<p>Salaries are not generally a factor of where the physician went to school but rather a reflection of their specialty, geographic location & work ethic. All of this assumes the physician has good skills, both as a doctor and as a business person, and has a good bedside manner.
Surgical specialties tend to pay better than cognitive ones such as psychiatry. At present, the reimbursement system is heavily tilted toward the procedure based specialties (so non surgeons who do a lot of procedures, such as gastroenterologists, may compete well with surgeons income-wise), though this may diminish a bit over time.
Location is a big key to income. In general terms, the less sought after the location, the more the doctor will earn. The highest paying offers I got were in North Dakota, Montana, the U.P. of Michigan and along the Mexican border (a job offer in Marquette, Michigan offered 5 times the pay of a job in San Diego!). Interestingly, costs of living and of practice tend to be lower in these places as well, so net physician income may be much, much higher.
Lastly, hard work means more income. In most cases, it comes down to how many patients you see a day and how many days a week you work. Not exactly surprising.
Anyway, the range at present is about $90,000 for pediatricians and psychiatrists to $450,000 for invasive cardiologists.</p>
<p>The Bureau of Labor Statistics (a US government agency) publishes detailed statistics on average wages for hundreds of occupations; for physicians, it's broken down by specialty. Each category is searchable by state, and by metropolitan area, and shows median wages as well as various percentiles above and below the median. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.bls.gov/oes/%5B/url%5D">http://www.bls.gov/oes/</a></p>
<p>my uncle, who is a psychiatrist, earns nearly $900,000 a year.</p>
<p>saywhatman, does your uncle have his own hospital because that seems like a lot of money earned by a psychiatrist in one year.</p>
<p>yeah he has his own hospital.</p>
<p>interesting</p>
<p>wait wait wait. how the heck do you have a psychiatric hospital? is it like a ward? i thought these were like prisons...???</p>
<p>I thought psychiatry was a higher earning specialty. I guess not?</p>
<p>Nope it avgs. 100-200 grand not too much, but not bad.</p>
<p>lol 200 grand is "not 2 much"..haha</p>
<p>Its not when you consider office expenses, malp insur. and taxes. Thats a fairly low "salary" when you account for all of the above. Then consider training period with low pay. Then also consider lots of on call time since most psychs. deal with cases all day every day over the phone, and yeah its not much</p>
<p>It's also the upper limit of what BND was discussing. If anything we should be using a figure of $150,000, which instantly becomes $65K after taxes. Now factor in the other costs.</p>
<p>Wow, so doctors really do not make much at all do they?</p>
<p>Well, it depends on what you compare it to.</p>
<p>what's the average doctor's salary? assuming also the doctor has done residency...</p>
<p>Too variable for any one number to be useful. Use salary.com for specifics.</p>
<p>Don't post if you don't know what your talking about, most if not all statistics showing doctors salaries specifically say AFTER malpractice, office, staff, and all other work expenditures, but before taxes, second who ever posted that 150k a year after taxes becomes 65k year, either doesn't live in america, or is a fool, WAYYYY WAYYYYYYY over the highest tax bracket, which is about 35 percent, I could be off by a few percentage points about nothing that will make a noticable difference, that means you lose 52,000 a year in federal income tax, (thats why you will not be voting for Hilary "the communist" Clinton in 08) putting your profit after all expenditures and federal taxes at 98,000 a year.</p>
<p>That alone is a very high salary much higher than average, and think, that isn't even going to be your salary, thats going to be you profit.</p>
<p>look at doctors salarys, alot of them most more than 150 a year anyway</p>
<p>"Don't post if you don't know what you're talking about" was a rather rude thing to say.</p>
<p>First, $150K is precisely the right salary to be using based on the citations and discussion above.</p>
<p>Second, national income taxes are around 35%. Payroll taxes are 13.6%. State income taxes in, say, California are 10%. City and county taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, gasoline taxes, car taxes, and in some cases capital gains taxes continue to erode this. 57% taxes seems like an underestimate to me. Now consider malpractice insurance.</p>
<p>Want to do the math? Be my guest.</p>
<p>What is the highest earning specialty?</p>