← all questions · Choosing a specialty
On the only national hours data, general practice: 35.7 hours a week against 40.6 for specialists and 43.8 for specialists-in-training 2. The sub adds ED, radiology, pathology, psychiatry and the outpatient physician specialties. Per-specialty hours are not published — the summary splits GP, specialist and trainee, nothing finer 2.
The only national number is coarse but it is real. The Department of Health workforce dataset gives GPs 35.7 hours a week, hospital non-specialists 46.2, specialists 40.6, and specialists-in-training 43.8 2. Anything finer than that — hours by specialty — is not published in the summary and has to be pulled from the interactive tool 2. So treat every per-specialty lifestyle ranking, including the one below, as lore.
What the sub nominates, repeatedly: general practice first, then ED, radiology, pathology, psychiatry, and the outpatient-heavy physician specialties like rheumatology and endocrinology 45. The GP case is made on structure, not hours alone — shorter training, cheaper exams, and a fellowship you can bolt second fellowships onto in pain, addiction, palliative care or occupational medicine 4. The ED case is that the total hours are genuinely low and shifts end, at the cost of nights and weekends 5.
Two structural facts that beat any specialty choice. First, fellowship is the switch: the most-upvoted lifestyle advice on the sub is to go part-time once you have your letters, which works in almost every specialty and still outearns most of the country 6. Second, GP's advantage is partly that you reach that switch in three years FTE from entry 1, while surgical SET is five to six after however many unaccredited years you spent getting on 3.
The counter-argument the sub upvotes hardest. The lifestyle-specialty trade is already priced in — anaesthetics and radiology got harder to enter precisely because everyone ran that play. And the years you spend queueing for a lifestyle specialty are years of no lifestyle 6. A specialty that is easy to enter and merely fine to work in can beat a lifestyle specialty you spend four extra years chasing.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
You're used to the grind so the idea of more grind to get the proverbial 1M+/yr gig seems like a doable thing.
It probably has the best work-life balance; relatively easier exams and shorter training times; work as much or as little as you want
IMO the key to not hating your life as a doctor in Aus/NZ is to go part time as soon as you have fellowship.
the out of hours work isn't great but the total hours is very good.
Asked 7 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /(work.?life|lifestyle|\bWLB\b|balance).{0,40}(specialt|specialit|career)|(specialt|specialit).{0,30}(work.?life|lifestyle|\bWLB\b|balance)/i. Quotes are the top-scoring answers across the work-life-balance threads, chosen so the GP/ED nominations sit beside the highest-scoring rebuttal of lifestyle-specialty hunting.