While not the only key indicator of what makes a good physician job, salary is a big part of how hospitalists consider whether a specific job opportunity in hospital medicine is a good fit or not. Doctors should know their worth and feel empowered to ask for it, and having access to salary data helps. This article focuses on aggregate compensation data for physicians specializing in hospital medicine, including what the average hospitalist salary is and other local and national statistics and trends for hospitalists compensation packages, in hopes that this information can provide salary transparency and leverage during the job search and contract negotiations process.
On our physician communities, we’ve seen many physicians express frustration about not having access to physician compensation data and the disadvantage it gives them in the marketplace. We make this physician salary data available to our members for free, as opposed to having to pay for expensive databases, as well as provide more comprehensive data on an individual level than many of the purely quantitative physician salary databases provide. Our databases and related articles show both individual and average data points on what doctors make by specialty and location, but also include information on bonus structures, parental leave, PTO, hours worked, practice environment, signing and relocation bonuses, call responsibilities, and more. This allows physicians to assess compensation packages by comparing apples to apples.
Our how much do doctors make series on compensation data by specialty utilizes aggregate data from our physician salary and compensation database with individual datapoints provided by physicians across the country. 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.
Article Navigation
Average Hospitalist Salary in 2024
The average annual salary across all of our contributing hospitalists (both part-time and full-time) was $295,000. This is for attending physicians only, excluding residents and fellows.
A single average annual salary can be misleading, as several factors affect salary. Part-time salaries can skew the overall average, so let’s look at full-time versus part-time separately.
Average Full-Time Hospitalist Salary for 2024
For a full-time equivalent, we assumed an average number of hours worked a week of 36 hours or more. We omitted any data points that did not specify their average.
The average salary in 2024 for a full-time hospitalist was $297,000. 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 $500,000 range
The lowest reported salaries were in the $150,000 range
The median salary for hospitalists was $300,000
Average Part-Time Hospitalist Salary for 2024
Unlike some of the other specialties we’ve featured, not many of our hospitalist doctors reported working part-time (this may be secondary to the week on and week off nature of many hospitalist jobs). As you can see, the overall average and average for full-time were very close for hospitalists. We don’t yet have enough data points in our reference range to confidently run the average for those physicians working less than an FTE as a hospitalist.
If you would like to see this stat in the future, please consider contributing if you haven’t already. Find links to contribute on our physician salary and compensation data page.
How Much Hospitalists Make by Specialization
We had a few different specialties hospitalists could select when contributing to our databases. Since specialization can pay heavily into salary, let’s look at the average salary breakdown by these specialization categories. These numbers are for doctors that reported working 36+ hours per week or more.
Family medicine hospitalist salary: $341,000
Internal medicine hospitalist salary: $314,000
Neurohospitalist average salary: not enough data points to assess
Obstetrics/gynecology hospitalist salary: $298,000
Pediatric hospitalist salary: $225,000
Outside of other factors we look into below, family medicine hospitalists were the highest paid specialty of hospitalists. Note that we are aware that in many instances, family medicine physicians are actually paid less than internal medicine counterparts for the same job, so we dug into this data a little deeper, coming to the conclusion that this data may be skewed as there were almost 10x as many data points for internal medicine hospitalists as family medicine hospitalists, and many of the family medicine hospitalists who responded to our survey were working either in hospital employed positions (as opposed to academics) or as locums physicians. This may explain some of the discrepancy with what our overall trends in our larger database are, and again makes the case for looking at the source data for individual physician salary data points on our larger salary and negotiation database to compare apples to apples positions. As we get more data points for 2024, we’ll continue to update these averages, so please contribute your physician salary data to our databases! Salary transparency helps all of us.
Hospitalist Pay by Gender
We looked at reported salaries for full-time physicians who reported working 36+ hours a week and compared what our female physicians averaged compared to their male counterparts, excluding all other factors (such as specialization, location, etc.).
Female hospitalists reported an average salary of $293,000. Male hospitalists reported an average salary of $306,000.
On average across all hospitalist specialties, male physicians reported an average 4% higher salary than female physicians.
