Salary is a big part of whether a job ultimately ends up being a good fit, so it’s important for physicians to know their worth in the job market and ask for it. Having access to salary data empowers physicians to know whether they are being compensated appropriately. We believe doctors practicing dermatology need salary transparency about what the average dermatologist salary is, as well as about other typical parts of the compensation package, so that they can leverage this information appropriately during contract negotiations.
We have therefore tried to provide both concrete data points as well as compile physician salary data on what doctors make, and make it available to our members for free, as opposed to having to pay for expensive databases. Using data from our physician online communities, we have started this series on compensation data by specialty to assess aggregate data from our physician salary and compensation database provided by physicians across the country.
Disclaimers/Disclosures: This information is derived from our physician salary and compensation databases, but is subject to self-reporting errors and availability of relevant data points from our online communities. This information is provided for educational purposes only, and is aimed at advocating for individual physicians. It is not intended to be used for collective bargaining; please see additional disclosures and disclaimers on the physician salary data pages. Please also do your own research before making any decisions based on the information provided. We are not formal financial, legal, or tax professionals and do not provide individualized advice. You should consult these as appropriate. We highly recommend having your physician employment agreement reviewed by a physician contract review attorney to ensure you have the most up to date and relevant information for your specific situation.
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How Dermatology Aggregate Stats Were Determined
The data for dermatologists below was compiled using 73 data points anonymously contributed to our database between mid-2023 and mid-2024. While we typically like to have more data points before assessing aggregate statistics for a specialty, this can be hard to obtain for highly specialized or fields of medicine with fewer physicians in that specialty.
Smaller datasets may be less representative of the overall landscape of the specialty. As such, a reminder to access the full free doctor salary and negotiation database to compare your situation to relevant data points available.
Please note that in general, on our ‘How Much Do Doctors Make’ series, we usually run our aggregate stats off a full-time equivalency of an average 36+ hours worked a week. For dermatology, we noted that almost 50% of contributing physicians reported working under this threshold, consistent with comments within the data indicating that many dermatology practices characterize a full time equivalent as a 4 day work week. As such, we changed our full-time equivalency for this specialty to 31+ hours a week and used this for our analysis unless otherwise noted.
We would love to reassess the statistics and further expand insights based upon future data. As such, we will continue to update this page as more contributions are received.
If you haven’t already, please contribute your 2024 physician salary and negotiation data to help others in your specialty.
How Much Does a Dermatologist Make in 2024?
The average annual salary across all of our contributing dermatologists for 2024 was $513,000, including physicians practicing dermatology part time and full time. This is data for attending physicians only; we excluded data contributed by residents and fellows.
A single average annual salary can be misleading, as several factors affect salary. We break this number down further to help you find more relevant comparison points.
Average Full-Time Dermatologist Salary for 2024
Part-time salaries can skew the overall average, so we looked at full-time versus part-time separately.
Please note that as noted above, more so than other specialties, there are many practices that characterize a 4 day work week as full time in dermatology. Therefore, as mentioned above, for a full-time equivalent, we assumed an average number of 31 hours or more worked a week, instead of our normal 36.
The average salary for a full-time dermatologist for 2024 was $527,000. To give you an idea on the range of salaries around the average, a few extra stats:
The highest reported salaries were around $1,000,000 a year.
The lowest reported salaries were in the $250,000 a year range.
The median salary was $490,000.
Interestingly, the median salary for full-time doctors in dermatology was actually slightly lower than the overall average across full-time and part-time physicians. 13% of dermatologists reported working 26-30 hours a week, and many in the 26-30 hours a week range reported higher than average salaries, which can account for this relationship we haven’t normally seen across other specialties. Below, we look into other factors that can contribute to these differences, as well as the average dermatologist salary by average number of hours worked.
Average Part-Time Dermatologist Salary for 2024
Many of our dermatologists reported working part-time.
