Physician Salaries: How HR and Compensation Teams Can Benchmark Doctor Pay in 2025

Introduction

Physician salaries represent one of the most complex and high-stakes compensation challenges facing HR and total rewards teams in the United States today. For organizations employing or contracting with doctors, getting physician compensation right means balancing fierce labor market competition, reimbursement pressures, regulatory scrutiny, and internal equity—all while working with data that is often 12 to 24 months out of date by the time it reaches your desk.

This article is written specifically for U.S. HR and compensation professionals responsible for pricing physician roles, building defensible pay structures, and ensuring market competitiveness. The scope is limited to employed and contracted physicians (MDs and DOs) practicing in the United States; it does not cover residents, fellows, international markets, or individual career advice. If you manage physician compensation, you already know the pain points: outdated survey data, rapid market shifts by specialty and region, growing scrutiny of the physician gender pay gap, and constant pressure to stay competitive without blowing budgets.

Here is the direct answer you need: In 2024–2025, average total compensation for U.S. physicians ranges from approximately $280,000–$320,000 for primary care physicians to $400,000–$750,000+ for high-demand surgical and procedural specialties. Annual growth has been modest (around 3–4%), but real purchasing power is flat or declining when adjusted for inflation and Medicare reimbursement trends. This means relying on annual survey cycles alone leaves your organization exposed—real-time compensation intelligence is now essential for competitive physician recruitment and retention.

By reading this article, you will gain:

How to interpret current physician salary benchmarks by specialty, state, and employment setting
How to structure market-aligned physician pay ranges and productivity incentives
How to identify and address pay equity and the physician gender pay gap in your organization
How to use real-time compensation intelligence tools like SalaryCube to keep physician ranges current and defensible
How to price hybrid and emerging physician roles that traditional surveys do not cleanly cover

The next section defines the core terms and concepts you will need to interpret the benchmarks and strategies that follow.

Understanding Physician Salaries in the U.S. Market

When HR and compensation teams discuss “physician salaries,” they are typically referring to total direct cash compensation—base salary plus incentives, stipends, and bonuses—excluding employer-paid benefits like health insurance, retirement contributions, malpractice coverage, and CME allowances. Unlike most white-collar roles, physician compensation is rarely a single fixed salary; it usually includes variable pay tied to productivity, quality, or both.

Physician compensation is structurally different from other professional roles for several reasons. Production incentives (often based on work RVUs or net collections), call pay, sign-on and retention bonuses, and value-based quality incentives are standard components. This complexity means that comparing two physician offers—or benchmarking a role against external data—requires understanding exactly what is included in “total compensation.” Without that clarity, apples-to-oranges comparisons are almost guaranteed.

This section establishes the foundation for interpreting the benchmarks and pay strategy recommendations that follow.

Core Components of Physician Compensation

To benchmark physician salaries accurately, HR teams must capture and compare the right components. Here are the key elements:

Base salary: The guaranteed annual pay for standard clinical duties, typically expressed as an annual figure regardless of productivity
Productivity incentives: Variable pay tied to work RVUs (a standardized measure of the time, skill, and intensity of billable services), net collections, or patient encounters
Quality and value-based incentives: Bonuses linked to HEDIS measures, patient satisfaction scores, readmission rates, or other performance metrics—typically representing 5–15% of total cash for hospital-employed physicians
Call pay and shift differentials: Stipends for nights, weekends, or specialty call coverage; particularly significant for hospitalists, emergency physicians, and surgeons
Medical directorship and leadership stipends: Additional pay for administrative or supervisory responsibilities, often structured as a separate FTE carve-out
Sign-on bonuses, retention bonuses, relocation assistance, and loan repayment: Non-recurring compensation that heavily influences recruitment packages but is typically excluded from annualized salary comparisons in surveys

When benchmarking, each element should be captured separately so HR can compare “apples to apples” and identify where a specific offer or contract is above or below market. This is where flexible, component-aware benchmarking tools like SalaryCube’s DataDive Pro add significant value—allowing you to break down and compare each element rather than relying on a single blended number.

