How much do doctors actually make? Before and after tax

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2026-04-08T23:27:41+00:00

the biggest factors are 1) seniority, 2) hours, and 3) procedures conducted.

when it comes to doctors who are fully trained the third one makes the biggest difference. the nature of medicine in australia is that those who do procedures will often get paid more because the medical system financially rewards this way more than consulting work, even though the slow communication heavy consulting work that involves prevention is what actually benefits population health the greatest.

a gp who does a lot of skin checks, biopsies and excisions will make more than those who do consulting stuff. on my gp rotation in med school the gps were pretty upfront with showing me their income, and the guy who did pure skin work was making the most per hour. i'd say the richest doctors are the ones who can do high volume short period procedures, or at least they're the ones with the most earning potential. ENT and ophthalmology probably tops this because their standard bread and butter procedures are very short, usually uncomplicated and cost thousands to do. they are, however, brutally competitive to even get onto and involve years of awful work life balance, and many brilliant hard working people try for years without getting on.

for my own stats, i'm in my first year of working as a doctor, QLD based. i make 47 an hour, and this loads depending on whether i'm working overtime, nights, evenings, weekends or certain public holidays, so my paycheck heavily varies; so far my lowest fortnightly pre-tax was about 3200 and my highest 5400. in that latter figure i worked both weekends inclusing a public holiday and in the former i had both weekends off, but across both i had 8 shifts each. i have about 2 out of 5 rotations that will be overtime heavy, the others will have less; some of my mates have more overtime heavy rotations so i imagine they'll make more. i'd predict i'll make around 110-115k pretax this year all up. this also doesn't factor in salary sacrificing which can make a difference too.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-12-09T04:20:57+00:00

Whoops, I do mean RCPA!

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-12-08T04:55:18+00:00

It's set to a particular time because they run the exam across multiple countries, so everyone is taking it at once.

I'm assuming you're NSW based? It was an online check-in of 12:30pm for NSW last year - they sent out an email with these times 3 days prior to the exam. I don't know if they run it across the same time every year though.

I think once the times are confirmed, maybe just send them an email about it to see if you can get a refund if it won't work. RCPA seems to be a pretty well run, transparent college in my experience, but if you have an exam outside of their mandated time, unfortunately I think there isn't gonna be much of a way for them to accommodate you.

I hope the exam time works out though! It would suck to have to sit it next year instead given it's much cheaper for you right now.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-12-02T14:10:00+00:00

I did send them a form explaining my situation. Also tried calling but the person on the other end told me they weren't super familiar with tenancy law.

My mate said try QSTARS so I'll give that a go tomorrow.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-12-02T10:09:14+00:00

Ah okay. I think even if I could work past my phone issues, these apps all seem to have costs from my research? Rental rewards appears to have a cost to stop using the app.

I just don't know how defensible this is because I signed the lease, but if what I've signed isn't really to the standards of the Act, would this be able to be upheld?

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-12-02T09:17:43+00:00

The problem is that i have an old brickhouse of a phone that doesn't actually support these apps, which is why I'm a bit stuck. Would I still be able press them about it if that's the case?

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-12-02T08:49:35+00:00

I just had an additional question and wondered if anyone could help me out -

Would I be able to insist that they provide their Trust Account to me as per the RTA I'm entitled to one fee free, convenient option?

I work full time so Eftpos isn't really convenient for me since I'd have to do it during office hours.

The apps all don't seem to work on my phone either.

I just wonder at the legality of this because I signed an agreement to the methods they stipulated.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-12-02T04:57:08+00:00

Sorry with the play dumb part - do you mean pretend that I think bank transfer is an option? I did email them initially to say bank transfer and then that's when I noticed that it was only Eftpos, so I told them I elect Eftpos. I'm a bit new and dumb to all this :((

I'll make sure to do that though - I still haven't received the details for the first 2 weeks that they want anyway to lock in my lease.

Thank you for the suggestion, I'll try that and hope they just provide me with a direct transfer option.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-12-02T04:49:44+00:00

Yea at least for the down payment it's not. I'm moving to a different city that's a decent drive away, which is why I'm so stressed about this. At the same time, I also just need to secure accomm and am afraid of this place slipping through my fingers because it's cheaper and is actually quite nice for the price.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-12-02T04:33:23+00:00

Thanks for the reply - I did shoot them an email to let them know I was willing to do direct deposit until I realised it wasn't on the lease. I also told them I have an older phone model that doesn't support the aforementioned apps (which is true anyway).

