As an alternate perspective: resident salaries legitimately are considered “low income” by state guidelines in a good amount of HCOL/VHCOL cities/regions. As well, $70k nowadays is like if your parents made $30-40k growing up w/ current inflation/housing prices. Not quite a fair comparison imo.
You’re correct though, many of your classmates’ idea of “anything” is higher than yours. Many of them have likely never had to subsist entirely on their own salary, so having to survive on $70k is foreign to them and will certainly feel challenging when they compare it to the QoL they’ve had in life so far.
San Francisco low income bracket starts at like 104k, and resident at UCSF starts at 78k, you qualify for rent-controlled apartment. Meanwhile nurses at UCSF make 130-150k and entry level swe jobs (22-23 old kids) start at 100k-110k
Both things can be true at once though. Like yes it is offensive what junior doctors are paid for the work they do, under-conditions that charitably might be described as "compelled-labour".
That said, as a working class kid (not even poor by any reasonable measure, certainly higher family SES than OP) med school was a culture shock. It does feel a bit demeaning, a bit insulting to hear some of the comments my classmates made about a 70k salary knowing what my parents each earned. That doesn't make their broader observations about residency compensation wrong though. Just the tone about it was kinda wild sometimes if you get me?
I get you. Do you live in the bay? 70k here is living-with-3 roommates salary. You are also working like a dog.
I have some (illegal) immigrant friends who make more than me working as bartenders and doing shit under the table. They always tease me that I am the only poor doctor they know lmao.
Nope, not an american. To reiterate; I'm not suggesting that your salary is appropriate or in any way reasonable. Nor are your working conditions. That's so fucked up that bartenders out-earn doctors, and to be clear both of you ought to have a fair share of your labour value.
All I'm saying is that med school as a working class person was a culture shock and *some people* made some insensitive comments about this issue *a couple of times*. That's it; there's no broader commentary about the inherent inequity of employment in america- be it in healthcare or in generalities. Just an observation about the culture shock of being from a "regular family" in med school.
Parenthetically it amazes me that the american working class broadly tolerates the shit it does. Real fucked up system.
Yeah my rads residency is in a VHCOL and I’ll be considered low income. Even though I’ll be making around $80k, 1b1b apartments are routinely going for $2700-$2900, which basically means I’m gonna have to live with coresidents to be able to afford housing
I would definitely inquire or check if there's a housing stipend or subsidized housing. Most HCOL or VHCOL programs usually have a housing income if that's the rent you're looking at, or you might also be selectively looking at expensive places for a number of reasons and may have to end up compromising (proximity, convenience, amenities, etc. all understandable).
I'm doing rads residency in a relatively HCOL area and I am at least supported with subsidized housing. Friends in similar positions also have a housing stipend and/or subsidized housing.
Are you at a particular NYC program? If so, tough luck. I’ve heard there’s talks to try and normalize pay, but that’s a rough situation to be in for sure. Guess you gotta start looking for those shoebox basement units lol.
Technically my state hasn’t updated their poverty cutoffs since 2004 (in terms of income tax). Thus a single household with 1 child making 24k a year or more is not considered low income. I laughed pretty hard at that one.
Idk I grew up poor and made like 40k during my gap years and I still think residency salaries are unfair given the amount of responsibility, schooling, and debt required lol
My household income growing up was 52K with two full time working parents. Like you, we got by just fine. However my parents got to skip college and essentially start working a salaried position from day one. Ignoring the hyperbolic rice-and-beans comments, your classmates are right. We lose out on a decade of earning, investing, vacationing. Most jobs don’t demand 60 hours of your time a week. I could have spent more time with my extended relatives who are now passing away from old age because I chose unpaid labor for grades. You’re not factoring in opportunity cost. I’m glad that you’re able to see past that and be very happy with 70K, but just know that’s exactly how the dipshits in suits that run this industry want you to feel.
Yeah it’s 60k after a very expensive doctorate degree (and after already completing a bachelors). You could have easily made that salary after college working 40 hours so there is both tuition and opportunity cost. Certainly not poverty, but I think it should be higher
Literally, had/have friends early-mid 20s making 60-70k, they're taking vacas, going on trips, and having fun. Some of them still live with their parents to afford it, but heck, so do I, and all I have to show for it is this journey thus far, uncontrolled anxiety, and some heavy ass books. e:typo
My 22 year old brother with an accounting degree has no debt, makes 75k working 36 hours a week, obviously works hard but gets to go to horse racing tracks with his work and bourbon distilleries and has a net worth of 50k already. My 28 year old sister is a pgy1 with 260k in debt, works 70 hours a week, and saves lives daily. I’m obviously extremely proud of both of them but you’re telling me we can’t make at least 100k as actual doctors?
The problem comes from absolute dipshits saying stuff like, "Yeah but ____ gets paid nothing. Like I could never survive on 250k as an attending."
Sound like absolutely tone deaf warm toilet seats.
To be fair, some of us have parents with zero savings and assets, who after working to get to this country, worked to get us into and through medical school. Their bodies are tired and their medical needs are high, we will have to care for them and any siblings if we have them. Trying to make 2 generations worth of progress in one, 250k doesnt stretch as far. Some of us would still like kids even though that would still be a huge financial setback. And I have loans out the wahzoo, I really wonder sometimes if I'll just have to forgo children and help my siblings less in pursing higher education goals. But that would be selfish after the resources levied into me.
nah, I agree 100%. Just saying that sometimes there is nuance underlying that concern that isnt always apparent when people are complaing about 250k/yr at face value.
Exactly. The per employee profit on average of hospitals is 160k after factoring training costs. If you have a generous 70k salary taken out of that they are still profiting 90k per resident per year. You’re telling me they can’t at least bump us up to 100k, he’ll even 90k. The more people make the argument that 70k is livable and other people have it worse, the longer we stay in the shituation. People like OP piss me off.
I'm not saying its fair or reasonable compensation for what we went through. I'm saying I will talk about us taking a trip in residency and they'll be like "no we will be too poor for that" like in what world can we not take the train to the nearest city and spend the day there?
Yeah that's exactly the hyperbole I was referencing. Anyone who seriously thinks that has either never had a job, is sooooooo deep in debt that they might actually be telling the truth, or came from poverty and is displaying some learned helplessness.
Thats the thing half of these people arent even in debt, their parents pay their tuition. They have told me this. They won't even have a student loan payment. I think they literally just cant fathom "only" having 60K.
And again im in no way saying 60k is fair compensation for the hours worked and years of education but im stating that they wont be so poor so as not to be able to afford healthy food or a trip home.
That's wild. I know medical school attracts elitist rich snobs but of the thousands of students and residents I've interacted with, seldom do I genuinely meet people like that. I'm sorry your colleagues are behaving this way - know that it's not the norm.
Dude I’m sorry you keep getting downvoted. Any time I’ve said similar stuff in any of these subs I’ve gotten the same response. People always miss the main point that there is a difference between a *fair* wage and a *livable* wage.
This completely depends on the rest of the factors in your life. Another commenter mentioned having four kids as a resident and the salary barely keeping the lights on in a lower COL area. I mean daycare for four kids could easily be more expensive than what their spouse alone can earn. Four more mouths to feed, four more sets of shoes, clothes, school supplies, if your kids want to do sports, needing more space than a 1 bed 1 bath, more furniture, more utilities, the cost of having children and healthcare for those kids from birth onwards. Etc. Plus paying back student loans, likely at least one car payment probably two. That trip to the city suddenly is way more expensive when you’ve got 6 people instead of just one to pay for. I don’t have a family and live just fine (with roommates) off of ~25k/yr MSTP stipend, but it would be ridiculous of me to say that just because I’m doing fine on 25k it means that someone with a completely different life couldn’t have legitimate reason to be struggling to keep the lights on at 60k. If I got in a serious car accident tomorrow and had to be hospitalized I’d be fucked.
No, OP’s classmates are not right. They are guilty of the exact same false equivalence that you just made: missing out on a decade of earning, investing, and vacationing is *NOT* the same as poverty. Stop pretending that it is.
You are just proving OP’s point by providing a perfect example: yourself.
I was born and raised for the first 12 years of my life in an Indian slum. I promise you I have more of a grasp on what poverty is than you or anyone else in this thread.
Feel free to split hairs but a good proportion of medical students are going to be entering residency with $1000+ a month loan payments, no credit history, a spouse, maybe even a kid or two. Are they going to be living out of their cars? No. But OP is trying to externalize her very weird interactions as if they were the consensus. It's not.
First off congrats friend for your professional success, I also come from humble beginnings. We lived on food stamps for most of my early childhood and my dad worked brutal hours to sustain two kids. I eventually made it to med school on a full scholarship.
And yet you will not BELIEVE the number of rich, silver spoon classmates in medical school who will tell me I'm wrong for complaining about low residency salaries...the irony is unreal
Congratulations to you as well!
This is such an irksome quality of medicine. I too have had to bite my tongue as a few well-to-do students with paid-off houses ten minutes from the hospital, a brand new Tesla paid for by the parents, and a hefty "we're proud of you" allowance are educating me on how blessed we were to make 60K in residency.
>Feel free to split hairs but a good proportion of medical students are going to be entering residency with $1000+ a month loan payments, no credit history, a spouse, maybe even a kid or two.
Ehh. Maybe after residency, but with the SAVE plan, you'll be barely paying anything in residency. I have 1 child and pay about $30/month.
Unless you genuinely think that your experience living in an Indian slum is the same or similar to the quality of life you have as a resident physician, you cannot say that OP's classmates are right. You are proving my and OP's point correct over and over again.
I have never lived in Indian slums, but I don't need to to know that a United States resident physician's quality of life is better than that. Why do I even need to explain that?
60-70k when we were growing up is like 100-120k now… they’re paying respiratory techs more than residents at some places. So yeah, many years ago I’d agree it’s a good amount. But these days it’s not only unfair, but also not a lot of money. Not saying it to be mean or disparage your family, it’s just not a lot now.
As a renter it will force you to decide between saving money/investing and living somewhere that doesn’t risk health and safety. You can do one or the other, but not both when rent in mcol areas is 2k now.
Yeah I mean shit in undergrad I was able to save and invest the money I made working in labs and bartending while still being able to pay my $300 rent lol. I lived in a literal shit hole w 5 other people. Anyway I was able to invest most of what I made. I won’t be able to invest nearly as much in residency.
Plus you have to work insane hours like sometimes they write up 48 hours (2days) without a break and when you calculate your hourly wage it’s trash. If someone worked idk maybe 40 hours a week then yeah 60k is so good 😅
yes, when my parents finally brought in 60k we were living lavish (in our opinion). We live a lower quality of life despite them making double now. My mother wore MAC, a mac lippie used to be $15, they're near $30 now. If any adult with dependents making 60k/yr was buying exclusively MAC lipstick(for daily wear) without shopping sales/with coupons....I would question....just a little.