Sources of Physician Salary Data (and Their Limitations)

HR teams rely on multiple data sources to benchmark physician salaries, and each has trade-offs:

Legacy salary surveys: Large consulting firms, specialty society surveys (e.g., MGMA, AMGA, SullivanCotter), and industry associations publish annual physician compensation data, often considered the gold standard for benchmarking
Government data: The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes occupational data for physicians and surgeons, but these figures are high-level and often top-coded, making them less useful for specialty-specific benchmarking
Physician-focused reports: Medscape, Doximity, and similar organizations release annual compensation reports based on physician self-reported data, providing useful directional benchmarks but with methodological limitations
Internal data and peer networks: Word-of-mouth and informal peer comparisons can supplement formal surveys but are inherently inconsistent

The limitations of these sources are significant:

Survey-cycle lag: Data is typically 12–24 months old by the time it is published, leaving HR teams exposed in fast-moving specialties
Participation bias: Surveys may over- or under-represent certain practice settings, geographies, or specialties
Inconsistent treatment of variable pay: Bonuses, call pay, and productivity incentives may or may not be included, making comparisons unreliable
Lack of granularity for hybrid roles: Traditional surveys rarely cover blended roles (e.g., hospitalist + telemedicine, clinician + medical director)

This is precisely why real-time U.S. physician salary data—like SalaryCube’s Bigfoot Live—is critical for 2025 contract cycles. Relying solely on annual surveys means you are pricing today’s offers with yesterday’s data.

Key Factors That Drive Variation in Physician Salaries

Physician salaries vary far more than most internal stakeholders expect. HR teams must understand what drives that variation to defend offers, justify ranges, and ensure internal equity.

Key drivers include:

Specialty and subspecialty: A pediatric endocrinologist may earn around $230,000, while a neurosurgeon may earn $750,000 or more—a gap of over $500,000 between two board-certified physicians
Geography: State and metro-level averages can differ by $100,000+ for the same specialty; Midwest and Southern states often offer higher nominal pay, while coastal, high-cost states may pay less in nominal terms
Employment setting: Hospital-employed, academic, single-specialty group, multi-specialty group, and telehealth or locum tenens arrangements each have distinct pay profiles and incentive structures
Experience and seniority: Early-career, mid-career, and late-career physicians command different salaries; leadership roles (department chair, service line director) add administrative stipends
Workload and schedule: FTE status, call burden, night/weekend coverage, and panel size for primary care all influence total compensation

The next section explores how these factors show up in current market benchmarks by specialty, state, and setting.

Current Benchmarks: How Physician Salaries Differ by Specialty, State, and Setting

From mid-2023 to mid-2025, average total compensation for full-time attending physicians has risen modestly—around 3–4% annually—but with significant spread between primary care and highly procedural specialties. National averages are useful starting points, but they obscure the extreme variation that matters for pricing specific roles.

The numbers in this section reference recent survey and public report patterns (e.g., Medscape 2025, Doximity 2024, AMGA 2025). These should be treated as directional; HR teams must supplement them with real-time data for localized, defensible benchmarking. Tools like SalaryCube’s salary benchmarking product allow you to validate and localize figures for your specific market and specialty.

Physician Salaries by Major Specialty Group

Physician specialties are typically grouped into primary care, internal medicine subspecialties, surgical specialties, diagnostic specialties, and hospital-based specialties. Average salaries differ dramatically across these groups.

Specialty Group	Approximate 2024–2025 U.S. Average Total Compensation
Primary care (family medicine, general internal medicine, pediatrics)	$280,000–$320,000
High-demand internal medicine subspecialties (cardiology, GI, hematology/oncology)	$450,000–$550,000+
Surgical specialties (orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery, general surgery, plastic surgery)	$500,000–$750,000+
Diagnostic specialties (radiology, pathology)	$400,000–$500,000
Hospital-based specialties (emergency medicine, anesthesiology, hospitalist medicine)	$330,000–$485,000
Note: These ranges are approximations based on publicly available 2024–2025 compensation reports. Actual compensation varies by geography, experience, and employment setting.