As stated above, as many dermatology practices have full time positions with 4 day work weeks. Below, we look into the breakdown of how much dermatologists typically work. For the purposes of this article, we considered working over 30 hours a week as full time in dermatology. As such, instead of our normal way of reporting part time as 16-35 hours a week across the rest of our ‘How much do doctors make?’ series, we have calculated part time as 16-30 hours per week.
To assess a part-time average, we looked at attending physicians who reported working 16-30 hours a week.
The average part-time dermatologist salary for 2024 was $475,000.
How Much Dermatologists Make by Specialization
Dermatologists contributing to our database can denote their sub specialization. Since specialization can play heavily into salary, we looked at overall trends in the average salary breakdown by specializations. While we didn’t have enough data points to assess average salaries for all specialties, we can look qualitatively at the dataset.
General dermatology. The average full-time salary (31 hours or more) for dermatologists in general practice was $500,000 for 2024.
Dermatopathology. There were only 2 data points for this specialty in the 2024 database, both of which were lower than the general dermatologist average salaries. However, on both national datasets as well as our historical data from prior versions of the Physician Side Gigs Salary and Negotiation Database, data indicates that dermatopathologists tend to make slightly more than average.
Mohs surgery. The average full-time salary (31+ hours a week) for dermatologists specializing in Mohs surgery was $710,000, which is 35% higher than our full-time average across all specialties in dermatology. As we saw with our how much doctors make by specialty article, surgical specialties are often some of the highest earners in medicine, so this doesn’t come as a surprise.
Pediatric dermatology. Reported salaries for pediatric dermatologists were lower than the average in dermatology.
Dermatologist Salary by Gender
We also compared what our female doctors averaged compared to their male counterparts.
Female dermatologists reported an average salary of $501,000. Male dermatologists reported an average salary of $591,000.
When looking strictly at the average salaries overall, our male doctors averaged 18% higher than our female doctors.
We noticed that female dermatologists were slightly more likely to be owners/partners (18% vs 16%), slightly more likely to work in academic hospitals (24% vs 21%) and averaged slightly less hours a week. These factors can all contribute to the gender gap, though they were close enough statistically that it makes it difficult to suggest these were the overriding factors for the pay differences.
How Much Dermatologists Make by Practice Environment
We then broke the data down by where our members reported working to assess the average pay differences by practice environment. Due to the size of the dataset and the percentage of dermatologists that work less than 31 hours a week, we looked at dermatologists working 26+ hours a week in order to be able to assess average salaries by practice environment, as 94% of our responding dermatologists worked 26 hours or more.
Group private practice, non private equity backed - $541,000
Group private practice, private equity backed - $524,000
Academic hospital employee - $436,000
Non-academic hospital employee - $466,000
Solo private practice - $658,000
Dermatologists working for hospitals. Dermatologists working for academic hospitals averaged the lowest salaries across all the different practice environments, around 7% less than their non-academic colleagues and 50% less than dermatologists in solo private practice.
Positions at academic hospitals often, however, qualify for Public Student Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), which can be a significant benefit in the overall compensation package, which is one of the reasons we say to consider not just the salary but the entire proposed offer.
Interestingly, when looking at the average hours worked a week, dermatologists at academic hospitals also reported a slightly higher average than the other practice environments. Dermatologists working for non-academic hospitals averaged the lowest number of hours worked weekly.
Private practice dermatologists. Dermatologists working for non-private equity backed group practices earned an average 3% more than colleagues working for private equity backed groups. Solo practitioners averaged the highest salaries, 22% more than colleagues in non-PE backed group practices and 26% more than colleagues in PE backed groups. Dermatologists in all three private practice settings averaged roughly the same number of hours of work a week, even though all our solo practitioners are partners/owners, which can significantly increase earnings, and potentially work load, as we evaluated next.
