Let me preface this post by saying that my advice to any medical student when choosing a specialty is to follow their passion and not the dollars. That having been said, money ultimately does make a difference. So what is the return on investment per year of residency?
Let’s start with medical student debt. No matter how altruistic a medical student is on day one of medical school, by the end of the fourth year, debt pressures can significantly influence career choices. The Association of American Colleges estimates that the average medical student debt is $172,751 for students graduating from public medical schools and $193,483 for graduates of private medical schools. With the median first year resident salary being about $52,000 with an increase of about $2,000 per year for subsequent residency years, physicians starting their careers following residency can face a huge debt burden. Many student loans will require relatively small monthly payments during residency but as soon as residency is completed, the monthly payments can skyrocket to as much as a mortgage payment.
Most physicians would assume that the longer the duration of residency, the higher the salary a physician makes after completion of residency and it turns out that this is generally correct. Pediatrics and family medicine with only 3 years of residency are usually the lowest paying specialties. Surgical specialties requiring 6 or 7 years of residency after medical school have the highest salaries for physicians. But those additional years of residency mean that the physician will either need to retire at an older age to make up for the lost earning years from the longer residency or they will have a shorter career duration for lifetime earnings.
A different way of looking at residency choices is the salary return on investment based on the number of years of residency. In other words, the best return on investment would be a specialty that has the highest salary per year of required residency training. Sure, there are a lot of potential criticisms of this method of analyzing the economics of post-graduate medical training but it is interesting, nevertheless.
The first challenge in this analysis is to pick a physician compensation report. There are reports put out by the MGMA, the AAMC, Medscape, Merritt Hawkins, and the AMGA, just to name a few. The data from each one is a little different. For example, the MGMA report mainly samples large physician group practices whereas the AAMC report is for academic physicians. Th AMGA is comprised of medical group practices and health systems. The Medscape report relies on self-reported individual physician surveys and may be subject to reporter bias. Reports based on first year salaries can be affected by relatively small numbers of physicians sampled. The bottom line is that there is no perfect compensation survey that fits all physicians. The Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2015 is based on surveys submitted by 19,657 physicians between December 2014 – March 2015 and is freely available on the internet. The American Medical Group Association (AMGA) is an organization for medical group practices and has 125,000 physician members. The AMGA Compensation Report 2015 is based on surveys received to member medical groups and health systems. The Merritt Hawkins Physician Compensation report is based on hospital and group practice offers to newly recruited physicians and primarily reflects entry-level salaries.
In the table in the PDF link below, the average compensation reported by Medscape is listed along with the number of years of residency for each specialty. I have counted years of fellowship as years of residency for simplicity. By dividing the average salary by the number of years of residency, you can come up with the average salary per year of residency training. If you think of think of residency as a career investment, then this number gives you an idea of the return on your residency time investment. Some of these numbers have to be viewed with caution, however. For example, unlike the MGMA and AAMC reports, Medscape lumps all cardiologists into a single category of cardiology so this may include not only general cardiologists but also interventional and electrophysiology cardiologists who have longer fellowships and make a higher salary. There is no separate category for outpatient general internal medicine and hospitalist medicine in the Medscape survey so presumably the category of “internal medicine” includes both even though they have very different salaries.
Medscape Physician Compensation Analysis
The AMGA physician compensation report gives fairly similar results as Medscape but does give results for some specialties not included in the Medscape survey:
AMGA Physician Compensation Analysis
The Merritt Hawkins report shows slightly different results, mainly what to expect in the first year after residency. It has a smaller “n-value” for each specialty so this may affect its accuracy compared to other reports:
Merritt Hawkins Physician Compensation Analysis
The MGMA report is for starting salaries in the first year post-residency in larger medical groups. Like the Merritt Hawkins survey, the results for any given specialty represent a small number of physicians and my not be as reflective of true numbers as other reports:
MGMA Physician Compensation Analysis
If you combine these three reports, the three highest return on investment specialties for all 4 surveys are emergency medicine, dermatology, and orthopedic surgery. Anesthesiology makes the highest return on investment list in 3 of the surveys and neurosurgery makes the list on 1 survey (however neurosurgery was only included as a specialty in two of the four surveys).
The lowest return on investment depends on the survey. For the Medscape, AMGA, and MGMA surveys that survey all practitioners, the two consistently lowest return on investment specialties are endocrinology and infectious disease. Pulmonary/critical care medicine and rheumatology make two of the surveys’ lowest return on investment list. Allergy and nephrology each made the bottom list in one of the surveys.
However, in the Merritt Hawkins survey, the four specialties giving the lowest return on investment are non-invasive cardiology, radiology, psychiatry, and hematology/oncology. Although this could just be a result of small numbers of physicians sampled in the Merritt Hawkins survey as opposed to the other surveys, it is also possible that these four specialities are becoming saturated with a supply of physicians beginning to exceed the supply.
No one would advise a medical student to choose a specialty purely based on this analysis. The good news is that all physicians make a high income relative to other professions and so the decision should be more about what you enjoy doing rather about a pure financial return on investment. There are also quality of life issues to consider, for example, an emergency medicine physician has to be willing to work a lot of evening and night shifts since that is when emergency rooms get busy.
In an ideal free market world, physician salary would be dictated by the supply and demand for any given specialty but the market for physicians is not a free market system since income is tied to reimbursement and the reimbursement for any given service or procedure is determined by Medicare and commercial insurance companies.
For myself, I started off my career as a pulmonary and critical care physician, one of the specialties with the lowest return on investment. Even if I had read this blog post 30 years ago, I still would have gone into pulmonary/critical care since that is where my passion lies.
August 1, 2016
