Doctor salary Australia

The training ladder is intern, resident (sometimes called JHO or SHO in Queensland), registrar, then consultant or GP fellow. Each step has its own award range. Overtime is not a rounding error on these rungs. A resident on nights can out-earn a registrar on a quiet term if the roster is ugly enough. That is why an advertised “package” without hours is not a salary.

Intern year is the cleanest comparison because both NSW and Queensland publish a single intern rate. After that, NSW splits resident years 1–4 and registrar years 1–4 plus a senior registrar rate. Queensland uses L1 through L24 on one table: intern at L1, junior house officer at L2, senior house officer at L3, registrar from L4, senior registrar from L10, staff specialist from L18.

Staff specialist bases in NSW run $197,583 to $243,822 for staff specialist years 1–5, and $266,942 for senior staff specialist, from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2025 (IB2026_006). Those amounts are salary under the Staff Specialists (State) Award. They do not include the 17.4% special allowance or optional private practice arrangements that many staff specialists also receive. Treating the table as “what a consultant takes home” understates hospital specialist pay in NSW.

Queensland staff specialists (senior medical officers) sit on L18–L24 in MOCA7: $216,643 to $251,642 a year from 1 July 2025. Again, that is the published per-annum wage rate, not a private-practice loading.

Two large public systems, two documents. NSW Health Information Bulletin IB2026_007 sets Public Hospital Medical Officers (State) Award rates with an interim 3% increase from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2025, pending the Industrial Relations Commission. If the Commission awards a different increase, those intern-to-senior-registrar numbers move. Queensland’s Medical Officers’ (Queensland Health) Certified Agreement (No. 7) 2025 already locks L1–L24 from 1 July 2025, 1 July 2026 and 1 July 2027.

Read the NSW intern rate as $80,638, resident $94,521–$127,827, registrar $117,745–$147,664, senior registrar $166,025. Queensland intern L1 is $94,670, JHO L2 $102,059, SHO L3 $109,583, registrar L4–L9 $133,848–$154,749, senior registrar L10–L13 $170,214–$187,569.

Queensland’s intern base is higher than NSW on this snapshot. That does not mean a Brisbane intern always takes home more than a Sydney intern. Hours, term, meal breaks paid or not, and whether you are on a 24-hour shift pattern move the fortnightly payslip more than the headline rate. Rural loadings and retrieval terms sit on top in both systems; they are not in the base table.

Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the NT are not in the comparison table. Those health services publish their own industrial instruments. Quoting an unverified “VIC intern salary” here would be guessing. If you have an offer from another state, open that award, not this page’s NSW/QLD columns.

Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profiles report median weekly full-time employee earnings from the ABS Employee Earnings and Hours survey, May 2025. For general practitioners and resident medical officers (ANZSCO 2531) that median is $2,446 a week. For specialist physicians (2533) it is $3,620. For surgeons (2535) it is $3,905.

Annualised, that is about $127,192, $188,240 and $203,060 if you multiply by 52. Do not treat those as award rates. EEH captures what employees were paid in the survey window, which can include overtime and bonuses, and it only covers employees. A GP who owns the practice is often not in that sample. ANZSCO 2531 also glues GPs and RMOs into one bucket, so the $2,446 weekly median is not “the GP salary” and it is not “the RMO salary”. It is the middle of a mixed group.

That mixed median sitting near $127,000 a year is consistent with NSW resident and registrar bases plus hours, and with Queensland registrar bases, without proving anyone’s individual contract. It is a labour-market checkpoint, not a bargaining target.

Public hospital JMOs are award employees. The payslip is base plus overtime, shift penalties, on-call and maybe a rural incentive. Private hospital RMOs, if employed, sit on a different contract; some private groups still shadow the public scale, some do not. Locum rates are a third market. This page does not invent a locum hourly figure.

Staff specialists in public hospitals can have a private-practice agreement on top of the award salary. NSW Health’s staff specialist bulletin is explicit that the published salary rates exclude those arrangements. If a job ad says “up to $400,000” for a public specialist, you are usually looking at salary plus allowances plus a private-practice share, not the $197,583 year-1 base.

Private specialists who bill Medicare in rooms are running a small business. Gross billings are not salary. Rooms, indemnity, staff, and the proportion of public VMO sessions change net income more than the MBS fee schedule headline. No responsible national average exists for that group without tax-office or college survey microdata, which this page does not have.

A GP fellow employed by a clinic is closer to the JSA 2531 employee world than a practice principal. A hospital physician on a staff specialist award is closer to IB2026_006 or MOCA7 L18+. The JSA specialist-physician median of $3,620 a week and the surgeon median of $3,905 a week sit below many advertised private-billing packages because they are employee earnings, not owner drawings.

Training time is the other split. General practice fellowship is shorter than most physician or surgical pathways. Registrar pay during those extra years is still a hospital or GP-training wage, not consultant billings. People comparing a fourth-year surgical registrar to a newly fellowed GP are comparing different products.

Rural generalists and remote GP posts often add retention payments that dwarf a metro registrar increment. Those payments are program-specific (state rural schemes, MMM loadings, employer incentives). They are real money. They are not in the NSW/QLD base tables above.

Award tables are gross base. From 1 July 2025 the Super Guarantee is 12% of ordinary time earnings, paid on top of base for most employees (ATO super guarantee). A Queensland intern on $94,670 has $11,360 of SG if the whole amount is OTE — before extra overtime super questions that payroll actually has to answer. NSW hospital super for some award staff can differ where a defined scheme still applies; read the contract, not this paragraph, for your fund.

Income tax and the Medicare levy come off the gross. HELP/HECS repayments sit on the same PAYG income for most junior doctors. Use the HECS-HELP repayment guide rather than a back-of-envelope percentage. A $90,000 intern and a $220,000 staff specialist are not in the same HELP band.

Salary packaging in public hospitals (meals, accommodation, novated leases) can change taxable income. Rules are employer-specific and FBT-capped. Model a lease with the novated lease calculator only after you know whether your health service still allows it. Do not subtract a packaging benefit from an award base and call the result “take-home” — the ATO still wants tax on what remains.

Night shifts and unrostered overtime are how many RMOs actually live. If you need a sense of penalty mechanics, the penalty rates calculator is built for award loadings, not for a medical officer 24-hour shift clause. For super on the base, use the superannuation calculator.

Internship is allocated, not negotiated, in most states. The intern rate is the intern rate. Residents then pick terms; a critical-care heavy year with more nights pays differently to a clinic-heavy year even at the same resident increment. Registrar pay jumps when you enter a college training program and again at senior registrar / advanced trainee classifications.

After fellowship, the fork is staff specialist or VMO in the public system, private rooms, or a mix. Geography still matters. A staff specialist post in a regional hospital can combine the award base with a recruitment incentive that a metro teaching hospital will not match. That incentive is usually time-limited. Read the end date.

Hours, on-call frequency, private-practice share, and whether you are an employee or a contractor explain more of the spread than “doctor vs doctor” as a job title. Two people both called “consultant physician” can be $150,000 apart before anyone has lied.

Award figures are copied from the named industrial instrument. Weekly Jobs and Skills Australia figures are median full-time employee earnings from ABS EEH May 2025, not award rates. Multiplying a weekly median by 52 is labelled as annualised and is only for comparison. Private-practice billings and owner drawings are not treated as salary.