Recruiting an emergency physician.

What does an emergency physician earn?

Ranked among the states and the District of Columbia where BLS publishes both the mean wage and the employment figure; 23 of the 51 are left out because BLS withholds or top-codes a figure or has no row. The emergency medicine salary page has every state, the metro areas and BLS’s caveats.

BLS puts the national mean for emergency medicine physicians at $317,480 (BLS, May 2025 release) a year, with half earning more than $335,550 (BLS, May 2025 release). About 32,880 (BLS, May 2025 release) are on employer payrolls, which leaves out physicians who own an unincorporated practice.

Offers are rarely quoted as a salary. Most groups pay by the hour or by the shift, add a productivity component tied to patients seen or work units billed, and price nights, weekends and holidays separately. The survey's wage excludes shift differentials, so compare an hourly offer with the hourly figures on the salary page rather than the annual mean.

Where do emergency physicians look for jobs?

Where new hires come from

Most new hires come straight from residency

Who employs them

Hospital emergency departments, through independent physician groups, hospital employment or national staffing companies; also freestanding emergency rooms and urgent care.

Who you compete with for candidates

National staffing companies that recruit for many sites at once and can offer a choice of locations, and hospitals that employ their emergency physicians directly with full benefits.

Residents in emergency medicine start looking early in their final year, and many have decided by the winter holidays. They hear about openings from attendings who trained them, from classmates who joined a group the year before, and from the specialty's own career board.

Experienced emergency physicians move for schedule, ownership and location more than pay. A group that offers a real path to partnership, a fair night rotation and a single site often wins against a larger employer with a higher hourly rate.

• emCareers Per posting

  $595 per 30-day posting

  The career center the American College of Emergency Physicians runs with the emergency medicine residents’ association, read by residents and attendings who are not looking through a staffing company. Post here before the fall interview season.

Every board’s listing, with its posting lengths and how CV access is sold, is in the job board directory; what a physician job posting costs compares them.

The locum agency directory has each agency’s states, malpractice coverage and physician pay where it states them.

What does an open emergency position cost?

What the calculator has for emergency medicine

• Revenue one physician brings in: no published figure, so you supply the annual revenue one physician in the specialty brings your organization
• Locum pay: $250 to $300 an hour (estimate, Locumstory (CHG Healthcare), 2025)
• First-year pay: $317,480 a year (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025)
• Contingency agency fee: 20 to 30% of first-year pay (estimate, MedStaff Nationwide, 2026)

Lost revenue is the wrong lens for an emergency department: the doors stay open whether or not the position is filled, and patients still arrive. The real cost is coverage. Every shift the group cannot staff with its own physicians goes to a locum, to overtime for the remaining partners, or to a gap that pushes wait times and walkouts up.

That makes the locum line the one to watch. The calculator prices locum pay at $250 to $300 (estimate, Locumstory (CHG Healthcare), 2025) an hour for this specialty, which is what the physician receives; the agency bills the department more for travel, housing, malpractice and its margin, and no agency publishes that rate.

Open the calculator with emergency medicine chosen

Which recruiting channels work for emergency medicine?

Because the supply arrives once a year, the calendar decides most of the plan. Groups that start interviews in late summer and make offers by early winter sign the residents they want; those that start in spring compete for whoever is left and for physicians leaving other jobs.

Questions to ask

• How many shifts a month are you covering with locums or extra partner shifts today?
• Which residency programs sent you your last three hires, and has anyone visited them this year?
• Can you state the night and weekend load in the posting, before the candidate asks?
• Does your staffing company contract restrict hiring a physician who worked your department as a locum?

Which rules bite emergency medicine recruiting?

Contracts in this specialty often come from a staffing company rather than the hospital, and that is where the restrictive covenants and the payment terms sit.

Every federal rule this site cites, grouped by what a practice or recruiter is doing, is on the federal rules page. For the contract itself (pay models, tail coverage, restrictive covenants), read the physician employment contract, clause by clause. These notes describe the rules and cite them; they are not legal advice for a particular offer or contract.