Salary Sharing 2025	# salaries (2/11/25)	Doximity 2024	Medscape 2024	AMGA 2024	AMN / Merrit Hawkins 2024
Allergy & Immunology	$296,000	10	$322,955	$307,000
Anesthesiology	$543,280	357	$494,522	$472,000		$460,000
Cardiology	$569,145	30	$565,485	$525,000	$595,827	$396,000
Critical Care	$444,087	45		$406,000
Dermatology	$499,704	27	$493,659	$479,000		$486,000
Emergency Medicine	$412,579	309	$398,990	$379,000		$404,000
Endocrinology	$306,180	16	$291,481	$256,000
Family Medicine	$304,961	312	$300,813	$272,000	$312,627	$271,000
Gastroenterology	$605,705	38	$514,208	$512,000		$531,000
General Surgery	$465,136	33	$464,071	$423,000	$494,287
Geriatrics	$306,200	5	$289,201
Hematology	$514,750	4	$392,260		$533,402	$444,000
Hospital Medicine / Hospitalist	$331,616	221		$316,000	$331,422	$283,000
Infectious Disease	$297,600	10	$314,626	$261,000
Internal Medicine	$335,045	85	$312,526	$282,000	$329,527	$271,000
Medical Genetics	$239,333	3	$244,517
Neonatology/Perinatology	$333,343	20	$338,024
Nephrology	$338,731	34	$365,323	$341,000
Neurology	$428,845	52	$348,365	$343,000	$364,467	$383,000
Neurosurgery	$836,141	11	$763,908
Obstetrics & Gynecology	$378,972	42	$382,791	$352,000	$396,300	$389,000
Oncology	$600,057	17	$479,754	$464,000
Ophthalmology	$546,688	48	$468,581	$409,000
Orthopaedic Surgery	$629,665	48	$654,815	$558,000	$723,421	$686,000
Otolaryngology (ENT)	$535,542	27	$502,543	$459,000		$358,000
Pain Medicine	$553,724	41				$508,000
Pathology	$361,520	51	$360,315	$348,000
Pediatrics	$247,816	172	$259,579	$260,000	$279,490	$244,000
Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation	$367,459	37	$376,925	$354,000
Plastic Surgery	$539,167	6	$619,812	$536,000
Psychiatry	$346,918	116	$332,976	$319,000		$285,000
Pulmonology	$451,718	28	$410,905	$374,000
Radiation Oncology	$632,200	20	$569,170	$516,000
Radiology	$565,383	47	$531,983	$498,000		$495,000
Rheumatology	$272,368	11	$305,502	$289,000
Thoracic Surgery	$1,013,616	5	$720,634
Urology	$545,647	47	$529,140	$515,000		$496,000
Vascular Surgery	$590,558	14	$556,070

But medians and averages only tell part of the story. When making career decisions, the details — like subspecialty, practice setting, compensation model, etc – matter a lot. Most benchmarking surveys only provide high-level figures, while others require you to pay for premium access, making it difficult to get the full picture.

This is where the community dataset really shines.  With thousands of real salaries contributed by clinicians, we can break down compensation in ways that go far beyond a simple median.

For this post, we’ll take a deep dive into my specialty, Anesthesiology — but you can explore the same level of detail for your own specialty.

Breakdown by Sub-Specialties

The variation across subspecialties isn’t just in the Base – but it’s shaped by factors like case complexity, procedural volume, reimbursement models, and work-life balance.

Specialties with heavy procedural focus (Pain) tend to see higher bonuses but lower satisfaction, while those in high-acuity settings (Cardiac) demand more training and long hours but offer top-tier pay.

Breakdown by Employer Type & Tax Status

Self-employed anesthesiologists report the highest total compensation ($636,500), which reflects the greater financial upside of independent practice — but also comes with added risks and overhead. 

Medical groups offer strong compensation ($579,000) and slightly longer hours, likely due to productivity-based incentives. Hospital-employed anesthesiologists earn less on average ($538,500) but benefit from more predictable salaries and institutional stability.

 

Unsurprisingly, Non Academic institutions pay approximately 10% more than Academic institutions. However, interestingly, compensation satisfaction is slightly higher in non-academic roles as well (3.6/5) – suggesting that while academic medicine offers purpose and prestige, financial constraints may weigh on overall satisfaction.

Comp Model Breakdown

Compensation models play a huge role in earnings potential and job satisfaction. 

Salaried anesthesiologists ($532,500) make the least on average but benefit from stability, while hourly pay ($678,000) and net income-based models ($629,000) offer the highest earnings, likely reflecting the trade-off of longer hours and less predictable income. 

Productivity-based (wRVU) compensation ($636,500) rewards volume but comes with lower satisfaction (3.3/5), suggesting the pressure of chasing RVUs can take a toll.

 

The community-powered dataset captures nearly 100 different data points, allowing for deeper breakdowns by factors like years of experience, state, metro area, practice setting, and more.

This level of granularity makes it possible to explore compensation in ways that traditional surveys simply don’t offer.

Taking It One Step Further: Anonymized Individual Salaries

When it comes to negotiating a specific offer, we’ve all relied on friends for the details that really matter — comp models, RVU thresholds, $/RVU rates, productivity bonuses, hours, shifts, PTO, loan forgiveness, benefits, and incentives. Averages only go so far; what we ultimately need is real-world context to assess whether an offer is truly fair.

That’s exactly what the anonymized individual salaries provide. You can browse through them one by one, seeing the full picture behind each compensation package — giving you the deep insight you need to negotiate with confidence.

We believe we’re on to something here, and we’re grateful for all those who have already shared their salary. As a community there’s always been a lot of talk about taking back control, but real change doesn’t need to be disruptive.

Small steps can make a difference, and we feel strongly that anonymous salary sharing is one of those small and obvious steps to help us reclaim some control over our compensation and reset the norms around salary transparency within medicine.

It’s time we come together to lift others up and collect the data we all need to ensure fair pay in medicine.