Collecting Residency and Fellowship Salaries
We are announcing the start of our most ambitious project yet (on top of our many ambitious projects)! We aim to collect and make salary information easily available for all US medical residencies and fellowships.
The goal is for medical students evaluating residencies (and residents contemplating fellowships) to spend less time gathering the data they need to compare the financial benefits of the programs they are considering. We also hope that it will incentivize institutions to offer better benefits to their house staff when they realize other programs are doing beating them. Nothing like some peer pressure to give them a nudge in the right direction.
Why this is Important
We recognize that salary is just one piece of the puzzle when choosing where to pursue training, we feel that people often forget that it is an important piece. For those will large loans, and also perhaps contemplating a traditionally less lucrative specialty (yes, non-surgical or gen peds, we’re looking at you), income and salary made during residency and fellowship can become quite important, as often there is not enough time to “make up” for lost ground later on in a persons career.
Many residents would benefit from taking a little extra time to compare programs, especially with the wide range in overall compensation between programs when taking taxes, benefits, and cost-of-living into account. (And yes, we think the oxford comma is important as well.)
The Survey, The Results, and Spreading the Word
The current data and much more information about the survey is available here.
If you recently matched or are currently in a program and don’t see your program information on there, please fill out our very short survey with your institution’s salary information so that we can get all programs represented. Consider it your good deed for the day.
And most importantly, share this blog post and survey with your classmates at other programs, and check back as we update the results. You’ll be surprised at some of the variability. Do programs in high cost-of-living or high-tax states provide higher salaries? Do institutions in the same region have similar salaries? Is there collusion? Competition? It’s like a great murder mystery, except, well a lot less fun than a great murder mystery. But otherwise, identical.