The average starting salary for family physicians was up 13% in the last year, with the increase putting it over $200,000 for the first time, according to physician recruitment firm Merritt Hawkins.
The average starting salary was $225,000 among family physicians recruited by the company in the 12 months from April 1, 2015, to March 31, 2016, compared with $198,000 the previous year. Of the 3,342 recruiting searches conducted in that year, family physicians were the subject of 627, tops among the 19 medical specialties tracked in the company’s 2016 Review of Physician and Advanced Practitioner Recruiting Incentives.
The number of searches was down from the previous year, but it was still more than twice as many as psychiatry, which was second with 250 searches, and it was the 10th consecutive year that family physicians were the most recruited specialty, the report noted.
Starting salaries were up for 18 of the 19 specialties, with only emergency medicine showing a decease. “Demand for physicians is as intense as we have seen it in our 29-year history,” Travis Singleton, senior vice president of Merritt Hawkins, said in a separate statement. “The expansion of health insurance coverage, population growth, population aging, expanded care sites such as urgent care centers and other factors are driving demand for doctors through the roof, and salaries are spiking as a consequence.”