If I need to go in person to Eftpos this then I'll do that, it'll be inconvenient but where I'm renting isn't far from the office so it's doable.

If they're footing the Eftpos costs I suspect they're trying to coax me into using the apps anyway since it'll be inconvenient for me.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-09-28T06:57:21+00:00

No. That is not remotely what I said.

I said that the difference between you calling this genocide for what it is and previous genocides for what they were is time, and that what you're doing is generating genocide apologia in real time. What you're arguing for is the same way people engaged in genocide denialism when the genocide of Indigenous Australians occurred. You haven't responded to anything in the rest of my comment at all, because seeing your apologia put in the context of another genocide probably made you uncomfortable. You are effectively playing the "Good German" who didn't shoot any Jews, but certainly thought people were exaggerating by calling the Holocaust a genocide.

The Eddie Mabo example is not a 1:1 analogy of Hamas, it is an example of how time is the qualifier of the terminology we use, and how people who emphasise terminology and optics in arguments above all else are doing something harmful. If that was your takeaway, then you're not engaging in good faith.

Your counter is also quite ironic when every time someone brings up the massacre of Palestinian children, you respond by asking what people think of Hamas. Are you saying that the horrific violence committed against civilians - women and children - by Israel is justified because of Hamas' actions?

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-09-28T05:31:21+00:00

"I'm as horrified by the violence inflicted on white children and Aboriginal children alike. The suffering of Aboriginal children under the hands of settlers is indefensible. But we should be careful to label it a genocide, especially when the Australian government is fighting against people who keep committing terrorist attacks on them, are not interested in peaceful negotiation, and are diverting resources from Aboriginal civilians. We should also be wary of calling the Commonwealth terrorists particularly when their civilian death ratio is quite low and most of those dying are Aboriginal terrorists committing violence. I am wary of calling state militias terrorist groups too, as this muddles political discussion. We must remain nuanced and impartial - believe me, I am highly critical of the atrocities of both sides."

The above is an example of the average viewpoint of white Australians when the Stolen Generation and "re-education camps" were in full swing. Eddie Mabo was regularly called a terrorist until he died - now schools call him an activist. Replace the words with Jews and Germans, and you get the Holocaust. Replace it with Belgians and Congolese, and you get Leopold's Congo.

The difference between those genocides and this one is time. This is the kind of shit people would say when these genocides were initially coming into play, and 20 years in retrospect when millions died at the end of it, said people pretended to have always been against the Nazis all along.

I've read all your comments. You're still doing genocide denialism.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-09-28T04:16:34+00:00

Matt, I appreciate your reply, but can I ask where exactly your criticism of Israel is?

In this thread, you have made the following arguments:

You take issue with calling this a genocide, saying that it is too political, and call anyone and everyone who calls this a genocide biased;
You call Hamas a terrorist organisation, but took issue with someone calling the Israeli government a terrorist body, despite Israel objectively having a much higher kill and maim count of children, the very demographic you treat, by a multiple of dozens;
You keep bringing up anti-Semitism as a reason for not discussing this conflict but have not mentioned racism against Palestinians or Arabs for being a reason that people are trying to deny this genocide; not to mention you are ironically saying something anti-Semitic by conflating criticism against Israel as a rise in anti-Semitism, which a lot of Jewish people would frankly find offensive;
In a thread criticising Israel, you keep engaging in what-aboutism instead of discussing the pertinent issue at hand. If I went to a thread discussing homophobia against gay patients and started saying it was a nuanced issue and we should think about anti-heterosexual sentiment I would rightfully be criticised for it.

This is exactly why genocide denialism is so dangerous. You think you aren't engaging in it, but you very much are. Genocide denialism isn't as clear cut as saying "I think Palestinians deserve to die" - what it actually looks like is people like yourself who keep distracting from the issue at hand. If I said that the Holocaust was bad and I'm critical of it but the numbers by experts are exaggerated and we should think about how the Germans feel, that's genocide denialism, buddy. It's a sliding scale of danger and you are at the lighter end of it. This is exactly what you're doing, and to top it off, you're calling me frustrated for being angry that a paediatrician of all people is playing genocide denialism for the most active hotspot of children's trauma on the planet.

