Health care salaries

Related to years of training?

How do salaries for health care professionals vary with years required for training?

Here’s a graphic - very simple. Took me about 45 minutes to put this together.

Salary data comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics May 2022 data set - you can download it yourself here: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm

Years of training required comes from my understanding of the years of training required for each profession along with the help of ChatGPT:
”How many years of training does it take to become a ….” For example, for a Nurse Anesthetist ChatGPT tells me: “In total, you are looking at approximately 7-9 years of education and clinical experience to become a CRNA.” So I entered 8 years.

Admittedly, the “Years Training” is the weakest part of the data set I’m working with at the moment. For this first draft I simply wanted an idea. For example, all of the professions that require more than 8 years of training typically include some sort of paid internship followed by a residency and possibly a fellowship. So, while it may take 13 years, 5 of those years include a salary and no tuition so it’s different in that 8/13 years require financial support for living as well as money for tuition and fees (that’s 61.5% of the training, meaning 38.5% of the training includes no tuition or fees, and at least some sort of salary support).

There are numerous issues with “mean” salary in any field - but that’s what they have available and it got me started. The primary problem with mean is that really high or low salaries can have a larger impact on the central tendency (as compared to the median).

The mean annual salary for a Physical Therapist in the US in 2022 was $97,960. Clearly the mean is going to vary based on practice setting and geographic location; and individual salaries are going to vary greatly by years and probably also types of experience. It’s also not clear from BLS whether this statistic only includes full time employed PTs. But I suspect so, because the mean hourly is listed as $47.10, which for a full time year of 2000 hours is $94,200 a year (not too far off).

You can see the PT salary on the graphic - it’s the lowest salary of the three professions requiring 7 years of training (which is what I entered for the PT training because that’s the median length of time for a DPT including the undergraduate education). The other two salaries are very close and the chart doesn’t really allow you to see them. One is pharmacist ($129,410) and the other is a medical dosimetrist ($129,080). You should also note that the variation (residuals) for these three professions are smaller than the variance within other “years of training” categories.

The BLS data set does include “Median Hourly” wage - as you can see, despite the flaws of the mean for central tendency, the relationship with years of training is pretty consistent with the mean:

And, for good measure, there’s a strong relationship between the Mean Annual and Median Hourly salary:

This plot shows some heteroscedasticity, but not much and most likely because many of the higher salary professions do not get paid hourly and/or often work more than a 40 hour week.

Something that needs to be kept in mind when looking at these relationships include the risks of certain occupations (more risk, more malpractice insurance, more cost to practice). And the stress of these occupations - making decisions is stressful. Making life threatening decisions is more stressful. So, while the decisions being made by physical therapists for their 7 years of training are important, they are probably a bit less stressful or life threatening than the decisions being made by professionals that are giving people chemicals to put into their body, or dosing them with radiation. Though there’s no doubt that there are some well paying careers in the 2-6 years of training category for those looking for a job that pays well with a bit less years in school.

In closing, for me this is the start of an investigation that relates to my last post on the economic value of physical therapy services. It’s been on mind based on hearing people talk about PT salaries. I thought I’d start to look at just what those salaries are, and how they compare to our colleagues also providing health care in the economy.

I’m interested in your thoughts, future posts will reveal the results.