Radiologists earn average compensation of $437,000, good for eighth place among the highest paid physician specialties, Medscape reported Friday.
Plastic surgeons led the way with a tally of $576,000, while experts in preventive medicine and public health fell last at $243,000. This marks the first time in the survey’s 11-year history that physicians across all areas of expertise earned a pay increase, including radiologists, who gained 6% alongside pathologists, pulmonologists and nephrologists. Critical care providers recorded the smallest pay increase (1%), while otolaryngologists gained the most (13%).
Medicine’s gender pay gap persists, remaining mostly the same since 2017, Medscape reported. Male specialists earned an average of $402,000, about 31% more than their female peers ($307,000) and down slightly from the 37% difference recorded five years ago. The findings are based on a survey of 13,000 physicians across 29 specialties, including roughly 500 radiologists, conducted between October and January.
“After an extremely difficult two years, physicians are seeing a return to more routine patient practice, and their compensation increases are evidence of that,” Leslie Kane, senior director of Medscape Business of Medicine, said in a statement. “That said, we’re seeing little progress on pay equity — although women have made inroads into many of the higher earning specialties — and physicians continue to raise the issue of workload and administrative demands.”
Since 2015, provider pay has risen 29%, including 30% among specialists and 33% for those in primary care. Radiologists also earned an average bonus of $66,000, with orthopedists nearly doubling that to lead the list at $126,000. About 57% of doctors surveyed said their compensation includes such incentives, typically earned via productivity, patient satisfaction or other metrics.
Women continue to represent the minority in radiology at just 23%, placing imaging near the bottom of the rankings. Pediatrics was the most female-dominated specialty at 58%, while only 8% of urologists are women, according to the survey. About 92% of radiologists said they’d choose the specialty again, with dermatologists No. 1 (99%) and internists last (63%). Sixty-three percent of radiologists said they feel fairly compensated, placing the specialty sixth on the list and tied with otolaryngologists. Public health and preventive medicine specialists (the lowest paid according to Medscape) were most satisfied with their earnings at 72%, and nephrologists were the least (42%).
“It’s not surprising that high-earning specialties consider their incomes to be fair,” James Taylor, chief operating officer of AMN Healthcare’s Leadership Solutions Division, told Medscape. “Today, however, it’s not necessarily the dollar amount physicians earn that may cause them dissatisfaction, but the methods by which their compensation is determined. These can include production bonuses that can penalize physicians for seeing relatively sick patients, or formulas that track quality measures physicians don’t believe are relevant or meaningful. That’s one reasons we are seeing a decline in the number of clients offering a salary plus production bonus and an increase in those offering a straight salary.”
Read more from Medscape’s 2022 Physician Compensation Report here, and our coverage of the 2021 report here.
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Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.