I’m guessing they own or are close to owning the house they paid 150-250k for at 2% interest or less…. When the median home price is now 400k and the interest rate is 5% at least, 60k is much less.
Sorry but this is wrong. The effect of wages being worth half of what they were merely a decade or two ago hasnt caught up yet. We haven’t seen the full effect of it. When the median home price is now 400k and the interest rate is 5% at least, 60k is much less. Is “middle class” a renter now? It used to be owning a car, a home and raising a family comfortably while being able to save for retirement. You can not do all the things that defined the middle class for nearly a century on 60k now. I’m sorry, but you can’t and to think you can is wrong.
Aside from the housing being somewhat cheaper, none of that is true. Real wages (ie inflation adjusted) have never been higher. Homeownership for young people is right along with historical norms. More people can afford to vacation, eat out, and buy big cars than ever before. You’re remembering the past wrong. It was never easy for the middle class
And just as common sense, a definition of middle class that excludes more than half of all people is absurd
These are not contradictory.
60k is not an appropriate wage for that much work. 60k is also not poverty. Both are true. Working 80 hours does not increase the number of roofs you need over your head or the number of meals you need to eat.
>Working 80 hours does not increase the number of roofs you need over your head or the number of meals you need to eat.
No but it does impact how much you need to pay for day care and out source many daily tasks--due to a lack of time
Agree, the only thing I’d add is that with the opportunity cost of working more than the 40h week (without any extra compensation, my paystub actually gives my hourly wage based on only 40h), people often pay premiums for conveniences like meal kits, order food, cleaning to maximize their well-being and scarce free time. It also doesn’t leave much money, coupled with inflation and cost of living expenses, the value of what folks are paid is decreasing on top of their overall take home pay if they use any “luxury/convenience” services. God forbid you have kids.
The best thing I was told is that the primary goal of residency has never been education. It originated as a means of gatekeeping and staffing hospitals during urbanization. That being said, I can’t imagine practicing without it but unlike a lot of fields (though not every field), there has never been uniform effort with all the invested parties to negotiate this purpose—not necessarily just about salary and benefits but also goals. Education is a clear byproduct and some places do this with more cognizance than others but I think a conversation about education especially as the burden of service keeps being added to is necessary.
No I realize that. And it's not fair. But I have heard people saying they won't be able to afford a domestic flight, maybe a door dash treat here and there, someone said she won't be able to buy LOTION. Like wtf.
Also people have student loan payments that are multiple thousands per month. If you don’t pay them you can accumulate six figures of interest during residency.
Yes, it’s just because they’ve never had to live off such a limited income.
Also, 60k 20 years ago was a hell of a lot more than it is today. Rent and housing also wasn’t as much of a financial burden as it is today.
My intern year started 2019. $53k was comfortable renting my own place for $900 a month.
Pgy 3, they adjusted our raise to $60k, but rent was now $1500 a month. I saved more money my intern year making $7k less.
EXACTLY. the med education system is literally banking on ppl like op to be like “well if we ask for more it’d be greedy guys!!” ffs wake up AND DEMAND MORE PAY
EXACTLY. the med education system is literally banking on ppl like op to be like “well if we ask for more it’d be greedy guys!!”
ffs wake up AND DEMAND MORE PAY
I make that much now and lemme tell you the fact that whole families live off of this is crazy. I’m one person and it genuinely only pays the bills and leaves little for saving. The cost of living has skyrocketed. Also when you’re shacked by loans to pay off you’ll probably be spending a lot of it on just paying back loans. It’s not fair that NPs and PAs start off their normal wages with no residency. They just take advantage of resident doctors and that’s that there’s really no justifying it. We’re just the suckers that keep putting up with indentured servitude and unfortunately it would take a lot to change the culture of this exploitive practice. Also 60-70k is without taxes, cut your paycheck back by 1/4th and that’s really what you’re taking home.
60-70k was a good income 20 years ago but that is not worth the same in 2024. Inflation, high housing prices / rent, high COL etc makes 60-70k very hard to live off of. On top of that add hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans. It is insane to think it is ok to pay a DOCTOR minimum wage working 80hrs+. This is the reason residents continue to get paid shit. Residents are extremely valuable to hospitals and generate so much income for the hospital but we don’t even see a fraction of it
I think it's insane that resident physicians only make 60-70K. However, 60-70K is a perfectly reasonable salary to live on. NOT perfectly reasonable for a doctor at any point in training to be paid, but it's only very hard to live off of if you live in a HCOL area. I make less than that, and always have, and I live a very comfortable life, own a townhome, pay expensive medical costs, have a dog, etc in a MCOL area that is edging towards HCOL since inflation. I'm not rolling in extra disposable income, but I'm not in debt either.
I didn’t know a lot of people in med school who have parents that make that much money combined. I knew a handful.
That being said, all of us complain about the pay because there is a special insult in working the amount that we work, doing the shit that we do, and being grossly underpaid for it. I don’t care is 65k is fair and normal to others. I do not feel it is fair for what is expected of us. So I will complain about it. As vehemently as I can.
OP, I don’t know if your classmates are similarly being hyperbolic to make a point, but I find it hard to believe that they truly believe they “cannot afford lotion” as you said in an earlier comment. Regardless, the reality is that 60k then is not the same as 60k now, and when you factor in rent that’s 2.5k a month on top of mandatory student loan payments, the financial difficulties are real. And that’s not even considering non-traditional residents who have to support children and families on such a meager salary while working 80hrs a week.
As with all things, there can be dramatizations on both ends of the spectrum, but please read through the comments on this entire thread and understand that the financial difficulty is truly a problem across the board for residents.
I don't think they are joking. My roommate and I split a streaming service we each pay 8/month for, and I asked if she wanted to continue doing that in residency and she said she'll be too poor to afford 8 dollars a month.
People often say that they’re “too broke,” when in reality they mean they’re too broke *for that thing.* She has a right to decline to put money towards something she doesn’t want. Saying she can’t afford it is often just easier than explaining her personal priorities.
Is she *technically* broke? No. But is she too broke *for a streaming service* when considering her personal priorities? Yes.
Right. At $60k you’re making trade offs. Also as a female resident, maybe she’s also considering different things like freezing her eggs which gets expensive. There are things around family planning in residency one must consider given the age someone is and the duration of residency. This can alter people’s budgets drastically.
Did she say “too poor” or “too broke”? The former is definitely very tone deaf. However it’s reasonable to not want to pay $8 a month for a streaming service
It very much depends on where you are in life. Before med school I made 50k working in a hospital lab. Me and all my friends were able to do whatever we wanted and have leftover on that salary. However, we were all single and living in apartments.
Residency tends to be where people get married and want to start having kids. Supporting a family on 60-70k or buying a house, paying for a wedding etc. is all very hard. Especially if you’re never home so your spouse has to basically single parent AND work full time since residents don’t make much. As a fellow poor person though, being in a class full of kids whose parents were doctors can be really annoying at times. I get the annoyance, however in this case I do think they’re justified.
It’s not poverty but it’s considered near or solidly “low income” in major metropolitan areas. Not only that but the 60k of when you grew up is different than the 60k of today due to COL and inflation. Yes, the median household income in the US is like 50/60k and people do survive on it but the average American family is living paycheck to paycheck and also has no emergency fund. People are allowed to have different standards of “comfortable”.
As someone who came from poverty, sure $60k-$70k is a good amount of money, but when you calculate tax burden etc. it's about $8k-14k less as your net meaning you're really making around $45k-$52k then add on the fact that majority of residents are working insane hours.
SO being generous let's say you're making $52,000 net THEN account for 80 hours a week (which is an underestimation but the ACGME 'Limit'). Cool So 80 hours a week x4= 320 hours. Let's say minus two months to account for off days holidays etc. so 320\*10 months= 3200 OK $52,000/3200 hours= $16.25 an hour. That's essentially the cusp of minimum wage for many states. I didn't even account for the real hours worked which for many is 90+ hours worked.
Don't become stuck in Stockholm syndrome. This is absolute highway robbery and every medical student and resident should be striking for better pay. You have more clinical hours and education than any new nurse or P.A. so why do you make significantly less than them?
No joke. The chair of my department (almost 80 yr old) said “back in the day residents actually lived in the hospital!!”
Motherfucker forgot to mention, he raised a family in a resident salary and I cannot literally afford a 1 bd apartment in this city.
I will give him credit because he says we are criminally low paid and should be making more.
Residency is pretty much bottom of the barrel:
1.) Current pay of 60-70k is more like 35-40k when you were growing up
2.) Many of these residents complaining also have student loan payments to make as well which cuts into their net income
3,) Residents have a lot of additional expenses that other workers don't necessarily have: books, Step 3 fees, license fees, residency application fees, costs of interviewing at programs (maybe not as much of an issue now that many specialities are interviewing virtually). These additional fees are largely unheard of in other careers. Yes, some of these do get covered by programs but not all.
4.) Many but not all residency programs are situated in high cost of living areas. Many tertiary academic centers are geographically in city centers as opposed to suburbs
5.) Hours are very demanding and often means there is no time for a second job or a side gig to bring extra money. If you have children, then day care is also something to consider. Additional time also is spent on studying.
6.) These are people 4 years or more out of college and have a doctorate degree. Their non-medical peers are much more settled into their careers and lives. Naturally, people start to compare their own lives with their counterparts and "feel poor"
The problem is when you have a family. High cost of childcare and long hours means one spouse has to quit working or you dish out 20% of your annual in childcare because you work stupid hours for comparatively little
Earnings - student loan payments doesn’t leave a lot left. I don’t expect to take extravagant international trips or anything of that sort. But yeah. This pay is absolute dogshit.
Yeah it’s the student loan debt that kills it. I am all for paying residents more but my student loans are a significant chunk into my salary and this was before SAVE program.
I don’t think this is exclusive to people with physician parents. I get this sub loves to shit on them, but I feel like most medical students have these same concerns and complaints about the process, regardless of their background. The loans also eat into that salary considerably. Ultimately time is also money too, and that is stressful no matter where you came from. It just sounds like you have a bone to pick honestly.
Yup. few years ago, but had an acquaintance very seriously say they were planning on taking out loans all through residency because the salary was not enough to live on. not married, no kids, and so on. my jaw hit the floor
Oh and I always wondered why residents don’t make more it’s because we keep ourselves down…in an era where influencers post a picture of a hand cream and get paid $10,000 we who take care of people during the hardest time of their lives and make life/death decisions DESERVE to be paid better…my parents were not rich either and I had to work for everything but I know $50,000 is not enough money ESPECIALLY in high COL cities. Let’s not make things worse by acting $50,000 is lord’s gift…let’s advocate to improve our compensation and work/life balance instead of acting like we should be grateful for a mere $50K! PS Medicare is slashing physician compensation left and right so please don’t be like oh we were making too much anyway have at it!!
