Physician income in Canada comparison tool
Are you a medical student thinking about choosing your specialty? Maybe you’re in residency wondering where to practise. Or maybe you’re just curious about the average income of a physician in Canada. Use this tool to see a comparison on physician gross annual income in Canada by province and specialty.
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Net income among physicians varies widely. Figures in this article are based on data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (October 2021), and represent average gross clinical income before overhead, taxes and other expenses.
The figures in the following tables are from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, published in October 2021 based on 2019–2020 data.
CIHI provides information for family medicine and a select number of medical and surgical specialties.
Note that because of the varying payment methods across Canada, there are limitations to the comparability of this physician payment information. Anesthesia data, in fact, is excluded from service counts because of concerns about the comparability of certain jurisdictions.
The above information should not be construed as offering specific financial, investment, foreign or domestic taxation, legal, accounting or similar professional advice, nor is it intended to replace the advice of independent tax, accounting or legal professionals.
Assumptions
Residents’ salaries are negotiated by the residency associations and are determined by two things: their postgraduate year and the province they’re working in.
For instance, if you’re in the second year of a training program (PGY-2) in Ontario, your salary is the same as that of every other PGY-2 resident in that province. Note that in all provinces, if you switch residency programs, or do multiple residency programs, you may go back to being paid at the PGY-1 level at the start of your new program.
While all the residents in a single year make the same amount no matter where they live in the province, their income after expenses could be vastly different. Those in urban areas may have higher living expenses such as rent, transportation and grocery costs compared with those in more remote areas.
The above information should not be construed as offering specific financial, investment, foreign or domestic taxation, legal, accounting or similar professional advice, nor is it intended to replace the advice of independent tax, accounting or legal professionals.