For example, Medscape’s 2025 Physician Compensation Report found average total compensation for primary care physicians at approximately $281,000, compared to $398,000–$404,000 for specialists. Doximity’s 2025 data shows average neurosurgeon salaries around $749,000, while pediatric endocrinologists average closer to $230,000. This $500,000+ spread within the physician workforce underscores why using a single “average doctor salary” for benchmarking is a red flag.

These benchmarks help HR define internal job families and pay bands, but they must be supplemented with real-time, specialty-specific data to remain defensible.

State and Regional Differences in Physician Salaries

State-level averages can differ by $100,000 or more for the same specialty, and cost-of-living adjustments are essential for interpreting those numbers. Recent compensation reports consistently show:

Higher nominal pay: Midwest and Southern states (e.g., Iowa, Arkansas, Minnesota, Arizona) often offer higher nominal salaries, driven by supply–demand mismatches and aggressive incentives to attract physicians to underserved markets
Lower nominal but higher-cost states: Coastal and academic-dense states (e.g., Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York) may report lower nominal salaries, but cost of living and academic prestige can offset some of the gap
Metro vs. rural differentials: Rural hospitals and critical-access facilities frequently offer higher base salaries, large sign-on bonuses, and loan repayment programs to offset lifestyle trade-offs

For HR teams, these patterns matter when recruiting into or out of specific markets, negotiating offers, and assessing retention risk. If your organization operates across multiple states or metros, applying geographic differentials is essential.

SalaryCube uses U.S. state and metro-level data, updated daily, to support localized salary benchmarking—helping HR avoid the trap of using national averages for local decisions.

Physician Salaries by Employment Setting

Employment setting can change physician compensation by six figures—even within the same specialty. Here are the main settings and their typical impact on pay and incentive mix:

Hospital-employed and health system-employed: Often use wRVU-based compensation with base guarantees; subject to more regulatory scrutiny (Stark, anti-kickback)
Private single-specialty and multi-specialty group practices: May offer higher total compensation through ownership distributions and profit-sharing, but with more income variability
Academic medical centers and teaching hospitals: Typically pay less in salary but offer protected time for research, complex cases, and prestige; stronger benefits packages
Telehealth, direct primary care, concierge medicine, and locum tenens: Highly variable; telehealth roles may pay per-visit or salary, while locum tenens rates can be significantly higher on a per-shift basis

Employment Setting	Relative Pay Level	Incentive Intensity
Private single-specialty group	Higher	High (collections, ownership)
Multi-specialty group	Higher	Moderate–High
Hospital/Health system	Moderate–High	Moderate (wRVU-based)
Academic medical center	Moderate–Lower	Lower
Telehealth/DPC/Concierge	Variable	Variable
Locum tenens	Higher per-shift	Low (hourly/shift-based)
Approximate relative compensation and incentive intensity based on 2024–2025 compensation report trends.

Understanding these patterns helps HR structure pay packages that fit organizational strategy and market realities.

Designing Market-Aligned Physician Salary Structures

With external benchmarks in hand, the next challenge is translating market data into defensible internal pay ranges and offers. This section focuses on how HR and compensation teams build physician pay structures that are competitive, equitable, and financially sustainable.

Building Physician Pay Ranges and Bands

A structured approach to physician pay ranges ensures consistency, transparency, and defensibility. Here is a recommended process:

Define job families and levels: Create clear physician job families (e.g., Physician I/II, Senior Physician, Medical Director) with explicit scope, FTE expectations, and responsibilities for each level
Select benchmark roles and map to external data: Use a tool like SalaryCube’s salary benchmarking product to match your internal roles to external datasets by specialty, geography, and setting
Determine target market position: Decide where you want to pay relative to market (e.g., 50th percentile for academic roles, 65th–75th percentile for hard-to-fill specialties)
Build ranges that separate base pay from variable pay and incentives: Establish clear min/mid/max rules for base salary, and define how productivity and quality incentives are layered on top
Export and document: SalaryCube allows you to export ranges and benchmark reports to CSV/Excel for comp planning, committee approvals, and audit trails

This process ensures your ranges are grounded in current market data and can be defended to leadership, physicians, and regulators.