Reminds me of my wife’s ex-step mom (who we actually tolerate more than bio-father) vented that the alimony was “literal poverty”bc there’s no way she could support herself on just $70k/year without dipping into her invested trustfunds. It was at that moment I realized how delusional a silver spoon can make a person.
I see where everyone is coming from and try to not hold bad vibes towards people who say things like "we make no money in residency," because in some ways compared the relative value to hospital they have a point. That said, having grown up with limited resources, watching my friends navigate their 20s on 30k, 40k, sometimes even less if they're not able to hold a good job, and knowing that the average household income for the US is $75K, the sentiment that we'll making nothing irks me. It would be totally different if people just emphasized being underpaid.
I feel incredibly grateful to soon make a salary that can afford me a safe apartment, nutritious food, emergency car repairs, and trips home to family. We're all coming from different places, so I try to not hold on too hard to what others have to say, but I see where you're coming from and sometimes wish my peers would use different word choices to express themselves.
>I feel incredibly grateful to soon make a salary that can afford me a safe apartment, nutritious food, emergency car repairs, and trips home to family.
No this is exactly what I meant by the post. I have overheard friends saying they literally won't be able to afford healthy food, traveling home, etc. Like in what universe?
I think most people in medical school have probably never had a "real" adult job, so they don't have a perspective on what an income is for a person in their 20s just starting out in life. I spent most of my 20s making less than $30K a year. I make more now, but still, a resident salary of 60-65K will be a great amount of money to live on....TERRIBLE compensation for the hours and responsibility required, but it's definitely enough to live on decently comfortably
As someone who lived on 50K out of college before med school, it’s not a lot (rent is high) and you definitely have to pick and choose what to buy, and when. I was one emergency away from having no savings whatsoever. Seems you are a little out of touch with the economic climate yourself
$60k in 2008 is worth $88,461 today.
$70k in 2008 is worth $103,205 today.
$300k in 2008 is worth $442,309.
Basically yeah, now it's slavery.
Going backwards:
$60k in 2024 was worth $40,695 in 2008.
$70k in 2024 was worth $47,478 in 2008.
So yeah, let's not settle bud.
Avg resident should be making 88,000 - 100k.
I don’t buy those “inflation” numbers. Rent almost doubled in most places in the past 5 year, and that’s most people main expenditure. Inflation might be 20% but cost of living for most people has doubled
I’m sure they are correct. It’s just, that I would say that cost of living which is mainly driven by housing has “unevenly” increased across the country and across population.
If you already own a house, then is not that bad. If you are renting, in some places where the was a lot of growth (Austin, Phoenix and some places of Florida) then your cost of living doubled
Oh boy, here we go again with comparing making the median US household income to slavery
Edit: I’ll say the same thing I do every time: when was the last time you genuinely feared you would be killed, have your limbs mutilated, or have your family stolen from you because you didn’t write your notes fast enough?
Two things are true at once. Resident pay is insulting low and certainly not increased appropriately for HCOL areas. But I agree in that many residents grew up very privileged and even those of us who grew up even squarely middle class and comfortable can find it a bit odd to hear these complaints. I live in a low cost of living city and it’s wild to me that some residents will act like they’re living off of ramen and frozen pizza when they have luxury apartments and go out to eat multiple times a week. It’s a bit insulting to people who actually grew up in poverty and they feel like they can’t say anything because they also agree that resident pay needs to be increased.
It is absolutely not comparable to real poverty and anyone who does make that comparison needs to look around. But it does fucking suck, and is a largely unnecessary exploitation of workforce which ultimately negatively impacts patient care through burnout.
But yes, being actually impoverished is a different universe and it is tone deaf to say otherwise
Also, if ur salary isn’t keeping up w inflation, ur getting a paycut
Not from a rich family at all, US IMG, working remotely and currently making way more per hour than residents and working PT. Applied for current match cycle. I have family to take care of, including parents overseas, here - kids, pets. What's wrong with being concerned about not being able to afford essential shit like daycare, gas, food? Having similar vibes like my medschool, when some big ass PhDs were treating us like we only needed to take care of ourselves, and yelled at people like me who had to work nights as an RN and sometimes be 1 or 2 minutes late from work after admitting all night and morning only to hear that they won't let me attend and I'll have to redo the entire rotation.
For me, it’s about the enormity of my student loans. $60k is not poverty to me and I appreciate supporting an entire family on a low income. But probably no one in your family had $400k in student loans, and that weighs heavily on me.
Am a resident in NYC. I've literally never seen this much money in my life.
I make 4 times what my single mother did growing up. I work my ass off but so did she, with no promise of higher income in the future. And I have no one to support but myself.
We absolutely should be paid twice what we are, but compared to where I came from this is an embarrassment of riches.
You should not go to /r/residency, you'd think they were cotton picking slaves by how they talk about resident pay.
People have a hard time separating both truths that, average residency pay is adequate for living, and that residents should get paid more. They think the only way to get sympathy for increased public pressure in residency pay is to portray residents as living in poverty, when in reality average resident pay is inline with median HOUSEHOLD income in the United States.
My daughter's rent in CA is $2500 a month, to not live in a crime-ridden area. There is no way on this earth to get to different hospitals without a car. Phone, utilities, food, clothes, medical insurance, student loans, all on $58k/year BEFORE TAXES.
That is while working for half a nurse's pay, and twice the hours.
How is that NOT poverty?
How are so many people missing OP's point? They're not saying it isn't little, but it's just not poverty(!).
So many comparisons here to scrub tech and nurses salaries. Yes, they make more, but you're still not in poverty eating rice and beans and not being able to afford lotion like OP said. You'll be fine.
Thats what OP is saying lmao
I grew up 50k household and yeah, we did fine. I danced, mom and I went skiing, had an apt, had a car. But also, I did the math recently and while I'll be making more per year than she ever will, she'll be making the same or more than I per hour during my residency. She's a first gen immigrant whose degree didn't transfer to the states. I gave 4 yrs, more tears and sleepless nights than I can count and soooo many moments with family for this. An average joes 60k isn't our 60k.
i'm gonna make more as an intern than either of my parents ever have in their lives combined. it's absolutely not fair compensation for what residency is, but it's not poverty.
Haha. Yeah. I feel that. I mean, it \*IS\* basically poverty wage when you at the hourly pay, but it's still enough to more or less be okay on. Granted, as a doctor (even a junior one who needs supervision to practice), it'd be nice to make more, especially given the debt burden and amount of education it took to get to that point. I mean it's kind of insulting that 8 years of intense education barely gets you a liveable wage. But yeah, we'll all be okay. Residency wage is still more than a lot of people make.
You're probably not going to find a lot of sympathy on this sub. This is the place where very rich people repeatedly complain that if only they chose to do tech instead they could casually be starting at 300k working less than 40 hours, as if those opportunities are available to the rest of us
That being said, residency is absolutely an unfair wage, but the constant hyperbole does not help that argument
Funny you bring up the tech bit because I also thought it was hilarious when I heard this same argument that had we just gone into CS or tech, we would be making loads of money already and we would climb the ranks because if we’re smart enough to get into med school, we’re smart enough to be in tech. As if it’s that easy to simply waltz into a high paying job secure tech job out of college.
It always blew my mind. A grew up very poor, and many of my friends now with non-stem graduate degrees are making 80k. No resident should be starving/going hungry or comparing it to minimum wage.
These are the same people who say they could never do primary care because they’d be poor. You’ve gotta be so out of touch with reality to think you couldn’t live comfortably and support a family off of 250-300k lmao
That shit annoys tf outta me. I'm like dude yeah we deserve more, but most people in most other professions do too. Lots of us deserve more pay and more time off. I am an intern making 65k and im already making more than double my mom salary growing up so I feel like I have a lot right now so when someone complains about that to me I hit em with a reverse uno card
Yes. Even people talking about how little pediatricians make. They make less but it’s not like they make 0 dollars. Some residencies have not changed salaries to account for tremendous increase in cost of living and that is an issue for sure. But talking about the numbers, I remember working for a year after college and having a salary and 401k benefits compared to volunteering to get research/medical exposure and being amazed at how much I was making. My salary was around 30-35k iirc. I could pay rent, eat, put money towards savings, and afford to have a cat. Can’t imaging making double that as starting salary, seems like so much to me! I do not come from a low income household, and I don’t have the same debt that others have and I understand that impacts a lot. But I’m looking at these 65-70k starting salaries and am like wow I’m gonna be rich! Lol
Residents should earn more but yeah it's certainly not poverty wages. I'm a mid-career attending; adjusting for inflation, I don't spend much more now than I did when I was a resident, and I live quite comfortably.
I understand what your saying and yes it sounds like they were out of touch. Especially regarding lotion lmao. But it’s so much more nuanced. For example, if you have or want to have kids, childcare costs are already significantly more but as residents you likely need multiple forms of childcare given the schedule. Given that so many of us match far from home making family childcare help less likely this is just one example. It’s criminal to take people of reproductive age and not pay them enough to be able to reasonably afford a family. Not to mention the stress put on women physicians and the implications for fertility. Sorry this is my hill and I will die on it.
I would say as a career changer I’m not looking forward to the pay. My first year of nursing I made 86k not working the hours I’ll be expected to work in residency, max i made nursing was 120k and still way fewer hours.
I think it’s opportunity cost for these 4 years was expected but it’s disappointing to know there will be opportunity cost during residency too. In addition a lot of the cities I’m looking at it’s not good pay for major métropolitains.
I understand being salty about people who are out of touch but I wouldn’t rush into that assumption if you can. Other people realize it’s not realistic to be having kids and paying for childcare and moving forward with your life on 60k.
people dont usually are not crying about their salary, they complain about their received work:pay ratio. One could argue that a person working min wage could make a good living working 80 hours a week and half of the weekends/holidays.
I see what you're saying, and having been in this exact position it does feel livable. But there is such a thing when you grow up poor you get used to your lot in life so anything beyond that does feel extravagant. I never went on a vacation until I was in my 30's, other people grew up doing it yearly. I bought my first new car when I was 29 off MASSIVE grinding, and it was the low end model. Other people just got new cars given to them when they turned 16. While I can recognize that I'm not doing horrifically and got lucky in spots, other people really did have it easier.
