← all questions · Is it worth it · General practice and rural generalism guide
It stopped being the fallback and became a genuine choice. FRACGP is three years FTE 1, every 2027 place went in the main round and the second round was cancelled 2, and there is now a $30,000 incentive over your first community GP term 4. ATO 2023–24 median taxable income for GPs is $156,733 5 — read that number carefully.
The official position has moved a long way. FRACGP is three years FTE including the hospital year 1, so a PGY2 entrant is fellowed in their late twenties. For the 2027 intake RACGP allocated every place in the main round and cancelled the second round outright 2, with up to 1,694 RACGP and 374 ACRRM places on offer 3. The Commonwealth added 200 places in 2026, 300 in 2027 and 400 from 2028, and pays a $30,000 incentive over the first six months of your first community GP term, plus five days' paid study leave and up to 20 weeks' paid parental leave 4. "Apply whenever, you'll get in" is dead 2.
Now the money, honestly. ATO 2023–24 median taxable income for GPs is $156,733 across 27,776 people 5 — but that includes registrars and part-timers, it is not FTE-adjusted, and taxable income is not billings 5. As a registrar you get the higher of the NTCER base rate or 44.79% of gross billings, never both 6. Fellowed, the market norm is 65–70% of billings or about $150/hr 7. The spread between a bad contract and a good one is larger than the spread between GP and several hospital specialties.
What the sub actually argues about. Two things, repeatedly. First, that the low status is ignorance — advanced trainees who left hospital medicine for GP are the loudest voices in the corpus 8. Second, the real cost isn't pay, it's throughput: 24–32 patients a day, constant task switching, and unpaid admin 8.
The counter-argument, from someone doing it. A GPT3 registrar in the current threads is applying back to hospital medicine, citing isolation, unpaid overtime and 15-minute slots for complex patients 9. Publish that next to the enthusiasm.
Not published: RACGP does not publish an applicant-to-place ratio. The ~2,962:1,639 figure circulating for 2027 is a community reading of the distribution matrix, not an official number 10.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
I fell for the claims of GP = work life balance and cruisy patient conditions.
As an AT that quit to do GP - BEST DECISION OF MY LIFE.
GP is well-paid if you charge what you're worth and let shit Medicare rebates be the patients' problem. But you still have to see 24-32 patients a day to earn less than a psychiatrist can with 8 patients a day
It's a great career. The pay is an issue until you realise Medicare rebates are the patients insurance and not your salary.
General practice really does give you incomparable longitudinal insights into how people live.
Asked 8 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 the r/ausjdocs dump (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /\bGP\b.{0,45}(worth|doom|dying|dead|cooked|bad idea|still good)|(worth it|unpopular|doomed).{0,30}\bGP\b/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in the GP-worth-it and BPT-vs-GP threads, picked so the two loudest pro-GP answers sit directly beside the throughput complaint and a current GP registrar applying back to hospital medicine.