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 hematology oncology (heme/onc) doctors need salary transparency about what the average hematologist oncologist salary is, 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 aggregate 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 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 as well, 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 a Hematologist Oncologist Make in 2024?
The average annual salary across all of our contributing hematologist oncologists was $488,000, including physicians practicing hematology oncology 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 to help you find more relevant comparison points.
Part-time salaries can skew the overall average, so we break down full-time versus part-time salaries separately.
Average Full-Time Hematologist Oncologist Salary for 2024
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 heme-onc doctor was $496,000. To give you an idea on the range of the salary around the average, a few extra stats:
The highest reported salaries were in the $1,250,000 a year range.
The lowest reported salaries were in the $250,000 a year range.
The median salary was $469,000.
Average Part-Time Hematologist Oncologist Salary for 2024
Most of our heme/onc doctors reported working full-time, so we do not currently have enough data to assess a part-time average. We did note when looking at the database, however, that some locums physicians in hematology/oncology reported higher average annual earnings for part-time work than many full-time salaried hematologist oncologists. While there is always a tradeoff with independent contractor work of losing additional aspects of compensation packages, locums work appears to be a lucrative side gig, part-time, or full-time opportunity for hematologist oncologists. In fact, heme/onc doctors reported some of the highest hourly rates for locums work across all specialties.
Learn more about:
Average Hematology Oncology Doctor Salary by Specialization
While we don’t have enough data for this specialty to quantitatively break down the average hematology oncology salary for every subspecialty, we can look at some overall trends within our physician salary and compensation database.
Medical Oncology Only. Full-time doctors who reported doing medical oncology only made an average annual salary of $459,000 (8% less than the overall full-time average).
Bone Marrow Transplant. Our hematologist oncologists who specialize in BMT reported some of the lower average salaries compared to other specialties.
Breast Oncology. These specialists reported higher earnings and less hours worked on average a week than their bone marrow transplant colleagues, though reported a higher range in potential earnings, so more data is required to fully assess an average.
Hematology Only. These reported earnings also had a greater variation, but with the current data, reported lower averages than oncology only and the average overall heme-onc salary.
Heme/Onc Doctor Salary by Gender
We looked at reported salaries for full-time hematologist oncologists and compared what our female physicians averaged compared to their male counterparts, excluding all other factors (such as specialization, location, etc.).
Female heme-onc doctors reported an average salary of $449,000. Male heme-onc physicians reported an average salary of $550,000.
When looking strictly at the average salaries overall, our male doctors averaged 22% higher than our female doctors in this specialty.
While we often see this trend of higher salaries for male doctors, we’ve seen the percentage difference vary significantly across different specialties, depending on the factors at play. For our hematologist oncologists, we noticed:
6% of our female physicians were partner/owner at their practice, while 10% of our male doctors were
26% of our female physicians specialize in medical oncology only, while only 18% of our male doctors do
Gender gaps in medicine are multifactorial, but the degree of difference between the two as well as head to head comparison of similar data points suggests that gender gaps do exist even when comparing apples to apples. Please look at the individual datapoints on the physician salary databases for examples.
Hematologist Oncologist Salary by Practice Environment
Looking at full-time attending hematologist oncologists, we broke the data down by where our members reported working to assess the average pay differences by practice environment.
Corporate groups - not enough data to assess
Group private practice, overall - $640,000
Group private practice, non-private equity - $726,000
Academic hospital employee - $365,000
Non-academic hospital employee - $540,000
Solo private practice - not enough data
Note that we separated out group private practice into overall and non-private equity backed private practice heme-onc groups. The overall group private practice numbers reflect both private equity and non-private equity backed groups, indicating that the private equity backed groups pay less to their physicians. However, we want to be cautious and say that we only had a handful of data points for the private equity backed heme onc doctors, and cannot definitively say that this is a trend amongst all private equity backed private heme onc groups at this time. As we get more numbers, we hope to more confidently be able to report an average amongst private equity backed groups, and will update the article accordingly.
We also see that our non-academic hospital employed doctors earned more than their academic hospital counterparts by almost 50%. We look forward to gathering more data to assess this significant difference.
If you haven’t already for this year, please take a moment to contribute to our physician salary and compensation data to help us provide future updates to this page.
We do know that academic hospitals often 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. We also noted when assessing our database that members included insights about potential college tuition incentives for children in some of these positions as well.
Heme-Onc Doctor Salary by Type of Employment
The majority of our heme-onc physicians reported working as W2 employees, who on average made $464,000 a year.