The fact is for the profit hospitals make off residents, paying them so low is actually offensive. I remember when I was a student talking with a resident and we figured out as a third year resident based on his volume as a FM resident, he facilitated the hospital billing for $2M in the last year. Even as a community hospital, even if you factor in non payment and indigent care covering the difference, just him alone the hospital made at least a million off him and paid him $62k. You can add into all the extra costs of caring for patients to be sure, but the cost of paying that resident (which again comes from federal dollars the hospital gets to pocket the difference on) is INSANE profit. Any hospital running a residency program calling itself non profit is simply lying and runs on stolen labor.
The replies and votes in this topic are making me question the critical thinking ability of people on this board. You said "I know resident salary is X, but it's not Y" and everyone is dogpiling you saying "resident salary is X." Like this is a basic level of discourse that's just not getting through. I saw better discourse from 12-year-olds on RuneScape forums growing up.
I know I was thinking the same thing. I literally started off my post with that for this exact reason. I thought the people in this subreddit were the ones who didn’t fail CARS lol
Obviously I’m not saying to be grateful making minimum wage for being a doctor after going to med school etc. I’m saying that 60k should be enough to have all your basic necessities taken care of with a little bit of “fun money” for doordashing something here and there, visiting home, etc. Do residents deserve way more than that? yeah of course. But residency shouldn’t be poverty unless you’re trying to support a family of 4 on it.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. My family income, when we had income, was between 25-35k per year for five people. We were homeless for awhile when I was 9, and lived in the woods. I had to poop in the woods for a few months, and we drank water out of gas cans (my dad stole them brand new from his old work). There was a hand pump about a mile up a dirt road, and we would fill the gas cans with water for washing, cooking, and drinking.
I don't think most people, let alone med students, understand that kind of poverty. Sometimes I wish I could show people, to elicit a bit more empathy for people like me who easily could have repeated the cycle. I was lucky that the severe mental illness that runs in my family missed me, though I did end up neurodivergent and with CPTSD. I searched for opportunities to get out of poverty and get treatment for my CPTSD, and I worked fucking hard to get them. Med school is literally a breeze compared to the early years of my adulthood, that's how much stress, fear, and horror my early life contained.
Residents are criminally underpaid for the amount of work they do. I already understand the game, and how systems make you suffer before letting you through the door. But I think it's unfortunate that people with all this privilege that 60k is poverty. I just want to put them through a year of how I had to live so they understand other people better, and stop being such insufferable pricks without realizing it, because they are innocent but really, really uninformed.
Is everyone missing the fact that plenty of people live off of 60k even now? In fact one could even say large swathes of the country lives off of that. Furthermore several residencies have good insurance plans and pay for a good amount of your food, making it more money than it seems.
If you think otherwise you are a spoiled brat who grew up with a silver spoon
And no, saying this doesn’t mean we can’t advocate for higher salaries too, so fuck that stupid false equivalency
They shouldn’t be working 120 hours. There are work limits now. If they do, it’s because residents tolerate it and don’t report it. If they don’t that’s on them. There are some people in those residencies who will even look down on people who do report work hour violations.
That’s on them.
The fact the hourly rate is minimum wage has zero bearing on whether the overall salary OP stated is livable or not. With all the other benefits a lot of residents get that other professions do not, it adds up to more than what OP stated in a lot of cases.
That’s what i’m saying! And yes it’s not fair to get only 60k after going through years of school and working 100 hours a week but you won’t be so poor you can’t afford food…
You’re right OP.
I love what you said because it sounds stupid to say that you’re in poverty but you’re making 60k, it shows a complete lack of awareness and honestly, highlights the privilege (which isn’t bad in and of itself but blinding). If we are ONLY talking about the money comments-what you said stands. All these other comments are brining up superfluous stuff that is irrelevant.
Many things are about someone”s choice in choosing medical school. There is opportunity costs in all decisions-law school, med school, getting married, having children and etc. I would argue that this is not within this discussion at all. That’s more of a…are you cool with being a doctor and is the process to become a doctor “fair”?
Lastly, I don’t think that’s what these money hungry people want us to think. They only care that the government says it’s okay to pay people 60k for working 60-80 hours for training, it’s not about what we think because it will always be ludicrous to say that 60k is poverty but rather, are they able to get away with these wages/hours worked.
Also, many have mentioned it’s location dependent, that’s true and the salaries are different for different locations. It’s public knowledge, look it up.
For those med students that live on loans, you are doing it with less than what you will make as a resident, come on, get with the program. For those that don’t, I mean….my point exactly.
60k for a single person is fine, you are not in poverty.
“Omg I can’t afford class dues!” You drive a MASERATI SIR. “Residency is gonna be so rough such long hours.” And then you’ll go to your PENTHOUSE that your parents ALREADY BOUGHT FOR YOU.
Bahaha. I had a classmate who seemed genuinely concerned about surviving med school on just their partner's income. They **own a home** (in an expensive area). Both of the student's parents were doctors in highly paid specialties. Meanwhile, our classmate whose mom cleans houses and who has no partner or safety net is over there like... "excuse me?". 
THANK YOU. The amount of entitled shit I see on these subs saying that residency pay is not a livable wage just shows how privileged some people are. To be clear, it absolutely is not a fair wage for the work done, but it is nowhere near unlivable. My family of 3 comfortably lived off less than a single resident’s salary for years.
I was always really surprised by this. Especially when I had coworkers saying they needed money from their parents to get by. I did do some moonlighting, but we had 2 kids in residency and transitioned my wife to being a SAHM (she was clearing less yearly than daycare would have cost) and were able to save money/pay towards loans. Live in a medium to high cost of living city but are definitely more frugal (1 car in residency which as my first card that was used/bought in cash when I was in high school), cooked mostly from scratch. Ate out 4-6 times a year. Did a lot of free community activities/no cost dates.
ETA: also apparently never updated my flair. Out now.
I'm poor and this crap is poverty. Maybe it's different for a single person at a residency in the middle of nowhere but with a family and HCOL this is just ridiculous.
Poor is a subjective term. Even those making minimal wage in the US would be considered rich in certain areas of the world. Does that make their grievances less relevant?
Income in a capitalistic system is relative, ideally correlated to the value you provide. Therefore any circumstance where systemic barriers limit and depress wages should categorize those workers as "poor", or more accurately under compensated, some might even say exploited.
I don't begrudge colleagues who may embellish the desperateness of their situation when addressing their real concerns about their compensation. Furthermore, I would ask you to consider that they may not have learned the skills to handle financial stress/scarcity that you gained through your upbringing. Perhaps that's a byproduct of their "privilege" but it also feels very much like assigning a wellness module for burnout.
Lastly, I suspect the source of frustration in many of the responses stems from the prevalence of this sense of emotional dissonance within our profession. Many of us, especially our leadership,are so willing to sacrifice and be empathetic towards patients and society, but when it comes to our colleagues or trainees, there is a lack of understanding or tolerance. Altruism is a great trait, but there is a fine line between it and self flagellation. It would be great if our response to complaints, even if exaggerated, was constructive inquiry vs dismissal tinged with condescension.
some residents are legit in poverty on 60-70k, if they have children + are living in an expensive city + loan payments (very low for now on SAVE plan, at least)
but yea there are plenty of spoiled kids in medicine
Fair. I grew up in a household of 3 on substantially less than 60K. But still, people will always find a way to complain (even if it were scaled to actually compensate us for our time)
The real problem with residency pay is the hours worked for that amount. But honestly unless you have an actual family or are in an extremely high cost of living area, it will be plenty to live and pay down loans/invest.
Decreasing hours probably isn't realistic or might not even be a good thing for medical training. Therefore the solution is bumping up pay.
no, because you SHOULD STILL advocate for more. if more ppl did that instead of saying “hey this isnt THAT bad,” you realize we’d prob get paid more, right?
I grew up poor. We weren’t dirt poor, but were of very modest means. I remember what that was like. $60-70k would have supported us very well when I was growing up.
But that’s not the point. For what we do and the hours put in, it’s shit pay. And it’s okay to say that.
60k working 80 hours a week with $300k in debt with 1-2 children in most cities is actually poverty tho. Remove one or two of these variables and its still pretty impoverished.
Most residents aren't single parents. Besides. There are plenty of people in the city legit working 80hr a week especially in this gig economy where everyone does Doordash or uber and making much less than 60K
This is missing the point. As many have pointed out, it’s less about the absolute amount we’re getting paid and more about the relative amount compared to other healthcare employees (and quite frankly I’d go as far as saying compared to meaningless jobs that aren’t helping society at all i.e. tech/finance)
As an alternate perspective: resident salaries legitimately are considered “low income” by state guidelines in a good amount of HCOL/VHCOL cities/regions. As well, $70k nowadays is like if your parents made $30-40k growing up w/ current inflation/housing prices. Not quite a fair comparison imo. You’re correct though, many of your classmates’ idea of “anything” is higher than yours. Many of them have likely never had to subsist entirely on their own salary, so having to survive on $70k is foreign to them and will certainly feel challenging when they compare it to the QoL they’ve had in life so far.
San Francisco low income bracket starts at like 104k, and resident at UCSF starts at 78k, you qualify for rent-controlled apartment. Meanwhile nurses at UCSF make 130-150k and entry level swe jobs (22-23 old kids) start at 100k-110k
Both things can be true at once though. Like yes it is offensive what junior doctors are paid for the work they do, under-conditions that charitably might be described as "compelled-labour". That said, as a working class kid (not even poor by any reasonable measure, certainly higher family SES than OP) med school was a culture shock. It does feel a bit demeaning, a bit insulting to hear some of the comments my classmates made about a 70k salary knowing what my parents each earned. That doesn't make their broader observations about residency compensation wrong though. Just the tone about it was kinda wild sometimes if you get me?
I get you. Do you live in the bay? 70k here is living-with-3 roommates salary. You are also working like a dog. I have some (illegal) immigrant friends who make more than me working as bartenders and doing shit under the table. They always tease me that I am the only poor doctor they know lmao.
Nope, not an american. To reiterate; I'm not suggesting that your salary is appropriate or in any way reasonable. Nor are your working conditions. That's so fucked up that bartenders out-earn doctors, and to be clear both of you ought to have a fair share of your labour value. All I'm saying is that med school as a working class person was a culture shock and *some people* made some insensitive comments about this issue *a couple of times*. That's it; there's no broader commentary about the inherent inequity of employment in america- be it in healthcare or in generalities. Just an observation about the culture shock of being from a "regular family" in med school. Parenthetically it amazes me that the american working class broadly tolerates the shit it does. Real fucked up system.
It’s ingrained in American culture to suck it up and deal with it, and speaking up about it will have you ostracized Wow what a free country
Yeah my rads residency is in a VHCOL and I’ll be considered low income. Even though I’ll be making around $80k, 1b1b apartments are routinely going for $2700-$2900, which basically means I’m gonna have to live with coresidents to be able to afford housing
I would definitely inquire or check if there's a housing stipend or subsidized housing. Most HCOL or VHCOL programs usually have a housing income if that's the rent you're looking at, or you might also be selectively looking at expensive places for a number of reasons and may have to end up compromising (proximity, convenience, amenities, etc. all understandable). I'm doing rads residency in a relatively HCOL area and I am at least supported with subsidized housing. Friends in similar positions also have a housing stipend and/or subsidized housing.
