Emergency Room Physician Salary Guide
Becoming an emergency room physician requires a significant period of education and training, but can lead to high salaries. After the traditional four years as an undergraduate student, would-be emergency room physicians attend medical school courses for three years and then work at least two years, and often more, in internship and residency programs. After this training, physicians who wish to specialize will serve additional years learning the ins and outs of the specialty field. Emergency room physicians may invest 12 to 15 years in their training before being paid high salaries.
During a residency period, many physicians-in-training will earn somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per year. During this time, these training physicians work a maximum of 80 hours per week and treat patients, learn about working within the healthcare system, and handle the paperwork required of doctors. Because residents also still are learning, they may incur student loans during this period to cover the continued cost of their education.
Once out of residency, emergency room physicians begin to earn six-figure salaries fairly quickly. According to a Salary.com survey, the median, or mid-range, pay for experienced emergency room physicians is $286,000 per year. Entry-level emergency room physicians typically start out at much lower salary rates, usually around $140,000 annually while the nation’s top emergency room physicians earn just shy of $400,000 per year.
While the annual pay of emergency room physicians seems significant, some researchers argue that the pay really is not as high as the raw numbers suggest given several factors. First, students often leave medical school with student loan debt in excess of $100,000, which means that a big portion of their pay in the first few years working will go to paying off this debt.
Another factor in evaluating emergency room doctors’ pay is the compressed timeframe in which these practitioners often work. The stress level and number of hours work combine to leave most ER physicians with only a 9-year career in the hospital. That means that at an average pay of $180,000 for those nine years, emergency room physicians may earn only $1.62 million over the course of their careers. Someone working for 30 years at an average pay of $54,000 would make the same money over a lifetime.
Few people will go through all of the training required of emergency room physicians simply to work for less than a decade and call it quits. Instead emergency room physicians can transition into other fields. Some of them gained additional specialty training and can transition to other medical careers. Some emergency room physicians transition to office-based practice, which will pay closer to $180,000 annually, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Finally teaching and training are options for some former emergency-room physicians, and though the hourly pay tends to be high for these occupations, the work is not always full-time.
Over the course of a lifetime, emergency room physicians will make a substantial income, but given the costs of the education and lost earning years during medical school and training, emergency room physicians do not earn the windfall income that many people imagine.
