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. Access to salary data empowers doctors with information about whether they are being compensated appropriately. It’s important for EM physicians to have salary transparency about what the average emergency medicine doctor makes, as well as about other typical parts of the compensation package, so that they can leverage this information 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 gathered 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.
Reported averages on physician salaries depend on several factors. Given the wide range of compensation across specialties, specialty remains one of the largest factors in answering the question of how much doctors make. Other factors such as hours worked, location, and practice environment all play a large role, so we look at differences in some of these categories within the specialty as well. Unless otherwise noted, the data included in our analysis below was collected from mid-2023 through mid-2024.
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 Much Does an Emergency Medicine Physician Make in 2024?
The average annual salary across all of our contributing emergency medicine physicians was $398,000 for 2024, including EM doctors that practice part time and full time. This is data for attending physicians only and excludes residents and fellows.
A single average annual salary can be misleading, as several factors affect salary. We break this number down further, as well as look at the hourly rate for emergency medicine doctors, to help you find more relevant comparison points.
Average Full-Time Emergency Medicine Doctor Salary for 2024
Part-time salaries can skew the overall average, so we looked at full-time versus part-time emergency medicine physicians separately.
For a full-time equivalent, we assumed an average number of hours worked a week of 36 hours or more.
The average salary for a full-time emergency medicine physician was $437,000 for 2024. To give you an idea on the range of the salary around the average, a few extra stats:
The highest reported salary was just shy of $1,000,000
The lowest reported salaries were in the $200,000 range
The median salary was $420,000
Average Part-Time Emergency Medicine Doctor Salary for 2024
Several of our emergency medicine physician members reported working part-time.
To assess a part-time average, we looked at attending physicians who reported working 16-35 hours a week.
The average part-time emergency medicine doctor salary for 2024 was $372,000.
Note that because of the flexibility in emergency medicine physician schedules that doctors have to choose from in the EM job market, “part time” can mean different things to different people, and 16 hours versus 35 hours makes a big difference in compensation. As such, for emergency medicine physicians in particular, looking at hours worked in more detail is necessary. You can see a full breakdown of the difference in salaries by hours worked below.
Average Hourly Rate Emergency Medicine Doctor Make in 2024
Due to the shift schedule nature of emergency medicine, coming to an hourly rate simply based on total earnings and self-reported average hours per week can be a little tricky depending on how physicians calculate and report average hours a week. Physicians who contribute to our doctor salary and compensation database can also provide an hourly rate if they are paid as such. Several of our EM doctors did, so we thought it best to include this data here.
The overall average hourly rate for emergency medicine physicians was $238/hour for 2024. The median hourly rate was very similar at $236/hour.
Factors That Influence What Emergency Medicine Physicians Get Paid by Hour
When compiling the data points, we noted that EM physicians had a few different compensation structures when it came to getting paid hourly. For example, one noted that they received an hourly rate over their base salary for clinical hours worked that exceeded their yearly contracted hours. Others reported multiple rates. These rates differed depending on:
Day rate versus night rate (the night rates were higher by $15/hr - $40/hr)
Higher premium rate for last minute, next-day shifts (about $50/hr higher)
The day of the week (week versus weekend) or the specific job (ranges were almost $100/hr difference between high and low)
High volume versus low volume shift rates (about $40/hr higher for high volume)
To determine the average hourly rate above, we standardized the data provided by physicians with multiple rates to their lowest rate provided. This is one of the reasons that aggregate data may be misleading depending on your situation, so make sure you visit the free full database to find data relevant to you.
Access our full physician salary and compensation data.
Emergency Medicine Physician Salary by Gender
Along with looking at overall salary trends, we look at how different factors, such as gender, can affect salaries within a specialty.
Female emergency medicine doctors reported an average salary of $373,000 and an average hourly rate of $230/hour.
Male EM doctors reported an average salary of $386,000 and an average hourly rate of $247/hour.
When looking strictly at the average salaries overall, our male doctors averaged 3% higher than our female doctors when it came to average salary and 7% higher when it came to average hourly rate. Other factors, such as average hours worked a week can come into play to explain the difference in average salary versus hourly rate.
Regardless, this gender gap, while still likely present, is less than many other specialties in our series, “How Much Do Doctors Make By Specialty?,” and was similar to our data on how much radiologists make. Considering that these fields both have more shift work type qualities, we wonder what it says about factors contributing to gender gaps in other specialties. More on this to come!