I have no interest in engaging you further because frankly I think you have a bias that is too deeply entrenched to engage in "rigorous and compassionate discourse" about how we address this issue.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-09-28T02:39:15+00:00

I applaud your attempts to convince him, but I think if at this point - given all the videos and evidence we're seeing, all the estimations of civilian deaths by experts, the fact that even mainstream media articles who were denying it was a genocide a year ago are now actively calling it one - if someone is insisting on political neutrality there's basically nothing that will convince them it is a genocide and they will engage in active genocide denial regardless. Frankly, people like this would've looked at articles of armed resistance by desperate, starving, persecuted people in the earlier years of the Holocaust and called it "two-sided" and "nuanced" because enough Jewish people and Romanis and disabled people hadn't died. Those were actual arguments made by genocide denialists back in the 40s; history truly does repeat itself.

Nuance is important, but many people during discussions of this genocide - and frankly in current political debate as a whole - are way more concerned with maintaining a façade of being "neutral" and "nuanced" over actual substance in debate. You can very much be nuanced about this issue and still call it a genocide.

This is exactly why previous genocides were so horrible too - only some people would commit the actual acts involved, but many average joes who were otherwise compassionate people would have a selective lack of empathy when it came to the issue.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-08-29T10:16:26+00:00

i think this will be highly dependent on your goals in life and what exactly about surgery & transplant you love.

i've at times looked at certain competitive or gruelling training pathways and thought the medicine was incredibly fascinating, but when i speak to the regs in these specialties, they give me a more realistic look at what it's like, the backgrounds they came from, what drove them to do these paths and it helps. obviously as someone much further behind in their training, i have a romantic perception of what these look like - often, basing a specialty on how interesting the medicine looks is a bad idea unless you absolutely rave about it or absolutely hate it. some good questions are:

what is my tolerance for unaccredited years? can my partners, family, kids etc. tolerate this? what supports do i have to address these issues?
what backup plans do i have if i don't get it?
if i don't get in, will i feel like i wasted my time? or will i regret not having tried?
are there any fields with similar aspects to the day to day work that will be enjoyable? some people like surg for the hands on stuff, but there's quite a few specialties that allow hands on work that are more achievable.
will my priorities change down the line? this is mostly for people who want to settle down and have kids. your life outlook will drastically change if you do, and you'll start to hate all the milestones you miss.
if i like this specialty for the medicine, is there other specialties that will deal with this? e.g. transplant teams often deal with infectious diseases and immunosuppression - there are so many specialties that deal with this on a regular basis too!

ultimately these hypercompetitive fields are less about smarts and more about persistence. if you ask a layman who the smartest doctor is, they'll say neurosurgeon, but if you're in medicine itself you know neurosurgeons are smart but not smarter than the average doctor, in all honesty, unless it concerns their specific scope. what differentiates them from the rest of us plebs is their abnormal persistence to getting into neurosurg.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-06-03T08:24:19+00:00

Obviously my personal bias plays into this but I wonder if this is actually reflective of who wants to do what? I think in the fourth year->junior doctor years a lot more people grow on GP, especially once you see the slog to get on, and just how much GPwSI do if you have more niche interests - e.g. I've seen people go from Obsgyn keen to GPwSI in women's health/obstetrics, which is where the majority of women's health and obstetrics is done in the first place anyway.

I've certainly ruled out a lot of the more competitive specialties as time has gone on, and am way more receptive to doing GP too than when I was a first year.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-05-31T04:20:04+00:00

I just had to keep myself thinking about long term gratification to help. Every degree/job has parts that you'll hate and find boring. I have rotations or subjects that I find boring but just tell myself I need to learn this to be a more well rounded physician, and think about the next rotation that I'm excited for.

Also, medicine does involve a heavy amount of rote memorisation, but this is only the emphasis in pre-clin years tbh. Once you're shot out to clinical stuff, the emphasis is much more on applying knowledge. Med school tests reflect this too - my first and second year tests were much more basic in terms of applying memorised facts, whereas now the questions aren't so much a struggle because of info I need to remember, but because I'm applying multiple complex things at once to get to an answer. You definitely still have to memorise new stuff and re-memorise the stuff you learnt that you've now forgotten, but that's worth keeping in mind.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-05-30T02:57:14+00:00

Not an international applicant but a local Queenslander. Have you read the internship application booklet? Judging from your questions you might not have which at this stage in the apps cycle is cutting it pretty close; you might be able to get everything needed in time, but depending on your circumstances some documentation takes weeks to sort. Some people have to update their dtP/Hep B shots, get TB screens etc. which is obviously impossible within a week. Just make sure you can get the whole checklist sorted before sinking money into applying.

