The race for physicians is heating up as workforce shortages loom large.
What does your organization need to know about the latest physician compensation trends?
The latest data from Modern Healthcare’s Physician Compensation Survey shows that the competition to recruit and retain physicians is intensifying as shortages run deep.
While compensation continues to rise, particularly through widespread use of sign-on bonuses, physicians are also seeking a broader set of benefits — including technology upgrades, flexibility, and work-life balance — as part of their employment decisions.
Featuring data and insights from SullivanCotter, Modern Healthcare recently outlined 5 key workforce and physician compensation trends that organizations must pay close attention to:
- Compensation ticks up, mainly through sign-on bonuses
- Industry pressure makes it hard to keep up with compensation trends
- On-call requirements almost nonnegotiable
- Tech ranks above compensation for some physicians
- Physicians opt for money over location – unless it’s rural
See what our experts have to say!
“We see almost a 25-percentage-point bump from 2023 to 2025 in the utilization of sign-on bonuses. It’s not that the overall median value of sign-on bonuses has really changed demonstrably, but the utilization sure has, which suggests that virtually every new deal is coming with a sign-on bonus attached to it, almost as if it’s a standard expectation.” – Mark Ryberg, Physician Workforce Practice Leader
“We have seen that rural market positions have a consistently higher median compensation level than their urban or suburban counterparts.” – Dave Hesselink, Managing Principal
Want to dive deeper into emerging physician compensation trends?
Our longstanding Physician Compensation and Productivity Survey is one of the largest and most comprehensive of its kind! It collects data on nearly 240 physician specialties across multiple position levels.
Report Highlights
- Data from more than 500 organizations on more than 231,000 individual physicians
- Includes 232 different specialties
- Base salary and total cash compensation data as well as cost of benefits
- Productivity data and ratios, including work RVUs, collections, patient visits and panel sizes
- Value-based compensation approaches and amounts paid
- Data for multiple position levels from staff physicians to chairs
- National data reported by region, organization type, position level and specialty group
- Other data, including sign-on bonuses, retention bonuses, relocation assistance and other perquisites