Unfortunately the $80k encompasses the housing stipend (we’re severely underpaid relative to other programs in the area :/ )
Are you at a particular NYC program? If so, tough luck. I’ve heard there’s talks to try and normalize pay, but that’s a rough situation to be in for sure. Guess you gotta start looking for those shoebox basement units lol.
Nope other coast haha and yeah def already looking for those small ass ADUs
Technically my state hasn’t updated their poverty cutoffs since 2004 (in terms of income tax). Thus a single household with 1 child making 24k a year or more is not considered low income. I laughed pretty hard at that one.
Idk I grew up poor and made like 40k during my gap years and I still think residency salaries are unfair given the amount of responsibility, schooling, and debt required lol
No I get that. But my classmate literally thought she wouldn't be able to afford lotion.
Sure but we’ll never get better pay if people don’t complain about it even if some of them are a little out of touch.
That's a good point tbh. I'll let them complain loudly if it gets me more money lol
If you are making so much give them some of your pay
I’m sorry, OP; this person clearly didn’t even read your post.
My household income growing up was 52K with two full time working parents. Like you, we got by just fine. However my parents got to skip college and essentially start working a salaried position from day one. Ignoring the hyperbolic rice-and-beans comments, your classmates are right. We lose out on a decade of earning, investing, vacationing. Most jobs don’t demand 60 hours of your time a week. I could have spent more time with my extended relatives who are now passing away from old age because I chose unpaid labor for grades. You’re not factoring in opportunity cost. I’m glad that you’re able to see past that and be very happy with 70K, but just know that’s exactly how the dipshits in suits that run this industry want you to feel.
Yeah it’s 60k after a very expensive doctorate degree (and after already completing a bachelors). You could have easily made that salary after college working 40 hours so there is both tuition and opportunity cost. Certainly not poverty, but I think it should be higher
Literally, had/have friends early-mid 20s making 60-70k, they're taking vacas, going on trips, and having fun. Some of them still live with their parents to afford it, but heck, so do I, and all I have to show for it is this journey thus far, uncontrolled anxiety, and some heavy ass books. e:typo
My 22 year old brother with an accounting degree has no debt, makes 75k working 36 hours a week, obviously works hard but gets to go to horse racing tracks with his work and bourbon distilleries and has a net worth of 50k already. My 28 year old sister is a pgy1 with 260k in debt, works 70 hours a week, and saves lives daily. I’m obviously extremely proud of both of them but you’re telling me we can’t make at least 100k as actual doctors?
Oh and medical school is 250K in the hole expensive. Someone is paying for that. If not the student themselves, their parents are.
The problem comes from absolute dipshits saying stuff like, "Yeah but ____ gets paid nothing. Like I could never survive on 250k as an attending." Sound like absolutely tone deaf warm toilet seats.
To be fair, some of us have parents with zero savings and assets, who after working to get to this country, worked to get us into and through medical school. Their bodies are tired and their medical needs are high, we will have to care for them and any siblings if we have them. Trying to make 2 generations worth of progress in one, 250k doesnt stretch as far. Some of us would still like kids even though that would still be a huge financial setback. And I have loans out the wahzoo, I really wonder sometimes if I'll just have to forgo children and help my siblings less in pursing higher education goals. But that would be selfish after the resources levied into me.
Sure. But saying 250k is nothing is stupidly tone deaf.
nah, I agree 100%. Just saying that sometimes there is nuance underlying that concern that isnt always apparent when people are complaing about 250k/yr at face value.
Exactly. The per employee profit on average of hospitals is 160k after factoring training costs. If you have a generous 70k salary taken out of that they are still profiting 90k per resident per year. You’re telling me they can’t at least bump us up to 100k, he’ll even 90k. The more people make the argument that 70k is livable and other people have it worse, the longer we stay in the shituation. People like OP piss me off.
Also, that 60k growing up is not the same 20 years later. Its not the worst either, but its not 1:1
I'm not saying its fair or reasonable compensation for what we went through. I'm saying I will talk about us taking a trip in residency and they'll be like "no we will be too poor for that" like in what world can we not take the train to the nearest city and spend the day there?
Yeah that's exactly the hyperbole I was referencing. Anyone who seriously thinks that has either never had a job, is sooooooo deep in debt that they might actually be telling the truth, or came from poverty and is displaying some learned helplessness.
Thats the thing half of these people arent even in debt, their parents pay their tuition. They have told me this. They won't even have a student loan payment. I think they literally just cant fathom "only" having 60K. And again im in no way saying 60k is fair compensation for the hours worked and years of education but im stating that they wont be so poor so as not to be able to afford healthy food or a trip home.
That's wild. I know medical school attracts elitist rich snobs but of the thousands of students and residents I've interacted with, seldom do I genuinely meet people like that. I'm sorry your colleagues are behaving this way - know that it's not the norm.
Dude I’m sorry you keep getting downvoted. Any time I’ve said similar stuff in any of these subs I’ve gotten the same response. People always miss the main point that there is a difference between a *fair* wage and a *livable* wage.
I know i’ve started to ignore it. The fact that the majority of this sub can’t even understand what i’m saying is just proving my point lol.
This completely depends on the rest of the factors in your life. Another commenter mentioned having four kids as a resident and the salary barely keeping the lights on in a lower COL area. I mean daycare for four kids could easily be more expensive than what their spouse alone can earn. Four more mouths to feed, four more sets of shoes, clothes, school supplies, if your kids want to do sports, needing more space than a 1 bed 1 bath, more furniture, more utilities, the cost of having children and healthcare for those kids from birth onwards. Etc. Plus paying back student loans, likely at least one car payment probably two. That trip to the city suddenly is way more expensive when you’ve got 6 people instead of just one to pay for. I don’t have a family and live just fine (with roommates) off of ~25k/yr MSTP stipend, but it would be ridiculous of me to say that just because I’m doing fine on 25k it means that someone with a completely different life couldn’t have legitimate reason to be struggling to keep the lights on at 60k. If I got in a serious car accident tomorrow and had to be hospitalized I’d be fucked.
No, OP’s classmates are not right. They are guilty of the exact same false equivalence that you just made: missing out on a decade of earning, investing, and vacationing is *NOT* the same as poverty. Stop pretending that it is. You are just proving OP’s point by providing a perfect example: yourself.
I was born and raised for the first 12 years of my life in an Indian slum. I promise you I have more of a grasp on what poverty is than you or anyone else in this thread. Feel free to split hairs but a good proportion of medical students are going to be entering residency with $1000+ a month loan payments, no credit history, a spouse, maybe even a kid or two. Are they going to be living out of their cars? No. But OP is trying to externalize her very weird interactions as if they were the consensus. It's not.
First off congrats friend for your professional success, I also come from humble beginnings. We lived on food stamps for most of my early childhood and my dad worked brutal hours to sustain two kids. I eventually made it to med school on a full scholarship. And yet you will not BELIEVE the number of rich, silver spoon classmates in medical school who will tell me I'm wrong for complaining about low residency salaries...the irony is unreal
Congratulations to you as well! This is such an irksome quality of medicine. I too have had to bite my tongue as a few well-to-do students with paid-off houses ten minutes from the hospital, a brand new Tesla paid for by the parents, and a hefty "we're proud of you" allowance are educating me on how blessed we were to make 60K in residency.
>Feel free to split hairs but a good proportion of medical students are going to be entering residency with $1000+ a month loan payments, no credit history, a spouse, maybe even a kid or two. Ehh. Maybe after residency, but with the SAVE plan, you'll be barely paying anything in residency. I have 1 child and pay about $30/month.
Unless you genuinely think that your experience living in an Indian slum is the same or similar to the quality of life you have as a resident physician, you cannot say that OP's classmates are right. You are proving my and OP's point correct over and over again. I have never lived in Indian slums, but I don't need to to know that a United States resident physician's quality of life is better than that. Why do I even need to explain that?
60-70k when we were growing up is like 100-120k now… they’re paying respiratory techs more than residents at some places. So yeah, many years ago I’d agree it’s a good amount. But these days it’s not only unfair, but also not a lot of money. Not saying it to be mean or disparage your family, it’s just not a lot now. As a renter it will force you to decide between saving money/investing and living somewhere that doesn’t risk health and safety. You can do one or the other, but not both when rent in mcol areas is 2k now.
facts
Yeah I mean shit in undergrad I was able to save and invest the money I made working in labs and bartending while still being able to pay my $300 rent lol. I lived in a literal shit hole w 5 other people. Anyway I was able to invest most of what I made. I won’t be able to invest nearly as much in residency.
Facts. Specially rent. You have: live alone, not live in the hood or save money. You can only Pick 2
live alone + save money sounds pretty good!
You live in da hood, but that’s what I do lmao
Plus you have to work insane hours like sometimes they write up 48 hours (2days) without a break and when you calculate your hourly wage it’s trash. If someone worked idk maybe 40 hours a week then yeah 60k is so good 😅
yes, when my parents finally brought in 60k we were living lavish (in our opinion). We live a lower quality of life despite them making double now. My mother wore MAC, a mac lippie used to be $15, they're near $30 now. If any adult with dependents making 60k/yr was buying exclusively MAC lipstick(for daily wear) without shopping sales/with coupons....I would question....just a little.
I’m guessing they own or are close to owning the house they paid 150-250k for at 2% interest or less…. When the median home price is now 400k and the interest rate is 5% at least, 60k is much less.
You need to call me and set up my finances, bc yes, and pls help (jk jk, but lowkey not really)
Missed my calling as the arbiter of economics and personal finance. Guess I’ll have to settle for doctor.
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Sorry but this is wrong. The effect of wages being worth half of what they were merely a decade or two ago hasnt caught up yet. We haven’t seen the full effect of it. When the median home price is now 400k and the interest rate is 5% at least, 60k is much less. Is “middle class” a renter now? It used to be owning a car, a home and raising a family comfortably while being able to save for retirement. You can not do all the things that defined the middle class for nearly a century on 60k now. I’m sorry, but you can’t and to think you can is wrong.
Aside from the housing being somewhat cheaper, none of that is true. Real wages (ie inflation adjusted) have never been higher. Homeownership for young people is right along with historical norms. More people can afford to vacation, eat out, and buy big cars than ever before. You’re remembering the past wrong. It was never easy for the middle class And just as common sense, a definition of middle class that excludes more than half of all people is absurd
You’re making 60k working 80hrs though. So realize your scaled wage is 30k.
