Are you a high school student considering becoming a doctor? Physicians can make a lot of money, especially those in high-demand or challenging medical specialties. However, whether you are still in high school student or even a premed student, be careful making a life decision based on money alone. It takes a lot of time, hard work, and money of your own just to get there.
There are many factors to consider when exploring a medical specialty, including the competitiveness of the field, length and type of training, work setting, and work-life balance. And yes, how much money you can make by becoming a doctor can be important, too.
According to the Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2020, physician incomes continue to rise. Primary care physicians (PCPs) earned an average of $243, 000 in 2020 while specialists earned an average of $346, 000.
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MedSchoolCoach, a personal coaching service that provides pre-med and medical school admissions consulting services and tutoring, compiled data on the specialties that pay the most.
Orthopedic surgeons are at the top of the list, earning $511, 000 per year on average, with plastic surgeons coming in second at $479, 000 per year on average. Public health and preventative medicine professionals are at the bottom of the list making closer to $200, 000 per year. These differences are sizeable. An extra couple hundred thousand dollars a year for a 30 to 40 year career can add up.
Note: Just because you’re going into ortho doesn’t mean you’re going to make five hundred thousand. And just because you’re going into pediatrics doesn’t mean you’re going to earn two hundred thousand. There is a large fluctuation in compensation based on a variety of other factors, ranging from location to healthcare setting.
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While salary is important, so are other considerations, like work-Life balance. In addition to being a doctor, you still need to find time for family, friends, and hobbies. Here are some factors to keep in mind when choosing a medical specialty:
Most medical school applicants have undergraduate debt and medical school debt. Plus, they defer that debt while they’re still in school, so they don’t start paying it off for a while. As premeds become residents, they “only” earn between $40k to $70k.
According to MedSchoolCoach, electricians will actually accumulate a higher net income than doctors for the first 26 years of their lives after high school.
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Still, for those who are patient, a doctor will earn up to $12 million more over their career. Here are the annual salaries of the most common medical specialties.
If you’d like to learn more about becoming a physician, download the free guidebook: The Pre-Med Journey: What it Takes to Get into Medical School.Now a median of $174, 000/year is hardly chump change, so I don’t expect much in the way of sympathy on these data. On the other hand, someone
To to be last, and note that our income hasn’t increased a bit since the last time I commented on this survey three years ago.
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We rank so low, most of them probably as obvious to you as the antibiotic of choice for treatment of syphilis. Then we’ll once again end on a happiernote.
Reason #1: Doctors in the USA are paid the most for doing procedures. A famous ID doctor once said, “No one ever got rich from doing a gram stain.” And even though I just made that quote up, it’s definitely true. We ID doctors barely do any procedures, and the few we can do are comparatively low ticket items such as PAP smears, CSF exams, minor wound care, I and D, etc.
Some ID/HIV specialists have added various procedures to their practice to offset this deficit, such as screening for anal dysplasia in their HIV positive patients using high resolution anoscopy, doing fecal microbiota transplants for C diff, or providing injections of facial fillers for lipoatrophy — that last one most certainly a cash business. However, these enterprising (and for the first two, strong-stomached) ID docs are the exception, not therule.
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Reason #2: Productivity of doctors is still measured in volume. In a fee-for-service, count-the-RVUs system, the more patients you see the more you get paid. And I suspect there are few patients
Consider these: Fever of unknown origin (clinic or hospital/ICU setting). Spinal osteomyelitis/epidural abscess. New HIV diagnosis (especially with advanced disease/complications). Acute endocarditis. Lyme disease (real or imagined). Recurrent UTIs in patients with GU anatomic abnormalities or spinal cord injury. Fever in the returning traveler. Non-tuberculous mycobacterial lung infection. Infectious complication following major surgery. Tuberculosis of any sort. Sexually transmitted infections. Transplant-related infections. And on and on and on…
Reason #3: Many of the time-consuming services ID doctors provide have no billing code. Which means, simply, you can’t charge for your work. Did you spend an hour searching for a critical culture result done at an outside hospital? Maybe it was the orthopedics consult on a patient with a septic hip, now in your hospital with essentially zero information in the chart. And once this patient is treated, who’s going to arrange his/her post-discharge IV antibiotics? The lab test follow-up? The vancomycinlevels?
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That’s right, it’s you, Dr. Bugsndrugs, and not Dr. Breakbone who can bill plenty for the time in the OR, while you can only hope your documentation on the initial consult note meets appropriate complexity criteria for a C4 or C5. (Don’t forget the review of systems.) The rest of the work listed above (aside from that first note) is essentially gratis. On a different case, did you spend an eternity searching for the resistance genotype done in 1999, relegated to the proverbial dust heap — but now it’s absolutely crucial to find it as you try to craft a new HIV regimen for a patient with significant side effects? What’s the billing code for that? And don’t get me started on curbside consults and other informal advice to colleagues — just readthis.
There are certainly other reasons for the low salary: low income means you can’t invest in money-making imaging/scanners (just a few have a FibroScan), there’s no ID-drug equivalent to Lucentis, a high proportion of us work on salary for a hospital/clinic rather than in private practice, and many participate in infection control/quality improvement programs that earn points for citizenship but rarelysalary.
Yet despite the low revenue, we still seem to be doing great with two key questions — if we had to do it all over again, wouldwe:
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Here, low-ish revenues notwithstanding, we do pretty darn well, finishing second among specialties in question #1, and eighth in question #2. All of which means we’re pretty satisfied with our jobs — hardly surprising given that we have the privilege of working in such an interesting field. Money isn’teverything.
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