Physician pay has one of the sharpest early-career cliffs of any profession: a resident earning a fixed training stipend can see income triple or quadruple the moment they finish residency and start billing independently, a jump most other professions never see in a single year.
This page sets out typical pay from resident to peak career, how earnings compare across several countries at similar seniority, and the employers and health systems that hire the most physicians.
The pay ladder
US first-year residents earn a fixed training stipend set by their hospital, not the market; the AAMC reported an average PGY-1 stipend of about $63,800 in 2023, rising toward $66,700 in 2024, for weeks that regularly exceed 60 hours.
Pay typically triples or quadruples the moment residency ends and a physician can bill independently for the first time — one of the sharpest single-year pay jumps of any profession, though starting offers vary widely by region and practice type.
Broadly consistent with recent occupational wage data for family medicine and general internal medicine physicians in the United States, which cluster in the mid-$200,000s.
Typical for a physician a decade or more past residency who has added administrative responsibility, such as a hospitalist medical director role, on top of clinical work.
Reached mainly by physicians who own a successful practice, hold a senior hospital-system leadership role, or add administrative income to clinical work; the US Bureau of Labor Statistics tops out its published wage bands at $239,200, so official averages likely understate the highest earners.
What it pays around the world
United States
Roughly the median for primary care and general internal medicine physicians nationally; pay varies widely by state, and procedural specialists earn substantially more than this generalist figure.
Australia
Full-time general practitioners report average incomes in this range in profession surveys, among the highest for primary care physicians in the OECD outside the United States.
United Kingdom
The national NHS consultant physician pay scale for England, 2023/24; salaried GPs and GP partners who share practice profit often land in a similar range or higher.
Germany
Typical salaried pay for a Facharzt (specialist) in internal medicine working in a German hospital or outpatient practice, after five to six years of postgraduate Weiterbildung training.
Brazil
Typical annual pay for a physician in Brazil's public SUS health system; private practice and health-plan work can pay considerably more for the same physician.
India
Typical pay band for a physician in a government hospital, roughly $14,000–$24,000 a year at 2024 exchange rates; senior private-hospital consultants in major cities earn several times this.
Key numbers
Who employs them
Mayo Clinic
A nonprofit, physician-led health system based in Rochester, Minnesota with major campuses in Arizona and Florida, consistently ranked among the world's leading employers for internal medicine and its subspecialties.
Kaiser Permanente
An integrated US nonprofit health system whose physicians practice through dedicated Permanente Medical Groups under exclusive contract rather than independent private practice, one of the largest such arrangements in the country and a widely studied model for team-based primary care.
National Health Service (NHS)
The United Kingdom's public health service is, by a wide margin, the largest single employer of physicians in the country, setting national consultant pay scales and training numbers for the entire profession.
Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin
One of Europe's largest university hospitals, and a major direct employer of physicians in training and specialist practice in Germany's capital.
Apollo Hospitals
A private hospital network founded in India in 1983 that grew into one of Asia's largest healthcare groups, employing thousands of physicians across dozens of hospitals in India and neighboring countries.
National and regional public health ministries
In most countries outside the United States, government health ministries and public hospital systems collectively employ more physicians than any single private group, typically at lower pay than top private practice.
Where the demand is going
Demand for physicians is rising almost everywhere at once: aging populations in wealthy countries need more chronic-disease management, while lower- and middle-income countries are still trying to reach the physician-to-population ratios the WHO considers adequate. Rural and lower-income regions within every country, not just between them, face the sharpest shortages, since newly qualified physicians overwhelmingly prefer to practice in the same wealthy urban areas where they trained.
Two forces are reshaping where that demand gets filled: telemedicine, which lets a physician in one region see patients hundreds of miles away, and the accelerating employment of physicians by hospital systems and corporate groups rather than independent practices, which increasingly determines not just physicians' pay but where and how many patients they are scheduled to see each day.
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