← all questions · Choosing a specialty
Nobody publishes dollars per hour by specialty, so this cannot be answered cleanly. The closest real figure is MABEL's: top-quartile ophthalmologists at $456/hr against GPs at $101/hr 2. On medians, ophthalmology $497,094 and dermatology $234,005 1 — and dermatology's low salaried share is the tell that private hours drive it 1.
The honest answer is that the number you want is not published. No Australian dataset reports income per hour by specialty. The ATO gives taxable income by occupation code 1; the workforce dataset gives hours only as GP 35.7, specialist 40.6, specialist-in-training 43.8 3. Anyone quoting a per-specialty hourly rate has multiplied one by the other.
The one credible hourly estimate is MABEL's, from the Melbourne Institute's longitudinal survey of doctors: GPs earned about $101 an hour in 2018, with a gap of more than $70/hr to other specialists and top-quartile ophthalmologists at $456/hr or more 2. It also found earnings are higher for men, for the self-employed, and for those doing after-hours and on-call work 2 — which is the whole answer in one line: the premium is paid for the hours you would rather not work.
What the ATO table actually shows. 2023–24 medians: neurosurgery $537,049, ENT $539,017, ophthalmology $497,094, anaesthetics $457,287, radiology $430,250, dermatology $234,005, general practice $156,733 1. The useful column is average salary and wages against taxable income: ophthalmology $158,314 of $655,245 is about a quarter salaried, radiology $383,218 of $500,262 about three-quarters 1. Low salaried share means private proceduralist, which means the income is bought with volume and after-hours lists.
The community's read, and it is consistent with the data: there is no high-paying, low-hours job — there is fellowship, then dropping to 0.6 FTE, which still outearns almost everyone 4. The consultant earning tier lists the sub posts every year carry no source at all and contradict each other 5.
Counter-argument. GP at $156,733 median 1 and roughly 36 hours 3 is not obviously a worse hourly deal than a surgical median earned over sixty-hour weeks after four extra unaccredited years. Run your own arithmetic before you buy the ranking.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
No, there are no high paying jobs where the work life balance isn't terrible.
Any fellowship, then working 3 days a week.
the "lowest paying" specialty it probably GP, where you can make somewhere between 200-300k/year full time while almost completely picking your hours
$1m from anaesthetics would be an exhausting life from what I've heard
Asked 3 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 /(high(est)?.?pay|best.?paid|most money|highest earning).{0,40}(specialt|job|medicine|doctor)/i. Quotes are the top-scoring answers in the 'high paying jobs with decent work life balance' thread, kept balanced between the flat denial and the part-time-after-fellowship answer.