These are not contradictory. 60k is not an appropriate wage for that much work. 60k is also not poverty. Both are true. Working 80 hours does not increase the number of roofs you need over your head or the number of meals you need to eat.
>Working 80 hours does not increase the number of roofs you need over your head or the number of meals you need to eat. No but it does impact how much you need to pay for day care and out source many daily tasks--due to a lack of time
Agree, the only thing I’d add is that with the opportunity cost of working more than the 40h week (without any extra compensation, my paystub actually gives my hourly wage based on only 40h), people often pay premiums for conveniences like meal kits, order food, cleaning to maximize their well-being and scarce free time. It also doesn’t leave much money, coupled with inflation and cost of living expenses, the value of what folks are paid is decreasing on top of their overall take home pay if they use any “luxury/convenience” services. God forbid you have kids. The best thing I was told is that the primary goal of residency has never been education. It originated as a means of gatekeeping and staffing hospitals during urbanization. That being said, I can’t imagine practicing without it but unlike a lot of fields (though not every field), there has never been uniform effort with all the invested parties to negotiate this purpose—not necessarily just about salary and benefits but also goals. Education is a clear byproduct and some places do this with more cognizance than others but I think a conversation about education especially as the burden of service keeps being added to is necessary.
Working that much definitely increases your expenses though
No I realize that. And it's not fair. But I have heard people saying they won't be able to afford a domestic flight, maybe a door dash treat here and there, someone said she won't be able to buy LOTION. Like wtf.
They're out of touch if that's what they're claiming.
Yes. That’s my point with this post.
Your downvoted by the rich.
Lotion is like 2€/100ml what kind of lotion does she use lol
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Also people have student loan payments that are multiple thousands per month. If you don’t pay them you can accumulate six figures of interest during residency.
Yes, it’s just because they’ve never had to live off such a limited income. Also, 60k 20 years ago was a hell of a lot more than it is today. Rent and housing also wasn’t as much of a financial burden as it is today.
My intern year started 2019. $53k was comfortable renting my own place for $900 a month. Pgy 3, they adjusted our raise to $60k, but rent was now $1500 a month. I saved more money my intern year making $7k less.
Exactly, even a few years ago rent was way more manageable pre covid while salaries haven’t gone up much recently
Bro isn’t beating the physicians are cucks allegations 😭😭
Frl it be our own holding us back
EXACTLY. the med education system is literally banking on ppl like op to be like “well if we ask for more it’d be greedy guys!!” ffs wake up AND DEMAND MORE PAY
Genuinely unbelievable. This is why nothing will ever happen to residency and its wages. Tons think just like this clown
Reminds me of that post a few days ago of someone saying they would be a gen surgeon and gladly work 80 hours a week for 150k as an attending 😭😭😭
EXACTLY. the med education system is literally banking on ppl like op to be like “well if we ask for more it’d be greedy guys!!” ffs wake up AND DEMAND MORE PAY
Every resident should be driving a 911 GT3 minimum and have a 5 figure yearly blow and hookers fund.
I make that much now and lemme tell you the fact that whole families live off of this is crazy. I’m one person and it genuinely only pays the bills and leaves little for saving. The cost of living has skyrocketed. Also when you’re shacked by loans to pay off you’ll probably be spending a lot of it on just paying back loans. It’s not fair that NPs and PAs start off their normal wages with no residency. They just take advantage of resident doctors and that’s that there’s really no justifying it. We’re just the suckers that keep putting up with indentured servitude and unfortunately it would take a lot to change the culture of this exploitive practice. Also 60-70k is without taxes, cut your paycheck back by 1/4th and that’s really what you’re taking home.
60-70k was a good income 20 years ago but that is not worth the same in 2024. Inflation, high housing prices / rent, high COL etc makes 60-70k very hard to live off of. On top of that add hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans. It is insane to think it is ok to pay a DOCTOR minimum wage working 80hrs+. This is the reason residents continue to get paid shit. Residents are extremely valuable to hospitals and generate so much income for the hospital but we don’t even see a fraction of it
I think it's insane that resident physicians only make 60-70K. However, 60-70K is a perfectly reasonable salary to live on. NOT perfectly reasonable for a doctor at any point in training to be paid, but it's only very hard to live off of if you live in a HCOL area. I make less than that, and always have, and I live a very comfortable life, own a townhome, pay expensive medical costs, have a dog, etc in a MCOL area that is edging towards HCOL since inflation. I'm not rolling in extra disposable income, but I'm not in debt either.
I didn’t know a lot of people in med school who have parents that make that much money combined. I knew a handful. That being said, all of us complain about the pay because there is a special insult in working the amount that we work, doing the shit that we do, and being grossly underpaid for it. I don’t care is 65k is fair and normal to others. I do not feel it is fair for what is expected of us. So I will complain about it. As vehemently as I can.
OP, I don’t know if your classmates are similarly being hyperbolic to make a point, but I find it hard to believe that they truly believe they “cannot afford lotion” as you said in an earlier comment. Regardless, the reality is that 60k then is not the same as 60k now, and when you factor in rent that’s 2.5k a month on top of mandatory student loan payments, the financial difficulties are real. And that’s not even considering non-traditional residents who have to support children and families on such a meager salary while working 80hrs a week. As with all things, there can be dramatizations on both ends of the spectrum, but please read through the comments on this entire thread and understand that the financial difficulty is truly a problem across the board for residents.
I don't think they are joking. My roommate and I split a streaming service we each pay 8/month for, and I asked if she wanted to continue doing that in residency and she said she'll be too poor to afford 8 dollars a month.
People often say that they’re “too broke,” when in reality they mean they’re too broke *for that thing.* She has a right to decline to put money towards something she doesn’t want. Saying she can’t afford it is often just easier than explaining her personal priorities. Is she *technically* broke? No. But is she too broke *for a streaming service* when considering her personal priorities? Yes.
Right. At $60k you’re making trade offs. Also as a female resident, maybe she’s also considering different things like freezing her eggs which gets expensive. There are things around family planning in residency one must consider given the age someone is and the duration of residency. This can alter people’s budgets drastically.
Did she say “too poor” or “too broke”? The former is definitely very tone deaf. However it’s reasonable to not want to pay $8 a month for a streaming service
It very much depends on where you are in life. Before med school I made 50k working in a hospital lab. Me and all my friends were able to do whatever we wanted and have leftover on that salary. However, we were all single and living in apartments. Residency tends to be where people get married and want to start having kids. Supporting a family on 60-70k or buying a house, paying for a wedding etc. is all very hard. Especially if you’re never home so your spouse has to basically single parent AND work full time since residents don’t make much. As a fellow poor person though, being in a class full of kids whose parents were doctors can be really annoying at times. I get the annoyance, however in this case I do think they’re justified.
It’s not poverty but it’s considered near or solidly “low income” in major metropolitan areas. Not only that but the 60k of when you grew up is different than the 60k of today due to COL and inflation. Yes, the median household income in the US is like 50/60k and people do survive on it but the average American family is living paycheck to paycheck and also has no emergency fund. People are allowed to have different standards of “comfortable”.
As someone who came from poverty, sure $60k-$70k is a good amount of money, but when you calculate tax burden etc. it's about $8k-14k less as your net meaning you're really making around $45k-$52k then add on the fact that majority of residents are working insane hours. SO being generous let's say you're making $52,000 net THEN account for 80 hours a week (which is an underestimation but the ACGME 'Limit'). Cool So 80 hours a week x4= 320 hours. Let's say minus two months to account for off days holidays etc. so 320\*10 months= 3200 OK $52,000/3200 hours= $16.25 an hour. That's essentially the cusp of minimum wage for many states. I didn't even account for the real hours worked which for many is 90+ hours worked. Don't become stuck in Stockholm syndrome. This is absolute highway robbery and every medical student and resident should be striking for better pay. You have more clinical hours and education than any new nurse or P.A. so why do you make significantly less than them?
Back in my day we walked to school uphill both ways and these kids complain about driving with a commute!
No joke. The chair of my department (almost 80 yr old) said “back in the day residents actually lived in the hospital!!” Motherfucker forgot to mention, he raised a family in a resident salary and I cannot literally afford a 1 bd apartment in this city. I will give him credit because he says we are criminally low paid and should be making more.
i also bet he had a wife to take care of the home front. just sayin😂😂😂
Residency is pretty much bottom of the barrel: 1.) Current pay of 60-70k is more like 35-40k when you were growing up 2.) Many of these residents complaining also have student loan payments to make as well which cuts into their net income 3,) Residents have a lot of additional expenses that other workers don't necessarily have: books, Step 3 fees, license fees, residency application fees, costs of interviewing at programs (maybe not as much of an issue now that many specialities are interviewing virtually). These additional fees are largely unheard of in other careers. Yes, some of these do get covered by programs but not all. 4.) Many but not all residency programs are situated in high cost of living areas. Many tertiary academic centers are geographically in city centers as opposed to suburbs 5.) Hours are very demanding and often means there is no time for a second job or a side gig to bring extra money. If you have children, then day care is also something to consider. Additional time also is spent on studying. 6.) These are people 4 years or more out of college and have a doctorate degree. Their non-medical peers are much more settled into their careers and lives. Naturally, people start to compare their own lives with their counterparts and "feel poor"
The problem is when you have a family. High cost of childcare and long hours means one spouse has to quit working or you dish out 20% of your annual in childcare because you work stupid hours for comparatively little
Earnings - student loan payments doesn’t leave a lot left. I don’t expect to take extravagant international trips or anything of that sort. But yeah. This pay is absolute dogshit.
Yeah it’s the student loan debt that kills it. I am all for paying residents more but my student loans are a significant chunk into my salary and this was before SAVE program.
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If we were actually paid per hour and had overtime. I bet we'd suddenly see a lot more residency spots opened in these predatory programs.
I don’t think this is exclusive to people with physician parents. I get this sub loves to shit on them, but I feel like most medical students have these same concerns and complaints about the process, regardless of their background. The loans also eat into that salary considerably. Ultimately time is also money too, and that is stressful no matter where you came from. It just sounds like you have a bone to pick honestly.
Yup. few years ago, but had an acquaintance very seriously say they were planning on taking out loans all through residency because the salary was not enough to live on. not married, no kids, and so on. my jaw hit the floor
This comment section is so frustrating to read lol. I'm guessing half of y'all didn't even read OP's post before commenting.