How Much Emergency Medicine Doctors Make by Practice Environment
We also broke the data down by where our EM doctors reported working to assess the average pay differences by practice environment.
Corporate group, non private equity - $428,000
Corporate group, private equity - $497,000
Government - not enough data
Group private practice, non private equity backed - $487,000
Group private practice, private equity backed - not enough data
Academic hospital employee - $365,000
Non-academic hospital employee - $459,000
Solo private practice - not enough data
We also looked at the average hourly rates reported by practice environment, where we had enough data to compile aggregate rates.
Corporate groups - $248/hour
Hospital system - $241/hour (3% less)
Our EM physicians working in corporate groups reported the highest average salaries and hourly rates, with hospital employees reporting the lowest by average salary and hourly rate. There was an almost 3% difference in the range of average hourly rates for 2024. (Similar trends were also true for part-time doctors, with the average rates being 10% higher for corporate groups than hospital systems.)
Active military physicians. Though we did not have enough data to assess an average, we also noted that our active duty military EMs reported the lowest salaries, which is consistent to what we’ve seen across other specialties within our doctor salaries by specialty series.
Private equity versus non-PE. Within the practice environments, doctors working for private equity backed practices averaged 16% higher salaries than colleagues working for PE backed groups. Generally, we see the opposite, and the opposite was true when looking at part-time EM doctors. Our sample size for our full-time physicians working in corporate groups is relatively small, and we noted that the majority of our members working for private equity groups were 1099 independent physicians, which we note below can also factor heavily in salaries and skew the data. Given the relative prevalence of private equity groups in the EM market in particular, we’d like to continue to investigate the reasons for this trend as we get more data, as well as monitor if these trends persist over time.
Hospital employees. EM physicians outside of academia averaged 25% higher salaries than colleagues working for academic hospitals.
It’s important to note that while physicians working for academic hospitals and as active duty in the military reported the lowest salaries, these positions often qualify for Public Student Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) and other special incentives, 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.
If you would like to see how your practice environment stacks up, please consider contributing your doctor salary and compensation information today if you haven’t already this year. We will continue to update this page as the database grows.
Emergency Medicine Physician Salary by Type of Employment
When submitting data, our physician members indicated their type of employment.
Annual salaries:
1099 (single entity regular job, 1099 arrangement) - $494,000
W2 employee - $415,000
Locums/per diem - not enough data to assess*
Partner/owner - $415,000 (see note)
Hourly rates (for full-time and part-time):
1099 (single entity regular job, 1099 arrangement) - $253/hour
W2 employee - $224/hour
Locums/per diem - $258/hour
Partner/owner - $255/hour
Owners/partners versus W2 employees. 15% of our EM doctors reported they were a partner or owner where they work.
Above, we noted that W2 employees and partners/owners averaged around the same amount in annual salary. When we went to run the average salary for owners/partners, we did not have enough data points, even though 15% reported this employment type. We noted that the majority of owners and partners worked less than our 36 hour full-time equivalent, with many averaging 26-35 hours a week. So while their salaries may be similar to W2 employees, this may be because they choose to work significantly less. Supporting this, we investigate how salary changes by hours worked below. Partners and owners average 14% more by hour than W2 employees.
While helping run and manage a practice comes with additional responsibilities and additional administrative burden, these doctors are compensated for the additional roles they play within the practice. Looking at partnership opportunities can be a great way to increase your physician salary within your field.
1099 physicians. Of the specialties we’ve covered so far, our emergency medicine physicians have one of the highest instances of reported 1099 employment at around 25%. 1099 physicians reported 19% higher salaries and 13% higher hourly rates than W2 employees. We’ve seen this trend of higher earnings across specialties.
1099 physicians have some additional responsibilities, as they have to manage their self-employed income, such as calculating and filing quarterly estimated taxes, obtaining health insurance, tracking their expenses, and additional tax reporting requirements.
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 and average hourly locums pay rates for physicians by specialty separately, where there is much more data about this. The average hourly rate above was taken from the locums database.
Emergency Medicine Doctor Salary by Location
We looked at salary differences among states for EM doctors. States with less than 10 data points were omitted from our analysis. As our doctors are well dispersed across the country, we currently only have a few aggregate averages. If you don’t see your state listed and want to see where it stacks up, contribute your physician salary and compensation data today.
