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Base of roughly $108,000–$160,000 depending on state and step — NSW Registrar Year 1 $117,745, Queensland L4 $133,848 12. Gross is a different number: overtime, penalties and on-call routinely add 20–60%, and a heavy NSW Year 3 roster reaches about $211,000 4. Divide by hours before you compare states.
Base, by instrument. NSW: Registrar Year 1 $117,745 rising to Year 4 $147,664 and Senior Registrar $166,025, on a 38-hour ordinary week 1. Queensland MOCA7: Registrar and PHO L4 $133,848 to L9 $154,749, Senior Registrar Year 4 $193,191 2. Victoria Registrar Year 1 $129,491, Tasmania $138,978–$194,675 — but both of those are a 43-hour ordinary week, and WA is 40, so the annual ranking is not the hourly ranking 4. The state comparison is covered properly in "which state pays junior doctors the most"; the instruments are the same ones.
Base badly understates gross. Roster intensity dominates. A NSW Registrar Year 3 on a heavy after-hours roster reaches about $211,000 gross, against roughly $129,000 for a Year 1 on a light one 4. On-call, callback with a four-hour minimum, and weekend penalties are where the difference comes from 1. ATO 2023-24 records 21,380 people under "medical officer — resident" with a median taxable income of $123,992 and a mean of $140,129 — after deductions, across all junior grades, not a salary figure 3.
The $300k registrar question. It happens, and almost never off base. The routes are an enormous overtime load, a second job or locum shifts, a rural generalist or GP registrar post with retention incentives, or a senior CMO-equivalent classification — a second-year GP registrar reporting $320k taxable is the clearest documented example 5. Med registrars top out far lower.
What it costs to get there. The people posting the biggest numbers are also the ones describing 100-hour weeks and burnout, and the highest-upvoted reply in that thread is from someone who earns less as a psychiatry registrar than they did as a surgical intern and considers it a good trade 5.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
I made more as a surgical intern than I do as a psych reg, but these days I get to see my kids
Max for me was 220K some overtime, I didn't do any locum.
no state has base salaries for registrars anywhere near that, so youd have to be doing some insane overtime, or have a second job.
Geotagging had me in the hospital 100+ hrs per week most of the time. Burn out was inevitable. Wasn't worth it.
The reality is 350k as a reg is possible, but it's the exception not the rule.
Asked 73 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 /(registrar|reg|RMO|resident|JMO|HMO).{0,35}(pay|salary|income|earn|\$\d)|(pay|salary|income|earn).{0,30}(registrar|RMO|resident)/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring replies in the canonical $300k thread, chosen to bracket the realistic range and to put the cost of the biggest numbers beside them; state-by-state comparison is left to the which-state-pays-junior-doctors-the-most entry.