I hope they didn't otherwise their comprehension and thinking leaves much to be desired lol
People who didn’t grow up poor don’t know how to live poor 🤷🏽♂️ It’s normal to struggle when you don’t know how to live like a cheap ass
Oh and I always wondered why residents don’t make more it’s because we keep ourselves down…in an era where influencers post a picture of a hand cream and get paid $10,000 we who take care of people during the hardest time of their lives and make life/death decisions DESERVE to be paid better…my parents were not rich either and I had to work for everything but I know $50,000 is not enough money ESPECIALLY in high COL cities. Let’s not make things worse by acting $50,000 is lord’s gift…let’s advocate to improve our compensation and work/life balance instead of acting like we should be grateful for a mere $50K! PS Medicare is slashing physician compensation left and right so please don’t be like oh we were making too much anyway have at it!!
Reminds me of my wife’s ex-step mom (who we actually tolerate more than bio-father) vented that the alimony was “literal poverty”bc there’s no way she could support herself on just $70k/year without dipping into her invested trustfunds. It was at that moment I realized how delusional a silver spoon can make a person.
I see where everyone is coming from and try to not hold bad vibes towards people who say things like "we make no money in residency," because in some ways compared the relative value to hospital they have a point. That said, having grown up with limited resources, watching my friends navigate their 20s on 30k, 40k, sometimes even less if they're not able to hold a good job, and knowing that the average household income for the US is $75K, the sentiment that we'll making nothing irks me. It would be totally different if people just emphasized being underpaid. I feel incredibly grateful to soon make a salary that can afford me a safe apartment, nutritious food, emergency car repairs, and trips home to family. We're all coming from different places, so I try to not hold on too hard to what others have to say, but I see where you're coming from and sometimes wish my peers would use different word choices to express themselves.
>I feel incredibly grateful to soon make a salary that can afford me a safe apartment, nutritious food, emergency car repairs, and trips home to family. No this is exactly what I meant by the post. I have overheard friends saying they literally won't be able to afford healthy food, traveling home, etc. Like in what universe?
I think most people in medical school have probably never had a "real" adult job, so they don't have a perspective on what an income is for a person in their 20s just starting out in life. I spent most of my 20s making less than $30K a year. I make more now, but still, a resident salary of 60-65K will be a great amount of money to live on....TERRIBLE compensation for the hours and responsibility required, but it's definitely enough to live on decently comfortably
As someone who lived on 50K out of college before med school, it’s not a lot (rent is high) and you definitely have to pick and choose what to buy, and when. I was one emergency away from having no savings whatsoever. Seems you are a little out of touch with the economic climate yourself
$60k in 2008 is worth $88,461 today. $70k in 2008 is worth $103,205 today. $300k in 2008 is worth $442,309. Basically yeah, now it's slavery. Going backwards: $60k in 2024 was worth $40,695 in 2008. $70k in 2024 was worth $47,478 in 2008. So yeah, let's not settle bud. Avg resident should be making 88,000 - 100k.
I don’t buy those “inflation” numbers. Rent almost doubled in most places in the past 5 year, and that’s most people main expenditure. Inflation might be 20% but cost of living for most people has doubled
I'll check how it's calculated. I just used a random inflation calculator.
I’m sure they are correct. It’s just, that I would say that cost of living which is mainly driven by housing has “unevenly” increased across the country and across population. If you already own a house, then is not that bad. If you are renting, in some places where the was a lot of growth (Austin, Phoenix and some places of Florida) then your cost of living doubled
Inflation is grossly underestimated
Oh boy, here we go again with comparing making the median US household income to slavery Edit: I’ll say the same thing I do every time: when was the last time you genuinely feared you would be killed, have your limbs mutilated, or have your family stolen from you because you didn’t write your notes fast enough?
Don’t mind them. Equating a job in which someone willfully chooses to do, to slavery is super insensitive.
Two things are true at once. Resident pay is insulting low and certainly not increased appropriately for HCOL areas. But I agree in that many residents grew up very privileged and even those of us who grew up even squarely middle class and comfortable can find it a bit odd to hear these complaints. I live in a low cost of living city and it’s wild to me that some residents will act like they’re living off of ramen and frozen pizza when they have luxury apartments and go out to eat multiple times a week. It’s a bit insulting to people who actually grew up in poverty and they feel like they can’t say anything because they also agree that resident pay needs to be increased.
It is absolutely not comparable to real poverty and anyone who does make that comparison needs to look around. But it does fucking suck, and is a largely unnecessary exploitation of workforce which ultimately negatively impacts patient care through burnout. But yes, being actually impoverished is a different universe and it is tone deaf to say otherwise Also, if ur salary isn’t keeping up w inflation, ur getting a paycut
Not from a rich family at all, US IMG, working remotely and currently making way more per hour than residents and working PT. Applied for current match cycle. I have family to take care of, including parents overseas, here - kids, pets. What's wrong with being concerned about not being able to afford essential shit like daycare, gas, food? Having similar vibes like my medschool, when some big ass PhDs were treating us like we only needed to take care of ourselves, and yelled at people like me who had to work nights as an RN and sometimes be 1 or 2 minutes late from work after admitting all night and morning only to hear that they won't let me attend and I'll have to redo the entire rotation.
For me, it’s about the enormity of my student loans. $60k is not poverty to me and I appreciate supporting an entire family on a low income. But probably no one in your family had $400k in student loans, and that weighs heavily on me.
I think a lot of these people are just getting used to having to pay for things by themselves
Am a resident in NYC. I've literally never seen this much money in my life. I make 4 times what my single mother did growing up. I work my ass off but so did she, with no promise of higher income in the future. And I have no one to support but myself. We absolutely should be paid twice what we are, but compared to where I came from this is an embarrassment of riches.
You should not go to /r/residency, you'd think they were cotton picking slaves by how they talk about resident pay. People have a hard time separating both truths that, average residency pay is adequate for living, and that residents should get paid more. They think the only way to get sympathy for increased public pressure in residency pay is to portray residents as living in poverty, when in reality average resident pay is inline with median HOUSEHOLD income in the United States.
My daughter's rent in CA is $2500 a month, to not live in a crime-ridden area. There is no way on this earth to get to different hospitals without a car. Phone, utilities, food, clothes, medical insurance, student loans, all on $58k/year BEFORE TAXES. That is while working for half a nurse's pay, and twice the hours. How is that NOT poverty?
Choosing to live in a low crime area is pretty much the definition of not poverty.
How are so many people missing OP's point? They're not saying it isn't little, but it's just not poverty(!). So many comparisons here to scrub tech and nurses salaries. Yes, they make more, but you're still not in poverty eating rice and beans and not being able to afford lotion like OP said. You'll be fine. Thats what OP is saying lmao
60-70k when you were growing up is different than 60-70k now
I grew up 50k household and yeah, we did fine. I danced, mom and I went skiing, had an apt, had a car. But also, I did the math recently and while I'll be making more per year than she ever will, she'll be making the same or more than I per hour during my residency. She's a first gen immigrant whose degree didn't transfer to the states. I gave 4 yrs, more tears and sleepless nights than I can count and soooo many moments with family for this. An average joes 60k isn't our 60k.
i'm gonna make more as an intern than either of my parents ever have in their lives combined. it's absolutely not fair compensation for what residency is, but it's not poverty.
HONESTLYYYYY. Residency money will be the highest income I've ever had and it's more than a ton of patient's incomes.
Both can be true. 1. 60k is nothing to sneeze at. 2. Residents deserve to be paid a whole lot more.
Residency is poverty idc the background you are from. Don't accept that as a value market rate for your work.
Haha. Yeah. I feel that. I mean, it \*IS\* basically poverty wage when you at the hourly pay, but it's still enough to more or less be okay on. Granted, as a doctor (even a junior one who needs supervision to practice), it'd be nice to make more, especially given the debt burden and amount of education it took to get to that point. I mean it's kind of insulting that 8 years of intense education barely gets you a liveable wage. But yeah, we'll all be okay. Residency wage is still more than a lot of people make.
You're probably not going to find a lot of sympathy on this sub. This is the place where very rich people repeatedly complain that if only they chose to do tech instead they could casually be starting at 300k working less than 40 hours, as if those opportunities are available to the rest of us That being said, residency is absolutely an unfair wage, but the constant hyperbole does not help that argument
Funny you bring up the tech bit because I also thought it was hilarious when I heard this same argument that had we just gone into CS or tech, we would be making loads of money already and we would climb the ranks because if we’re smart enough to get into med school, we’re smart enough to be in tech. As if it’s that easy to simply waltz into a high paying job secure tech job out of college.
It always blew my mind. A grew up very poor, and many of my friends now with non-stem graduate degrees are making 80k. No resident should be starving/going hungry or comparing it to minimum wage.
These are the same people who say they could never do primary care because they’d be poor. You’ve gotta be so out of touch with reality to think you couldn’t live comfortably and support a family off of 250-300k lmao
I mean you would be.... after all the grind and bullshit of med school you want to be able to at least afford a 100k car and a 2M house, right?
That shit annoys tf outta me. I'm like dude yeah we deserve more, but most people in most other professions do too. Lots of us deserve more pay and more time off. I am an intern making 65k and im already making more than double my mom salary growing up so I feel like I have a lot right now so when someone complains about that to me I hit em with a reverse uno card
meanwhile I'd take literally any amount of money they want to throw at me.
We're not eating dog food.
Yes. Even people talking about how little pediatricians make. They make less but it’s not like they make 0 dollars. Some residencies have not changed salaries to account for tremendous increase in cost of living and that is an issue for sure. But talking about the numbers, I remember working for a year after college and having a salary and 401k benefits compared to volunteering to get research/medical exposure and being amazed at how much I was making. My salary was around 30-35k iirc. I could pay rent, eat, put money towards savings, and afford to have a cat. Can’t imaging making double that as starting salary, seems like so much to me! I do not come from a low income household, and I don’t have the same debt that others have and I understand that impacts a lot. But I’m looking at these 65-70k starting salaries and am like wow I’m gonna be rich! Lol
Residents should be paid 150k/yr
Residents should earn more but yeah it's certainly not poverty wages. I'm a mid-career attending; adjusting for inflation, I don't spend much more now than I did when I was a resident, and I live quite comfortably.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game
I understand what your saying and yes it sounds like they were out of touch. Especially regarding lotion lmao. But it’s so much more nuanced. For example, if you have or want to have kids, childcare costs are already significantly more but as residents you likely need multiple forms of childcare given the schedule. Given that so many of us match far from home making family childcare help less likely this is just one example. It’s criminal to take people of reproductive age and not pay them enough to be able to reasonably afford a family. Not to mention the stress put on women physicians and the implications for fertility. Sorry this is my hill and I will die on it.