Incorporating Productivity and Quality Incentives

Most physician compensation plans include variable pay tied to work RVUs, collections, or value-based metrics. This approach aligns physician effort with organizational goals—but it also adds complexity to benchmarking and plan design.

Common RVU-based structures: Many organizations set a base salary tied to an expected wRVU threshold, then pay an additional rate per wRVU for production above that level (e.g., $50–$70/wRVU depending on specialty and market)
Aligning productivity targets with benchmarks: Link wRVU expectations to 50th–75th percentile physician productivity data to ensure targets are realistic and competitive
Adding quality and patient experience metrics: Balance volume incentives with quality goals by incorporating HEDIS measures, patient satisfaction scores, or readmission rates into incentive calculations
Documentation and audit trail: Clearly document how incentive targets and payouts are determined, and maintain an audit trail for compliance and physician trust. SalaryCube’s methodology resources can support this documentation

The goal is to balance simplicity (physicians can understand and trust the plan) with fairness and financial sustainability.

Adjusting for Location, FTE Status, and Hybrid Roles

The growing complexity of physician roles—hybrid clinical/admin positions, part-time arrangements, and multi-state telehealth practices—requires more nuanced pay structures.

Geographic differentials: Apply factor-based or range-shift adjustments when hiring the same specialty across multiple states and metros. SalaryCube’s state and metro-level data supports these localized adjustments.
Part-time and reduced FTE: Pro-rate base salaries for part-time physicians, but handle fixed components (call stipends, leadership stipends) carefully to maintain internal equity
Hybrid roles: Price blended roles (e.g., 0.7 clinical + 0.3 admin) by allocating separate benchmarks to the clinical and non-clinical components and blending them. SalaryCube’s DataDive Pro and Job Description Studio can help define and benchmark these roles

The next section addresses pay equity, gender gaps, and compliance—areas of increasing scrutiny for physician compensation.

Pay Equity, Gender Gaps, and Compliance in Physician Salaries

Increased transparency requirements, legal risk around pay discrimination, and media attention on the physician gender pay gap have made equity analysis a non-negotiable part of physician compensation management. This section focuses on organization-wide analysis and remediation, not individual negotiation advice.

Understanding the Physician Gender Pay Gap

Recent physician compensation studies consistently report a significant physician gender pay gap—often in the range of 20–26%, with male physicians earning $100,000 or more on average than female physicians. For example, Doximity’s 2025 data found a 26% gap, while Medscape reported a $98,000 difference between men and women physicians surveyed.

Several factors contribute to this gap:

Specialty distribution differences: More men practice in high-paying surgical and procedural specialties, while women are more represented in primary care and pediatrics
Differences in FTE status, call coverage, and leadership roles: Women physicians surveyed are more likely to work part-time or have fewer call shifts, which affects total compensation
Unexplained residual gaps: Even after controlling for measurable factors, unexplained gaps remain—pointing to potential pay equity issues that HR must address

HR teams must move beyond averages to role-level, like-for-like comparisons using robust data and consistent methodologies.

Conducting Pay Equity Reviews for Physician Staff

A clear, pragmatic process for pay equity review helps organizations identify and remediate unjustified gaps. Here is a recommended approach:

Define comparable cohorts: Group physicians by specialty, FTE, site, call burden, and leadership status to ensure like-for-like comparisons
Pull current pay data: Gather base salary, bonuses, incentives, and stipends, along with relevant performance and productivity metrics
Compare internal compensation to external market benchmarks by percentile: Use SalaryCube or similar tools to quantify where each physician falls relative to market
Identify outliers and unexplained gaps: Document potential adjustments and the business rationale for any remediation
Implement changes with a clear communication plan: Set a schedule for ongoing monitoring (annually or biannually)

SalaryCube’s compa-ratio calculator is a practical tool for quantifying internal vs. market positioning during these reviews.

