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For a year or two, often yes. As a career, it costs you training, security and a borrowing profile. Booked-shift averages run $141.20/hr RMO and $176.30/hr registrar 23, well above award hourly — but you fund your own leave, super and indemnity, and no locum year counts toward a training program.
The money is real. Medlo's 2025 averages, taken from shifts actually booked, are $141.20/hr for RMOs across 16,321 shifts and $176.30/hr for registrars across 41,424 23. Against a NSW Resident Year 1 base of $94,521 on a 38-hour week 1, full-time locuming at those rates is a large pay rise on paper.
What the rate is buying out. No annual, sick, study or long service leave. No employer super through an agency. Your own indemnity, your own travel admin, your own invoice-chasing. No professional development and no term assessments 4. So the comparison is never locum hourly against award hourly — it is locum hourly against award hourly plus roughly 30% of benefits you are giving up.
What it costs your career. A locum year does not count toward a training program, does not generate the consultant references selection panels want, and does not keep you in a department long enough for anyone to vouch for you. People who locum long term describe it working beautifully until it doesn't: kids reaching school age, wanting to settle, or the work drying up when policy shifts 5.
The unglamorous constraint. Banks price sporadic invoices worse than a payslip, so the mortgage is harder even though the income is higher 4. And the best-paid rural posts are the least supported — one bad outcome at 3am with no retrieval for a day is a real part of the rate 5.
Where it genuinely works. As a deliberate gap year, as a way to pay down a mortgage, as a hedge while you re-apply, or as a part-time top-up beside a stable job — a week or fortnight every month or two is the setup people who have done it longest recommend 5. What it does not do is replace getting on.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
None of them are the primary income-earners in their households, however.
Love not being chained to the whims of med admin assigning me a bullshit roster with no consideration for my prior roster requests.
You just get no training or professional development.
It's great for flexibility, and it allowed me to travel pretty extensively. It also helped me off of my mortgage early.
it's a lot easier to apply for a mortgage with a consistent payslip than sporadic locums
Asked 6 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 /locum.{0,40}(worth|good|bad|career|full.?time|life)|(worth|career).{0,30}locum/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments from the career-locum and is-it-worth-it threads, paired so the flexibility and mortgage upside sits directly beside the household-income and training-progression warnings.