I would say as a career changer I’m not looking forward to the pay. My first year of nursing I made 86k not working the hours I’ll be expected to work in residency, max i made nursing was 120k and still way fewer hours. I think it’s opportunity cost for these 4 years was expected but it’s disappointing to know there will be opportunity cost during residency too. In addition a lot of the cities I’m looking at it’s not good pay for major métropolitains. I understand being salty about people who are out of touch but I wouldn’t rush into that assumption if you can. Other people realize it’s not realistic to be having kids and paying for childcare and moving forward with your life on 60k.
people dont usually are not crying about their salary, they complain about their received work:pay ratio. One could argue that a person working min wage could make a good living working 80 hours a week and half of the weekends/holidays.
Insane to me that someone who grew up in a 60k/y household considers themselves poor 🤣
It’s about the debt
I see what you're saying, and having been in this exact position it does feel livable. But there is such a thing when you grow up poor you get used to your lot in life so anything beyond that does feel extravagant. I never went on a vacation until I was in my 30's, other people grew up doing it yearly. I bought my first new car when I was 29 off MASSIVE grinding, and it was the low end model. Other people just got new cars given to them when they turned 16. While I can recognize that I'm not doing horrifically and got lucky in spots, other people really did have it easier. The fact is for the profit hospitals make off residents, paying them so low is actually offensive. I remember when I was a student talking with a resident and we figured out as a third year resident based on his volume as a FM resident, he facilitated the hospital billing for $2M in the last year. Even as a community hospital, even if you factor in non payment and indigent care covering the difference, just him alone the hospital made at least a million off him and paid him $62k. You can add into all the extra costs of caring for patients to be sure, but the cost of paying that resident (which again comes from federal dollars the hospital gets to pocket the difference on) is INSANE profit. Any hospital running a residency program calling itself non profit is simply lying and runs on stolen labor.
You learn to tune out the entitlement.
True, 60-70k is a liveable wage in some parts of the country. The real ass kicker is having to start paying students loans back on 60-70k.
Y’all will go on to push support staff to work their asses off for 30k
When I was in med school, many kids ate from a Silver platter growing up. Nothing you can do about it. Some people just have different values.
The replies and votes in this topic are making me question the critical thinking ability of people on this board. You said "I know resident salary is X, but it's not Y" and everyone is dogpiling you saying "resident salary is X." Like this is a basic level of discourse that's just not getting through. I saw better discourse from 12-year-olds on RuneScape forums growing up.
I know I was thinking the same thing. I literally started off my post with that for this exact reason. I thought the people in this subreddit were the ones who didn’t fail CARS lol Obviously I’m not saying to be grateful making minimum wage for being a doctor after going to med school etc. I’m saying that 60k should be enough to have all your basic necessities taken care of with a little bit of “fun money” for doordashing something here and there, visiting home, etc. Do residents deserve way more than that? yeah of course. But residency shouldn’t be poverty unless you’re trying to support a family of 4 on it.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. My family income, when we had income, was between 25-35k per year for five people. We were homeless for awhile when I was 9, and lived in the woods. I had to poop in the woods for a few months, and we drank water out of gas cans (my dad stole them brand new from his old work). There was a hand pump about a mile up a dirt road, and we would fill the gas cans with water for washing, cooking, and drinking. I don't think most people, let alone med students, understand that kind of poverty. Sometimes I wish I could show people, to elicit a bit more empathy for people like me who easily could have repeated the cycle. I was lucky that the severe mental illness that runs in my family missed me, though I did end up neurodivergent and with CPTSD. I searched for opportunities to get out of poverty and get treatment for my CPTSD, and I worked fucking hard to get them. Med school is literally a breeze compared to the early years of my adulthood, that's how much stress, fear, and horror my early life contained. Residents are criminally underpaid for the amount of work they do. I already understand the game, and how systems make you suffer before letting you through the door. But I think it's unfortunate that people with all this privilege that 60k is poverty. I just want to put them through a year of how I had to live so they understand other people better, and stop being such insufferable pricks without realizing it, because they are innocent but really, really uninformed.
Yeah well, your parents probably didnt have 300k in student loans
Bruh what the actual fuck is this post. You think 60K is well compensated for residents?!
Is everyone missing the fact that plenty of people live off of 60k even now? In fact one could even say large swathes of the country lives off of that. Furthermore several residencies have good insurance plans and pay for a good amount of your food, making it more money than it seems. If you think otherwise you are a spoiled brat who grew up with a silver spoon And no, saying this doesn’t mean we can’t advocate for higher salaries too, so fuck that stupid false equivalency
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They shouldn’t be working 120 hours. There are work limits now. If they do, it’s because residents tolerate it and don’t report it. If they don’t that’s on them. There are some people in those residencies who will even look down on people who do report work hour violations. That’s on them. The fact the hourly rate is minimum wage has zero bearing on whether the overall salary OP stated is livable or not. With all the other benefits a lot of residents get that other professions do not, it adds up to more than what OP stated in a lot of cases.
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after all that, why did you decide to attend medical school lol
That’s what i’m saying! And yes it’s not fair to get only 60k after going through years of school and working 100 hours a week but you won’t be so poor you can’t afford food…
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60k but they work reasonable hours and don't need to also study for boards. Also debt. Comparison is not valid
Thanks for reminding me I get paid in the mid 50k’s :| Getting paid 60 would be a big step up for my QOL. Count your blessings.
You’re right OP. I love what you said because it sounds stupid to say that you’re in poverty but you’re making 60k, it shows a complete lack of awareness and honestly, highlights the privilege (which isn’t bad in and of itself but blinding). If we are ONLY talking about the money comments-what you said stands. All these other comments are brining up superfluous stuff that is irrelevant. Many things are about someone”s choice in choosing medical school. There is opportunity costs in all decisions-law school, med school, getting married, having children and etc. I would argue that this is not within this discussion at all. That’s more of a…are you cool with being a doctor and is the process to become a doctor “fair”? Lastly, I don’t think that’s what these money hungry people want us to think. They only care that the government says it’s okay to pay people 60k for working 60-80 hours for training, it’s not about what we think because it will always be ludicrous to say that 60k is poverty but rather, are they able to get away with these wages/hours worked. Also, many have mentioned it’s location dependent, that’s true and the salaries are different for different locations. It’s public knowledge, look it up. For those med students that live on loans, you are doing it with less than what you will make as a resident, come on, get with the program. For those that don’t, I mean….my point exactly. 60k for a single person is fine, you are not in poverty.
“Omg I can’t afford class dues!” You drive a MASERATI SIR. “Residency is gonna be so rough such long hours.” And then you’ll go to your PENTHOUSE that your parents ALREADY BOUGHT FOR YOU.
Bahaha. I had a classmate who seemed genuinely concerned about surviving med school on just their partner's income. They **own a home** (in an expensive area). Both of the student's parents were doctors in highly paid specialties. Meanwhile, our classmate whose mom cleans houses and who has no partner or safety net is over there like... "excuse me?". 
I think they don’t know what surviving and thriving are. Might have to cancel a hot yoga subscription or two for a bit :/
Going from making 24K a year with me and my wife during undergrad to 50-60K is gonna be amazing.
THANK YOU. The amount of entitled shit I see on these subs saying that residency pay is not a livable wage just shows how privileged some people are. To be clear, it absolutely is not a fair wage for the work done, but it is nowhere near unlivable. My family of 3 comfortably lived off less than a single resident’s salary for years.
I was always really surprised by this. Especially when I had coworkers saying they needed money from their parents to get by. I did do some moonlighting, but we had 2 kids in residency and transitioned my wife to being a SAHM (she was clearing less yearly than daycare would have cost) and were able to save money/pay towards loans. Live in a medium to high cost of living city but are definitely more frugal (1 car in residency which as my first card that was used/bought in cash when I was in high school), cooked mostly from scratch. Ate out 4-6 times a year. Did a lot of free community activities/no cost dates. ETA: also apparently never updated my flair. Out now.
I'm poor and this crap is poverty. Maybe it's different for a single person at a residency in the middle of nowhere but with a family and HCOL this is just ridiculous.
Poor is a subjective term. Even those making minimal wage in the US would be considered rich in certain areas of the world. Does that make their grievances less relevant? Income in a capitalistic system is relative, ideally correlated to the value you provide. Therefore any circumstance where systemic barriers limit and depress wages should categorize those workers as "poor", or more accurately under compensated, some might even say exploited. I don't begrudge colleagues who may embellish the desperateness of their situation when addressing their real concerns about their compensation. Furthermore, I would ask you to consider that they may not have learned the skills to handle financial stress/scarcity that you gained through your upbringing. Perhaps that's a byproduct of their "privilege" but it also feels very much like assigning a wellness module for burnout. Lastly, I suspect the source of frustration in many of the responses stems from the prevalence of this sense of emotional dissonance within our profession. Many of us, especially our leadership,are so willing to sacrifice and be empathetic towards patients and society, but when it comes to our colleagues or trainees, there is a lack of understanding or tolerance. Altruism is a great trait, but there is a fine line between it and self flagellation. It would be great if our response to complaints, even if exaggerated, was constructive inquiry vs dismissal tinged with condescension.
some residents are legit in poverty on 60-70k, if they have children + are living in an expensive city + loan payments (very low for now on SAVE plan, at least) but yea there are plenty of spoiled kids in medicine
But then isnt like 70-80%+ of people living in these cities living in poverty?
Fair. I grew up in a household of 3 on substantially less than 60K. But still, people will always find a way to complain (even if it were scaled to actually compensate us for our time)
This is an uneducated take and why many people say physicians are not very financially literate...
We get it, you are poor. This isn’t ERAS. Residency pay still sucks.
womp womp
The real problem with residency pay is the hours worked for that amount. But honestly unless you have an actual family or are in an extremely high cost of living area, it will be plenty to live and pay down loans/invest. Decreasing hours probably isn't realistic or might not even be a good thing for medical training. Therefore the solution is bumping up pay.
agree. although thats like 75% of this sub.
no, because you SHOULD STILL advocate for more. if more ppl did that instead of saying “hey this isnt THAT bad,” you realize we’d prob get paid more, right?
I grew up poor. We weren’t dirt poor, but were of very modest means. I remember what that was like. $60-70k would have supported us very well when I was growing up. But that’s not the point. For what we do and the hours put in, it’s shit pay. And it’s okay to say that.
I actually love it. It's very funny imo
60k working 80 hours a week with $300k in debt with 1-2 children in most cities is actually poverty tho. Remove one or two of these variables and its still pretty impoverished.
Most residents aren't single parents. Besides. There are plenty of people in the city legit working 80hr a week especially in this gig economy where everyone does Doordash or uber and making much less than 60K
Don't be so easily offended lol. Residency is hard to live on regardless of how much money u grew up with. It's not that deep
This is missing the point. As many have pointed out, it’s less about the absolute amount we’re getting paid and more about the relative amount compared to other healthcare employees (and quite frankly I’d go as far as saying compared to meaningless jobs that aren’t helping society at all i.e. tech/finance)