Our partner/owner hematologist oncologists made 79% more on average at $831,000, which is one of the largest differences we’ve seen to date by employment type within our how much do doctors make by specialty series. One important note here is that the partners/owners often reported working 46+ hours a week on average, while many of our other respondents worked on average 36-45 hours a week. Physician salary can vary significantly by hours worked, and being a partner or owner can come with additional administrative responsibilities for the additional income. Also, it’s likely that many private practice heme-onc doctors have access to ancillary income streams from their private practice.
Still, there is clearly a great earning potential for this employment track in hematology/oncology.
Related PSG resources to explore:
Side note: We have a separate locums pay and compensation data set, and have looked at the statistics on locum tenens compensation for doctors and what locum tenens doctors make by specialty separately, where there is much more data about this.
Hematologist Oncologist Salary by Location
We looked at salary differences among states for full-time hematologist oncologists. We typically omit states with less than 10 data points from our analysis. Given the wide variety of locations provided and the smaller dataset for this specialty, we included locations with 7 data points or more. This can make the averages more likely to change as new data arrives, so please make sure you are comparing your situation with specific, relevant ones from the database.
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: $423,000 a year
Florida: $498,000 a year
New York: $433,000 a year
North Carolina: $532,000 a year
The highest paid state (North Carolina) pays 26% more than the salary of the lowest paid state (California) in states where we had enough data points. Given the relatively low number of data points by state, we look forward to seeing how these numbers might change as more doctors contribute.
In general, we’ve found a trend of different average salaries by state, highlighting the importance of 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).
Learn more about how what doctors make varies by where they live.
Hematologist Oncologist Salary 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 full-time attending heme-onc doctors. Some of our members reported working 61+ hours a week, but the vast majority fell into the averages below.
36-40 hours a week average - $524,000 a year
41-45 hours a week average - $452,000 a year
46-50 hours a week average - $523,000 a year
51-60 hours a week average - $478,000 a year
We usually see a trend where income increases slightly with hours worked. For heme/onc, the data is a lot more scattered. Since it is a smaller dataset on the whole with only between 100-200 data points at this time, high variations in the data based on other factors noted above can skew the data quickly. For example, 50% of our respondents in the 51-60 hours a week average were academic hospitalists, which we saw above made significantly less than their peers in other practice environments. And 32% of our doctors working 41-45 hours a week were medical oncology only, which we saw pays less than the average hematologist oncologist.
While we need more data to dig into insights about pay by salary, we can see from our current dataset that other factors tend to dictate salaries more than hours worked for this specialty.
A breakdown of the distribution of how much hematologist oncologists work:
The majority of our heme-onc doctors work on average 46-50 hours a week.
As an aside, we noticed many hematologist oncologists reported spending a lot of time at home charting. You may have heard us talking about AI scribes on the physician communities. They are becoming more and more widespread, and can 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 Heme/Onc Doctor 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 hematologist oncologists over time. To compare relative data, we continued to look only at heme/onc doctors out of residency/fellowship who worked on average 36+ hours a week. 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.
2018-2019: $475,000
2020-2021: $398,000
2022-2023: $493,000
We see an increase in reported salaries for 2022-2023 versus 2018-2019. Though there was a dip in 2020-2021, we’ve seen these in various specialties in this timeframe due to restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
With our average salary for hematologist oncologists of $496,000 from our new database covering mid 2023 to mid 2024, we can see another slight increase from our current respondents so far. We hope with continued salary transparency and with more data to assess going forward, this trend will increase.
Additional Insights into Hematologist Oncologist Compensation Packages
Sign-On and Relocation Bonuses Heme/Onc Doctors Receive
44% of our hematologist oncologists reported receiving a sign-on bonus, with the average amount of $28,000.
Learn more about signing bonuses for physicians.
Around 25% reported receiving a relocation bonus. The average amount was around $10,000.
Average Vacation Days Heme/Onc Doctors Receive
The average number of vacation days annually was 23 days, with a median of 20 days. Some doctors in our database comment 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 Heme/Onc Doctors
Around 70% of our full-time heme/onc doctors reported receiving some sort of CME stipend, with the average annual stipend being around $4,700.
Average Student Loan Debt for Heme/Onc Doctors
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 $295,000. 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 Heme-Onc 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 hematologist oncologists that could be valuable for job selection and contract negotiations. A few that might be of use:
Increasing Your Hematologist Oncologist Salary
If you’re looking to increase your income as a hematologist oncologist but are already at or above your market’s rate, you may choose to supplement your income with alternative income streams. Some side gig opportunities to consider include:
Medical surveys - oncologists are amongst our most highly sought out specialists for these.
Explore side gigs for oncologists for more information on these and other ways to increase your income.
If the information above has you questioning your current salary, there are a few different ways to increase your income in heme-onc. 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.
Additional Salary and Career Resources for Hematologist Oncologists
Explore our related articles and resources on oncologist income streams and physician compensation and doctor 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: