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In our practice advising new attendings and graduates, we often asked about the best resources for physician compensation data. While MGMA is an excellent resource, it's expensive and often inaccessible for new grads who already have significant financial demands. Recently, we've found a lot of value in Marit, a new anonymous salary-sharing platform started by Dr. Rob Anderson and his brother Tim Anderson, who was part of the early team at Glassdoor.
Marit offers detailed, anonymized individual salary data and updates in real-time. They also have a great blog offering excellent educational content, helping physicians understand critical elements such as compensation models, wRVUs, drivers of pay satisfaction, etc.
We are pleased to share a guest blog post from Dr. Rob Anderson highlighting the latest physician compensation trends from contracts and offers as of Q2 2025. We hope this proves helpful as you navigate your new offers. If you haven't explored Marit yet, we highly recommend checking it out and contributing your own salary information. As the physician community increasingly transitions to W-2 employment models, transparency in compensation is crucial to ensuring we can all negotiate confidently.
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In my experience recruiting, mentoring, and reviewing hundreds of offers for new attending physicians, I've consistently observed that the best negotiators are those who come well-prepared. They have a clear understanding of relevant salary benchmarks, compensation models, productivity metrics, and they are not afraid to ask.
But getting access to accurate, detailed, and up-to-date salary data is hard to come by. Most salary reports publish only once a year, with data that is either too high level to be useful in negotiations, or too expensive to access. And, this is why I created Marit – a community-powered, anonymous salary-sharing platform specifically designed for medicine. Unlike traditional benchmarks, Marit updates in real-time and provides a detailed snapshot of current compensation trends, equipping you with the most up-to-date and relevant insight, so you can negotiate with confidence.
Based on real-time salary data shared by more than 8,000 physicians on Marit, Neurosurgeon salaries ($750k median), Orthopedic Surgeon salaries ($600k median), and Cardiologist salaries ($550k median) continue to lead overall compensation. In contrast, Pediatrician salaries ($235k median), Endocrinologist salaries ($250k median), and Family Medicine physician salaries ($265k median) are among the lower-compensated specialties, consistent with long-standing market trends.
Here are the median salaries by specialty, as of Jun 2025
See detailed breakdown of physician salaries by specialty
It is well-known that pay at academic institutions tends to be lower than non-academic institutions - this is because the more prestigious academic institutions offer sought-after research and teaching opportunities, and are able to attract top talent without competing solely on compensation.
But the differences can vary significantly by specialty. For example, in Allergy & Immunology, median academic salary is $200k compared to $302k median in non-academic settings. For Plastic Surgeon salaries, the absolute gap is wider ($470k in academic settings vs. $600k in non-academic), as surgeons in private practice often generate significant income from high-demand, elective, and out-of-pocket procedures like cosmetic surgeries, which are less common in academic settings.
There are many factors that explain intra-specialty pay variances, but a key factor that helps to further explain the variance between academic vs non-academic compensation is the clinical workload. Specialties where physicians spend a lower percentage of their time on clinical work - e.g., Allergy & Immunology (70%) and Rheumatology (74%) - typically have greater responsibilities in research, teaching, or administrative roles, leading to lower overall compensation in academic settings. Conversely, specialties with very high clinical workloads, such as Anesthesiology (92%), Hospital Medicine (93%), and Emergency Medicine (90%), do not see as much difference between Academic and Non Academic settings.
Employers now use a variety of compensation models in their contracts, and this can vary significantly by specialty. e.g., Hospital-based specialties remain predominantly salary-based (81% of contracts reported on Marit), since these are structured, institutional settings with more predictable clinical workloads. Primary care specialties also largely rely on salary-based modes (76% of contracts on Marit).
However, most compensation packages in medicine are increasingly shifting toward productivity-based models, aligning more closely with reimbursement frameworks used by healthcare payers. In Primary Care specialties, a meaningful portion (17%) now have a component of production-based compensation, which reflects increased expectations around patient volume and practice efficiency. For procedural and surgical specialties, roughly 32% of contracts are productivity based.
This shift underscores the importance of understanding productivity measures such as work Relative Value Units (wRVUs). Physicians in these fields must be adept at managing their clinical efficiency and familiarizing themselves with productivity benchmarks.
As productivity-based compensation becomes more ubiquitous, it’s increasingly important for physicians to deeply understand wRVU structures and metrics. Without a clear grasp of these metrics, threshold values and conversion factors, physicians risk undervaluing their work and missing key leverage points in contract negotiations.
The issue with wRVU based compensation is that, once again, it undervalues primary care and related specialties. These specialties typically generate lower wRVUs because the reimbursement codes for their highest volume services - e.g., routine visits, preventive care, and chronic disease management - have lower wRVU conversion factors. Additionally, primary care providers generally do not generate significant income from facility fees, a common revenue stream in procedural and surgical specialties - hence the overall reimbursement for these codes tends to be lower. This is a double-whammy - so specialties like Pediatrics, Family Medicine, and Internal Medicine fall into the "low wRVU, low $/wRVU" category (see below).
On the other hand, specialties such as Orthopedic Surgery, Neurosurgery, Cardiology, and Radiology benefit from higher wRVU production and better reimbursement per unit. These specialties typically perform procedures that have higher complexity, higher risk, and also generate higher facility fees, placing them in the "high wRVU, high $/wRVU" category.
Signing and relocation bonuses are important elements to negotiate when evaluating new physician job offers. These bonuses can vary significantly based on geographic location and market demand. Rural areas, for instance, often provide higher signing bonuses to attract physicians. These higher incentives help offset the challenges of attracting physicians to remote or less popular regions.
While median signing bonuses across specialties around $25k and relocation bonuses around $10k, there is considerable flexibility in negotiating these figures. Physicians in the top 10% can secure signing bonuses exceeding $100k, highlighting the importance of proactive negotiation in securing the best possible offer.
When it comes to negotiating a job offer, we’ve all relied on friends for the details that really matter - RVU thresholds, $/RVU rates, productivity bonuses, hours, shifts, PTO, loan forgiveness, benefits, and incentives. Averages only go so far, so what we ultimately need is real-world context to assess whether an offer is truly fair.
That’s exactly what Marit’s physician salary data provides. With individual salaries shared anonymously by your own peers, you get the full picture behind each compensation package so you have the insight you need to negotiate with confidence.
As a community, there’s always been a lot of talk about taking back control, and anonymous salary sharing is a small but obvious step toward reclaiming our voice in compensation discussions.
But this only works when we collectively participate. We’re grateful to everyone who has already shared their salary, and if you haven’t, we hope you’ll consider contributing. Together, we’re building the dataset we all need to ensure we’re paid our worth.
Bio
Rob Anderson, MD is a practicing Anesthesiologist at NAPA (North American Partners in Anesthesiology) based out of Richmond, Virginia; and co-founder of Marit Health, a Pay Transparency Platform for Medicine. Marit is a free, community-powered anonymous salary solution for physicians and APPs.
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