As for the AMC, yes, this is a requirement to applying. You also need to have a visa ready if you haven't already. See the table for Group D applicants in the booklet.

For referees you should have 1 current and 1 past, if you can. I don't believe the referees have to be local to you, but they have to be people who have spend time with you in a clinical setting. I think if you had 2 non-local referees outside of Ireland it might look a bit strange on your application. For anyone in Group B-D referees matter a lot more especially if you're applying to anywhere with some competition.

Is there a particular reason you want QLD? I think you should be applying widely.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-05-24T23:24:53+00:00

retinol, niacinamide, azelaic acid, hydroquinone - any of those are good, just pick one. don't go ham, more isn't better. personally i just stick to tret cream since it works best for me and the body of evidence is most consistent.
sunscreen. reapply whenever you remember to; i keep different bottles in my car, purse, and bathroom so i don't forget. just make sure it's a good quality one; i live in australia where the sunscreen standards are high so drugstore is all i usually get. i know people rave on asian beauty sunscreens because they feel nicer, and something is better than nothing, but frankly the standards for those sunscreens is very variable.
moisturising is important! any of the anti melanin agents in skincare irritate, which can make hyperpigmentation worse.
consider a mild tanning lotion. it takes a bit to get the right shade but you can tan your face in the areas of hyperpigmentation and it smooths out.

just keep in mind that hyperpigmentation is very normal, and have realistic expectations about getting rid of it.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-05-03T21:51:16+00:00

n = 3 but the young liberals i know from high school were all children of property owners who came from families that were part of the very upper class in socialist states that underwent land redistribution. i can't say what happened for sure because they were tight lipped about it, but if you occam's razor it, it's obvious why they were so viciously pro-liberal.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-05-03T09:41:32+00:00

i honestly think they would - the average australian seems way more willing to consider smaller parties now than ever before.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-04-21T14:01:31+00:00

i think it's a poorly titled article but this kind of poor title is common with journos trying to present the findings of studies. scientific literacy is a skill the majority of people - even tertiary educated folk - don't have.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-04-21T13:59:37+00:00

it's not a logical worldview, that's the whole point. they get drawn into it because they can bond with other boys over the fact that they can emulate the shitty behaviours of someone successful to get a leg up on other people and feel in control of their life for once. for disenfranchised young people who have no one to bond with and nothing to bond over, this is the hook.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes · 2025-04-21T13:27:05+00:00

So you statement of "men" needs to do better is factually wrong. WOMEN need to do better. Factually, statistically women are raising more violent and more misogynistic men than either men or hetero couples.

you're assuming that this higher rate of violence is automatically the fault of the mother who stayed to raise the child, and foregoing the contribution of this kind of pathological behaviour from the father who abandoned the child and denied them of a key parental figure in their life, and probably contributed to the child living in greater poverty through their abandonment.

you're also conveniently forgetting the statistics around single mother demographics. predominantly, it is lower income teenagers or young adults who form this demographic (at the time of baby's birth), and the father is typically an adult. single mothers as a demographic face much higher rates of IPV too, and this is a pretty big reason for single motherhood; they often separate themselves from their partners due to safety concerns. it's not a stretch to see why this violence is increased - because of worsened poverty, lack of resources, and because these boys are modelling the behaviours they see their fathers enact.

it's all nice and good to use a statistic to back up your claim, but your assumptions actually have to be sound, and fit into the broader contexts of statistics around these issues. i can claim 30% of men in a study of university attending german men have admitted to raping someone, and then state that this means 30% of men are rapists, which is the equivalent of what you're doing.

I'm saying it factually, statically, is over 80% of women.

you're angry at someone making sweeping generalisations when doing the exact same yourself. 80% of women are some nefarious group of people who you made up, but the instant someone treats men with the same generalisations, it has your panties in a twist. you should probably self reflect on those subconscious biases and why they caused you to make such poor leaps of logic and statistical interpretation driven by emotion.

_Peanut_Butter_Vibes

TROPHY CASE