Dermatologist Salary by Type of Employment
Many dermatology partners/owners work less than our typical full-time equivalent in our smaller dataset, so when assessing salaries by type of employment, we also looked at dermatologists who reported working 26+ hours per week.
1099 (single entity regular job, 1099 arrangement) - not enough data to assess
W2 employee - $495,000 a year
Locums/per diem - not enough data to assess*
Partner/owner - $667,000 a year
Overall, dermatologists who are partners or owners averaged 35% higher salaries than W2 colleagues. While being an owner adds additional administrative duties, dermatology partners/owners did not report significantly higher hours, suggesting that even with the additional responsibilities, they maintain a similar work/life balance.
The partner or owner track can be a great way to increase your earnings potential in dermatology, if you don’t mind the additional administrative roles.
Related PSG resources to explore:
* We have a separate locums pay and compensation data set, and have looked at the statistics on locum tenens compensation for doctors separately, where there is much more data about this.
Dermatologist Salary by Location
We generally like to have a minimum of 10 data points to assess an average salary by location. Our dermatologists are spread across the country, so we don’t have average salaries by state that we can currently report with confidence.
If you haven’t for this calendar year, please contribute your physician salary and negotiation data to our free database to help us expand with this section in the future.
How Much Dermatologists Make by Hours Worked
Medicine can often be an “eat what you kill” industry, so we wanted to look at how average salaries varied in 2024 by reported hours worked for our dermatology physicians. For many specialties, we look at how salaries change for weekly ranges up to 60+ hours a week. Of all the specialties we’ve covered so far in our series on how much doctors make, dermatologists seem to have the best work/life balance, with the vast majority working 45 hours a week or less.
26-30 hours a week - $482,000
31-35 hours a week - $491,000 (2% increase)
36-40 hours a week - $556,000 (13% increase)
41-45 hours a week - $590,000 (6% increase)
We notice a general trend of dermatology salaries increasing with the average hours worked a week, though it isn’t necessarily a linear increase. A 16% increase in work from 30 to 35 hours a week only averaged 2% higher salaries, and a 12% increase in work from 40 to 45 hours a week only averaged 6% higher salaries.
We noted above how other factors can play into these differences, such as gender, type of employment and whether the physician is a partner in the practice, and the practice environment.
How Much Dermatologists Work
As well as looking at how much dermatologists make by hours worked, we looked at how much dermatologists worked on average.
The majority of dermatologists work 31-40 hours a week on average.
Along with the average hours worked a week, doctors contributing to our database also indicate how much time they spend charting. 30% of dermatologists reported spending an additional 5 or more hours a week charting at home and several reported spending 10+ hours weekly, with partners/owners in private practices reporting spending more time charting at home than W2 employees.
If you find yourself spending a lot of time at home charting, an AI scribe may be able to dramatically decrease the amount of time you spend charting. We have a free trial and a long standing discount on an AI scribing solution in our practice resources for physicians, in case you need one!
Changes in Dermatologist Salary Over Time
As noted above, the data analyzed included contributions from mid 2023 to mid 2024, reflecting data from our most recent salary and compensation database.
We also typically dig into our previous salary database we started in 2018 to get an idea of the trends in average pay over time. For dermatology, we don’t have enough data points in our old database to break down changes in salaries over the two-year time periods we typically assess, so we widened our time periods. For 2023, we combined the data from the old data and the new database, cutting off entries at the transition point to help omit any overlapping or duplicate information.
2018-2020: $365,000
2021-2023: $464,000 (27% increase)
2024: $527,000 (14% increase)
Overall, we see salaries in dermatology increasing over time. We hope with continued salary transparency, this trend will continue.
Additional Insights into Dermatologist Compensation Packages
In addition to salary information, physicians contributing to our databases include other compensation data as well. We plan to dive further into complete compensation packages later, but for now, we have included some key insights dermatologists might find interesting.
Since many of our dermatology doctors who reported working under 31 hours a week provided information on additional compensation benefits, we looked at compensation packages across all contributions, regardless of reported hours worked a week.