Hospitalist Salary by Practice Environment
Looking at full-time (36+ hours a week average) hospitalist attendings, we broke the data down by where our members reported working to assess the average pay differences by practice environment.
Corporate group, non private equity - not enough data points to assess
Corporate group, private equity - $311,000
Government - not enough data points
Group private practice, non private equity backed - $319,000
Group private practice, private equity backed - not enough data points
Academic hospital employee - $253,000
Non-academic hospital employee - $310,000
While it’s important to consider how hard you work to get each dollar earned, as well as benefits and frustrations of each of these practice environments, when considering what salary makes each environment worth it to you, it was interesting to see that outside of academics, average hospitalist pay did not vary much by practice environment compared to other specialties in our salary and compensation data by physician specialty series.
As a reminder, academic hospitals for universities can be eligible for many benefits, such as better health benefits, retirement plans and pensions, and Public Student Loan Forgiveness (PSLF). The lifestyle can also be significantly better in regards to call, patient volume, etc. Therefore, we again reiterate the importance of looking at the entire compensation package on our salary and negotiation databases before deciding that one job really is better based on the salary alone.
Hospitalist Salary by Type of Employment
In this series, we typically like to look at how salaries range depending on the type of employment, such as W-2 employee, 1099 contractor, partner/owner, or locums/per diem. Our hospitalist physicians that contributed data are overwhelmingly W-2 employees, and as such, we don’t currently have enough data points to assess any other subsets with confidence.
If you’d like to see us add this section and haven’t already, please contribute your physician salary and compensation data today.
If you’re looking for stats on locums salary and compensation, you can check out our separate locums compensation database and our statistics on locum tenens compensation for doctors.
How Much Hospitalists Make by Location
We looked at salary differences among states for full-time hospitalists next. States with less than 10 data points were omitted from our analysis. If you don’t see your state listed and want to see where it stacks up, contribute your physician salary and compensation data today.
North Carolina - $329,000 a year
California - $325,000 a year
Indiana - $313,000 a year
Georgia - $295,000 a year
Florida - $293,000 a year
Texas - $286,000 a year
Pennsylvania - $267,000 a year
New York - $222,000 a year
There’s an almost 50% difference in the average salaries looking strictly at which state our physician members live in. 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).
Hospitalist Pay by Hours Worked
Medicine can often be an “eat what you kill” industry, so we wanted to look at how average salaries varied by reported hours worked for our full-time attending hospitalists. Of all the specialties we have featured to date, the hospitalists have the highest number of contributions from physicians reporting 60+ hour work weeks. Hopefully, this is compensated for by the often 1 week on, 1 week off schedule many hospitalists have, and emphasizes the importance of resting during those weeks off!
36-40 hours a week - $267,000 a year
41-45 hours a week - $292,000 a year
46-50 hours a week - $313,000 a year
51-60 hours a week - $309,000 a year
61-70 hours a week - $327,000 a year
71-80 hours a week - $302,000 a year
81+ hours a week - $339,000 a year
Changes in Average Hospitalist 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 hospitalists over time. To compare relative data, we continued to look only at hospitalists 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: $266,000
2020-2021: $266,000
2022-2023: $291,000 (9% increase)
While salaries seemed to stagnate around the COVID era, salaries increased for 2022-2023. With our average salary for hospitalists of $297,000 from our new database covering mid 2023 to mid 2024, we can see salaries continuing to trend upward for 2024. We hope with continued salary transparency, this trend will continue.
Extra Insights from Hospitalists
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 hospitalists that could be valuable for job selection and contract negotiations.
A few of note:
You can see more of their insights on the individual compensation data points provided by physicians on our master physician salary database.
Increasing Your Hospitalist Salary
If the information above has you questioning your current salary, there are a few different ways to increase your income as a hospitalist. 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 including 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 they are willing to offer. Explore open opportunities on our Physician Side Gigs job board, along with 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 hospitalist but are already at or above your market’s rate, you have options in this situation as well. Opportunities to consider include:
Locums, moonlighting, and urgent care
Expert witness work
Medical surveys
Explore side gigs for hospitalists for more information on these and other ways to increase your income.
Additional Salary and Career Resources for Hospitalists
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 our side gigs for hospitalists.