California: $319,000
Florida: $444,000
Texas: $424,000
Additionally, we can look at qualitative data by location.
California. Of the lowest 10 salaries reported, four were from California. Quantitatively, we can see how emergency medicine physicians in California averaged 39% less in salary than our contributing members in Florida and 33% less than members in Texas.
Florida. While the average salary for Florida was significantly higher, it also had one of the lowest 10 reported salaries in our database for 2024.
Michigan. Two of our lowest 10 reported hourly rates came from Michigan
Oregon. Our lowest reported hourly rate came from Oregon
The differences above highlight the importance of potential geographic arbitrage. While city and local metropolitan areas can factor heavily into the cost of living, and how much a physician actually brings home depends on state and local taxes, assessing different salary options across the country and comparing them to the cost of living can give physicians the potential to geoarbitrage if they are willing to move. Just make sure you know what is included in cost of living comparisons (taxes are often excluded and can be significant).
How Much Emergency Medicine Physicians Make by Hours Worked
Medicine can often be an “eat what you kill” industry, so we wanted to look at how average salaries varied for 2024 by reported hours worked. Some of our members reported working 51+ hours a week, but the vast majority fell into the averages below.
21-25 hours a week average - $321,000
26-30 hours a week average - $359,000 (12% more)
31-35 hours a week average - $395,000 (10% more)
36-40 hours a week average - $420,000 (6% more)
41-45 hours a week average - $482,000 (15% more)
46-50 hours a week average - $429,000
While our 46-50 hour average is an outlier, we see a general trend where emergency medicine doctors earn more the more that they work. Our current data set of doctors who average 46-50 hours a week is currently too small to assess why their average is lower, but we look forward to investigating this further as we receive more data. It may have to do with practice environment or employment type (1099 vs salaried).
We noted that the increase at 36-40 hours is less than across other averages. From what we saw with trends by type of employment, this could be linked to the fact that owners and partners generally reported working less than W2 physicians while having higher hourly rates, which can skew the data higher in the lower averages.
How Much Do Emergency Medicine Doctors Work?
A breakdown of the distribution of how much emergency medicine doctors work:
The majority of emergency medicine physicians work on average 31-35 hours per week.
Changes in Average Emergency Medicine Physician 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 dug into our previous salary database we started in 2018 to get an idea of the trends in average pay for emergency medicine doctors over time. 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 info
2018-2019: $378,000
2020-2021: $374,000 (1% decrease)
2022-2023: $413,000 (10% increase)
2024: $437,000 (6% increase)
We didn’t have as many data points as we normally would like for 2020-2021, so our 2020-2021 figures may be slightly off, though we have seen over different specialties a decrease in salaries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, however, we see a general trend of increasing salaries over time. We hope with continued salary transparency, this trend will continue.
Additional Insights into Emergency Medicine 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 emergency medicine doctors might find interesting.
Sign-On and Relocation Bonuses Emergency Medicine Doctors Receive
33% of our emergency medicine doctors reported receiving a sign-on bonus, with the average amount of $38,000. Bonuses ranged anywhere from $3,000 to $150,000. This is higher than our average sign on bonus amongst physician specialties.
Around 20% reported receiving a relocation bonus. The average amount was around $11,000 with bonuses ranging from $5,000 to $20,000.
Average Vacation Days Emergency Medicine Doctors Receive
Given the shift nature of work in emergency medicine, paid time off was not common for this specialty. There were some EM physicians, however, who did report paid time off. Among this smaller percentage (17%), the average amount of vacation was 21 days.
CME Stipends for Emergency Medicine Physicians
48% of our EM doctors reported receiving some sort of CME stipend, with the average annual stipend being around $4,100.
Average Student Loan Debt for Emergency Medicine Physicians
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 $263,000. 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 Emergency Medicine Physicians
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 emergency medicine physicians that could be valuable for job selection and contract negotiations. A few that might be of use:
Increasing How Much You Make as an Emergency Medicine Doctor
If the information above has you questioning your current salary, there are a few different ways to increase your income in emergency medicine. But a reminder: remember to 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 call responsibilities, 401(k) match, etc. All of these components are important in 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 an emergency medicine physician but are already at or above your market’s rate, you have options in this situation as well. Opportunities to consider include:
First-aid training
Explore more side gigs for emergency medicine doctors for ways to increase your income.
Additional Salary and Career Resources for Emergency Medicine Physicians
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: