Family Medicine Career Benchmark Dashboard
Imagine arming yourself with real data specifically for family physicians—including compensation, benefits, and job satisfaction details—as you make future career decisions. That's exactly the information you'll get from the family medicine career benchmark dashboard, available for free to AAFP members.
Why does family medicine need a career benchmark dashboard?
New family physicians need support.
Knowing what to expect from early-career jobs can protect you from burnout and give you confidence to demand compensation equal to the value you provide.
Too many family physicians are underpaid.
Pay transparency is a tool for uncovering bias and discrimination in compensation. The completed benchmark dashboard will allow you to filter by ethnic/racial identiy, gender identity, geographic location, and more.
Compensation isn’t the only factor that matters.
An ideal job should offer more than a high salary. Family physicians need to be able to see how different roles and settings might affect their well-being or benefits offered.
Family physicians must understand their worth.
No other specialty treats a broader range of conditions than family physicians. You save more lives than any other specialty and keep your patients’ health care costs down by providing continuous, relationship-based, and comprehensive care.
All family physicians should benefit from new payment policies.
The AAFP has advocated to Congress, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and private payers for payment changes that benefit many family physicians; however, employed family physicians often must advocate for themselves to benefit from these advances. This dashboard will equip members with the information they need to negotiate improved compensation.
Nothing like this dashboard exists.
There is no other comprehensive career benchmarking tool for family physicians to compare compensation, benefits, and work environment in one place. Transparency is key to making informed career decisions and conducting successful compensation and contract negotiations.
Help your peers know their worth by sharing the career benchmark dashboard with them. Download these images for use in social media or other channels.
Dashboard FAQs
The dashboard’s salary and other data can help you establish a realistic perspective and develop a fair salary range for evaluating your compensation package. You can use the data as a benchmark to evaluate an employer’s offer or to make a counteroffer based on your value and expectations. You can also use the data to demonstrate your credibility and marketability by showing that you have done your research and that you are aware of industry standards and trends.
While the compensation and other data in the dashboard can be a powerful tool for your negotiation, you should not rely on it alone. You should also consider other factors, such as the employer's budget and needs, the demand for and supply of your skills, the total package of benefits and perks offered, and the work environment and culture.
Finally, please note that information provided by the AAFP is not a suggestion, invitation, direction, or recommendation as to what you should ask for or what you should be paid. You must make that determination based on your own and the employer’s needs, your skills and experience, regional and/or practice-specific circumstances, the total benefits package and the other terms and conditions of employment offered, your business judgment, and other factors within your discretion. The dashboard is intended to increase the quality and availability of relevant information in the field of family medicine as a means to enhance, not suppress, competition for the services and care for patients that family physicians provide.
The survey questions were developed by a panel of AAFP staff and reviewed by members of the AAFP Commission on Quality and Practice. Questions were compiled from several sources, including the YM Careers template survey, AAFP Practice Profile, ABFM Diplomate Survey, and AAFP Member Survey. Three members piloted the survey while AAFP staff observed and asked questions about their interpretation of questions.
The online survey, administered by SurveyMonkey (San Mateo, CA), collected anonymous responses from August 28 to November 14, 2023. All active members (not currently a student, resident, or retired) with valid email addresses received an email with a link on September 1, 2023. The survey link was also posted on the AAFP website and distributed through social media channels, online communities, at in-person AAFP and chapter events, and in four additional emails.
There were 7,841 total responses, with the following respondents removed from the dataset:
Incorrectly answered our trap question1
Indicated they were retired in a text box
Reported that their role as a family physician was not the main driver of their income
Reported an income $0 - $1000
Worked 5% FTE (full-time equivalent) or less
Worked part time (PT), but did not provide an FTE percentage
The final sample of 7,535 physician respondents represents 10.2% of active AAFP membership, which is statistically significant with a 95% confidence interval and a 3% margin of error.
Survey responses for all AAFP state and U.S. territory chapters exceeded 5% of membership, with response rates ranging from 5.91% to 32.42%, except Guam (3.57%). While all responses are presented in the dashboard, state-level results did not reach the level of statistical significance noted for the national results. The information in this survey is intended to help AAFP members explore career opportunities within family medicine and build a general understanding of the family physician compensation, benefit, and career satisfaction landscape. It is not intended for other uses.
1. SurveyMonkey. Trap questions. SurveyMonkey. Accessed December 5, 2023. https://help.surveymonkey.com/en/surveymonkey/create/trap-questions/
The dashboard collected anonymous information from more than 7,500 family physicians about:
- Geographic location
- Personal demographics
- Professional roles, practice setting, and workforce experience
- Pre-tax compensation and bonuses
- Benefits and paid time off
- Scheduling
- Burnout
This information was collected in 2023.
Career Benchmark Dashboard survey respondents’ self-reported demographics (years since residency, degree obtained, and race/ethnicity) closely align with both AAFP membership and the ABFM Family Medicine FactBook (FactBook).
The slight variations between racial and ethnic representation between the three data sources is negligible. However, the Career Benchmark Dashboard respondents have a notable variation in gender. While female physicians represent 45.6% of family physicians in the FactBook and 48% of AAFP membership, they make up 54.2% of survey respondents.
This information was collected in 2023. The survey solicited 2022 data from respondents.
The dashboard is only available to AAFP members, who can access it anytime free of charge.
Not an AAFP member? Join now.
Once you log in to view the dashboard, you’ll see an overview screen with national-level information, including total responses, average salary and role satisfaction, work and position information.
To learn more about any of the six sections, click the “Explore” links on the overview screen. Once in those screens, select one or more filters to narrow the data. Each filter has multiple selectable options. Multiple filters and multiple categories can be used simultaneously.
Please note: A privacy screen will prevent certain data from being viewed if the applied filters bring the information down to 10 or fewer responses. This privacy guard helps to protect the privacy of those who responded to the survey. Changing filters may help to explore data. For example, when exploring data in one state and also applying a gender identity and race/ethnicity filter activates the privacy guard, it may be helpful to select a grouping of states in the region of interest; this provides a larger pool of responses to explore.
The AAFP does not recommend that you apply filters like state, primary role, and employer and then take that average compensation number with you to the negotiation table for your next contract. Rather, this survey can give you a sense of how other family physicians were paid in 2022, both the average and the distribution. The dashboard cannot put the average compensation in context with a total benefits package or how a compensation package is structured.
The data in the dashboard can help you see how your current or offered compensation generally compares to what survey participants reported.
The AAFP has resources on employment contracts and negotiation that can help prepare you to evaluate your career opportunities as you seek fulfilling and fairly compensated work that recognizes your worth to the health of patients.
If you want to seek improvements to your current work arrangement or a contract, these are some of our negotiation resources that can help you prepare: