Academic Surgeon Financial Compensation in the US: Trends from 2017 to 2023

Academic surgeons play a dual role in healthcare by providing patient care and spearheading research and trainees education, but nonsurgical responsibilities are frequently uncompensated and undervalued. For faculty underrepresented in medicine, these issues can be compounded by additional expected mentorship and advocacy roles. Comprehensive analyses of academic surgeon compensation trends remain scarce; this study evaluated recent trends in academic surgeon compensation stratified by rank, sex, race and ethnicity, and subspecialty.

Total annual compensation from 2017 to 2023 for full-time surgery department faculty was collected from the Association of American Medical Colleges Faculty Salary Survey and analyzed according to rank, sex, and race and ethnicity identifiers and across 11 surgical subspecialties. Average salaries, wage gaps, and changes across time were assessed.

The Faculty Salary Survey data for 2023 included 12,443 faculty in academic surgery departments. The average salary for surgery faculty weighed by rank had a 2.9% compounded growth rate from 2017 to 2023, with division chiefs having the greatest compound growth rate and associate professors having the lowest. After adjusting for rank, women consistently earned less than men. In 2023, Black faculty earned less than White faculty, and Asian women faculty members experienced the largest wage gap compared with White male faculty.

This study summarized trends in academic surgeon compensation. It highlighted the need for further research that identifies the root causes of disparity and informs interventions that address it, promoting the recruitment and retention of a skilled, diverse academic surgeon workforce.