Emergency Physician Salary in USA

Emergency Room Physicians are paid a decent salary for their hectic work. These mid-career, annual average physician salaries figures below vouch for that :

Houston, TX: $200,000/-
Los Angeles, CA: $218,000/-
New York, NY: $229,000/-
Seattle, WA: $212,000/-


The incomes vary largely based on the setting - academic center salaries with physicians working as 'faculty' are usually lower than the private / ownership option settings.
For example, the 2009-2010 ER physician faculty salary survey by the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine found the following:

"Annual Mean salaries for:
All faculty: 189,848 $;
First-year faculty: $153,855 dollars;
Core faculty: $197,259 dollars
Noncore faculty: $164,215 dollars
Programs reporting data to AAMC: $183,605 dollars
Programs not reporting data to AAMC: $204,383"

Mean emergency physician salaries as reported by AAMC region are as follows:
- Northeast, $192,864;
- South, $182,768 ;
- Midwest, $192,224;
- West, $195,732."

How to be an Emergency Medicine Physician in the USA ?

Emergency Medicine can be done as a three year Residency after Medical school. Alternatively Emergency Medicine can also be done as a Fellowship after other Primary Care residencies like Internal Medicine, Family Practice etc. For example, the Emergency Medicine Fellowship affiliated to the University of Tennessee College of Health Sciences offers a fellowship in Emergency Medicine for Family Practitioners. Another example is the University of Colorado Denver Emergency Medicine Fellowship after pediatrics residency. But note that salaries for physicians with Emergency Medicine residency training is found to be higher than those who do it as a fellowship after IM, FP etc.

What Fellowship Options are Available ?

- Medical Toxicology
- Pediatric Emergency Medicine
- Sports Medicine

Emergency Rooms in Hospitals are experiencing an increase in patient inflow due to more Americans joining the ranks of the uninsured people. Thanks to EMTALA act, no Emergency Rooms in the USA are allowed to deny primary patient care whether he pays or not - which has resulted in uninsured people flocking to the ERs and using those as primary care centers, while they are not staffed adequately.

Read this excellent article about the Day in the life of an Emergency Physician, which laments that Emergency Room physicians do not get the recognition and monetary compensation they deserve.

But otherwise, in most places with a lot of ER physicians, the lifestyle is pretty controlled, since the ER physicians traditionally operate in shifts and do not take calls.But note that Emergency Medicine is one of the more competitive residencies in the United States.

"Lifestyle appeal" for emergency medicine might seem like a paradox at first, but then Dr. Elizabeth Moran explains it best: "You will have to work nights. You will have to work holidays and weekends, but once your shift is over, it's over. You won't be paged to come back in. I think it's one of the best kept secrets in medicine"

Note: physician salaries here are the 50th Percentile Salaries and may apply to mid-career levels - the lower percentile salaries (for fresh physicians) may actually be lower by 30,000- 40,000 $