Sign-On and Relocation Bonuses Dermatologists Receive
37% of our dermatologists reported receiving a sign-on bonus, with the average amount of $32,000. Signing bonuses ranged from $3,000 - $100,000.
Learn more about signing bonuses for physicians.
25% reported receiving a relocation bonus. The average amount was around $11,000. Relocation bonuses ranged from $3,000 - $20,000.
Average Vacation Days Dermatologists Receive
The average and median number of vacation days annually was 20 days. Some doctors commented that their vacation is an overall pool of paid time off, including their sick days and CME, while others had separate buckets.
CME Stipends for Dermatologists
59% of our dermatology doctors reported receiving some sort of CME stipend, with the average annual stipend being around $3,900. (This is one of the lower averages we’ve seen in our how much doctors make by specialty series.) Stipends ranged everywhere from $750 up to $10,000.
Average Student Loan Debt for Dermatologists
While student loans are not a part of compensation, student loan debt forgiveness can be a benefit with many positions. Of our physicians who reported their student loan debt at graduation, the average debt was $200,000. The higher your federal loan debt burden, the more beneficial repayment programs and loan forgiveness programs can be.
Learn more about doctor student loans. If you’ve been considering refinancing to help with the debt burden, you can also explore our student loan refinancing options.
Extra Insights from Dermatologists
As part of our salary and compensation data contributions, members of our physician online community can provide additional comments. As we compiled the data, we also looked for additional insights provided by other dermatologists that could be valuable for job selection and contract negotiations. A few that might be of use:
Increasing Your Dermatologist Salary
If the information above has you questioning your current salary, there are a few different ways to increase your income as a dermatologist. But a reminder first: look at the overall picture, taking into consideration all the factors included above and others, such as other compensation in the overall employment package such as amount of PTO, call responsibilities, 401(k) match, etc.
Salary is a key component to physician compensation, but it isn’t the only part of a well negotiated physician employment contract.
If you like where you work but don’t love the pay, consider setting aside a time to talk with management. If you are a valued part of their team, they may be willing to work with you to renegotiate your contract versus risking you leaving. Their answer may be no, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. Be practical in what you’re expecting and respectful in your request. Diving deeper into the salary and compensation data for physicians for comparable situations can help you get a target idea of what to try to renegotiate for.
Looking for additional career opportunities can also help. Sometimes, an employer may either not be able to or just not willing to work with you to get you to where you should be. That doesn’t mean every job will come with the same constraints. Interviewing for a few other positions can give you a feel of what the market looks like from the employer’s perspective by what employers are willing to offer. Explore open opportunities on our Physician Side Gigs job board, and explore all our physician career resources and education to help you navigate the job search process.
While we think the data above and in our database can be a great tool during the negotiation process, we almost always also recommend hiring a local contract review attorney for physicians to review your contract. They will have invaluable experience when it comes to negotiating physician contracts, including understanding what red flags to watch out for.
If you’re looking to increase your income as a dermatologist but are already at or above your market’s rate, you have options in this situation as well. Opportunities to consider include:
Becoming an influencer teaching about skin & beauty
Training injections
Explore more common medical and non-medical side gigs for doctors for more information on these and other ways to increase your income.
Additional Salary and Career Resources for Dermatologists
Explore our related articles and resources on doctor compensation and salaries:
If you haven’t recently, please take a few minutes to contribute! The data provided is used only for the purpose of our database to help physicians like yourself negotiate better compensation by helping provide salary transparency with relevant data. The data is completely anonymous and is only available to members of our Physician Side Gigs Facebook group. Contribution links can be found on our compensation data for physicians page.
Looking for a new career opportunity? Explore the Physician Side Gigs job board for current opportunities.
If you need guidance on negotiating your next contract for the best possible deal, check out:
Also check out common medical and non-medical physician side gigs.