Regulatory and Compliance Considerations

Several U.S. regulatory themes affect physician compensation management:

Pay transparency and salary range disclosure laws: Several states and cities now require salary range disclosures for job postings, including physician roles
Anti-discrimination and equal pay statutes: Physician employees are covered by federal and state equal pay laws, making documented, defensible pay decisions essential
Fair market value (FMV) and commercial reasonableness: Stark Law and Anti-Kickback Statute considerations require organizations to demonstrate that physician compensation is consistent with FMV and not tied to referrals. Using credible, current market data is critical for defensibility.

Defensible, documented methodologies supported by real-time market data—like those available through SalaryCube’s methodology resources—reduce regulatory and legal risk.

Common Challenges and Solutions in Managing Physician Salaries

Physician shortages, burnout, the shift toward value-based care, and industry consolidation all make compensation management more complex for HR teams. This section focuses on operational challenges and concrete, tactical responses.

Challenge 1: Outdated or Conflicting Market Data

Issue: HR receives conflicting benchmark numbers from different survey vendors, and reports are often 12–18 months behind current market conditions.

Solutions:

Adopt a “source-of-truth” real-time data platform—such as SalaryCube’s Bigfoot Live—to anchor decisions
Create internal guidelines for prioritizing data sources and reconciling discrepancies
Update physician ranges on a defined cadence (e.g., annually for stable specialties, semi-annually for highly competitive ones)

Challenge 2: Pricing New or Emerging Physician Roles

Issue: Benchmarking roles like telehealth-only physicians, virtual urgent care, hospital-at-home models, and clinician-leader hybrids is difficult because traditional surveys do not cover them.

Solutions:

Use a component-based approach: Break hybrid roles into clinical and non-clinical portions and benchmark each separately
Leverage Job Description Studio to formalize scope, responsibilities, and FTE allocation before pricing
Calibrate with a small pilot group and collect outcome data to refine future offers

Challenge 3: Balancing Physician Expectations with Budget Constraints

Issue: Many physicians report dissatisfaction with pay (about half are not satisfied, according to recent surveys), while health system margins remain under pressure.

Solutions:

Use transparent benchmark data during recruitment and retention conversations so physicians understand how offers compare to local and national markets
Shift some compensation growth from base to performance or quality incentives where appropriate
Introduce non-cash elements (flexible schedules, reduced call, remote days) while keeping pay structures defensible and consistent

These tactical responses help HR teams navigate the tension between competitive pressure and organizational financial realities.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Physician salaries are among the most complex compensation challenges facing U.S. HR and total rewards teams. Large variation by specialty, geography, and employment setting means that “average doctor salary” is almost meaningless for benchmarking individual roles. Real-time, component-aware data is now essential for competitive recruitment, defensible pay equity, and regulatory compliance.

Here are actionable next steps for HR and compensation teams:

Audit current physician pay ranges against up-to-date benchmarks for your top specialties
Standardize definitions of base pay, incentives, and stipends across offers and contracts
Schedule a recurring physician pay equity and gender gap analysis (annually or biannually)
Document a clear internal methodology for physician market pricing and compensation committee approvals
Evaluate real-time compensation intelligence tools to replace or supplement legacy survey data

Related topics worth exploring include salary benchmarking tools, compa-ratio analysis, FLSA considerations for non-physician clinical staff, and job description modernization.

If you want real-time, defensible salary data that HR and compensation teams can actually use, book a demo with SalaryCube to see U.S. physician salary data and range-building workflows in action.

Additional Resources for Physician Compensation Teams

This section provides practical tools and references for HR and compensation professionals managing physician pay:

Salary Benchmarking Product: Build defensible physician ranges with real-time U.S. data by specialty, state, and metro
Bigfoot Live: Monitor daily changes in physician salaries by specialty, geography, and employment setting
Free Tools: Compa-ratio calculator, salary-to-hourly converter, and raise calculator for quick checks and internal presentations
Job Description Studio: Create standardized physician and hybrid role descriptions that tie directly into benchmarking
Methodology and Security Documentation: Learn how SalaryCube curates, validates, and updates physician compensation data

If you want real-time, defensible salary data that HR and compensation teams can actually use, book a demo with SalaryCube.