PSedrishMD

Salaries are not generally a factor of where the physician went to school but rather a reflection of their specialty, geographic location & work ethic. All of this assumes the physician has good skills, both as a doctor and as a business person, and has a good bedside manner.
Surgical specialties tend to pay better than cognitive ones such as psychiatry. At present, the reimbursement system is heavily tilted toward the procedure based specialties (so non surgeons who do a lot of procedures, such as gastroenterologists, may compete well with surgeons income-wise), though this may diminish a bit over time.
Location is a big key to income. In general terms, the less sought after the location, the more the doctor will earn. The highest paying offers I got were in North Dakota, Montana, the U.P. of Michigan and along the Mexican border (a job offer in Marquette, Michigan offered 5 times the pay of a job in San Diego!). Interestingly, costs of living and of practice tend to be lower in these places as well, so net physician income may be much, much higher.
Lastly, hard work means more income. In most cases, it comes down to how many patients you see a day and how many days a week you work. Not exactly surprising.
Anyway, the range at present is about $90,000 for pediatricians and psychiatrists to $450,000 for invasive cardiologists.

Greybeard

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (a US government agency) publishes detailed statistics on average wages for hundreds of occupations; for physicians, it's broken down by specialty. Each category is searchable by state, and by metropolitan area, and shows median wages as well as various percentiles above and below the median.

http://www.bls.gov/oes/

saywhatman

my uncle, who is a psychiatrist, earns nearly $900,000 a year.

collegegirl498

saywhatman, does your uncle have his own hospital because that seems like a lot of money earned by a psychiatrist in one year.

saywhatman

yeah he has his own hospital.

ktoto

interesting

T0N1CH1

wait wait wait. how the heck do you have a psychiatric hospital? is it like a ward? i thought these were like prisons...???

manofsteeletr88

I thought psychiatry was a higher earning specialty. I guess not?

bigndude

Nope it avgs. 100-200 grand not too much, but not bad.

LuckMC11

lol 200 grand is "not 2 much"..haha

bigndude

Its not when you consider office expenses, malp insur. and taxes. Thats a fairly low "salary" when you account for all of the above. Then consider training period with low pay. Then also consider lots of on call time since most psychs. deal with cases all day every day over the phone, and yeah its not much

bluedevilmike

It's also the upper limit of what BND was discussing. If anything we should be using a figure of $150,000, which instantly becomes $65K after taxes. Now factor in the other costs.

manofsteeletr88

Wow, so doctors really do not make much at all do they?

bluedevilmike

Well, it depends on what you compare it to.

T0N1CH1

what's the average doctor's salary? assuming also the doctor has done residency...