← all questions · The unaccredited years
The fixed costs are published and they are not the big number. RACS charges $655 to register for selection plus about $920 per specialty you apply to, and the GSSE is $4,850 per attempt, pass or fail 12. A peer-reviewed analysis put successful surgical applicants at roughly $50,000 of CV building over about three years 4.
Start with what you can look up. RACS selection registration is $655 including GST, non-refundable; the processing fee is $920 per specialty, and you pay one per specialty per year you apply 1. Neurosurgery adds a $450 application fee plus a $563 anatomy exam 1. The GSSE is $4,850 including GST per attempt, whether you pass or fail 2. Those are the floor, and they recur.
The degree is where the money goes, and it is the least safe spend. The coursework Master of Surgery most people mean costs roughly $40,000 by indexed course data — Sydney's own fee widget returns no figure, so treat that as indicative 5. From the 2028 intake ASPS will credit only a research MSurg, MPhil or PhD, with no coursework and no majority-online degrees, and its archived notices excluded the University of Sydney Master of Surgery specifically 3. You can finish a degree that was creditworthy when you enrolled and is not when you apply.
The peer-reviewed number. "The high price of becoming a surgeon" in ANZ J Surg is cited as finding successful applicants spent about $50,000 building their CV over roughly three years 4 — and that excludes the fees above, interview travel, and the income you did not earn.
The community's number is higher, and it clusters. Three independent estimates in the corpus put the pre-application spend at $75,000 to $100,000 6. A 2024 reader survey quoted on the sub put the median annual cost of simply being a registered doctor at $15,320, with most doctors between $10,000 and $25,000 a year 7 — that is before any CV building at all.
Nobody publishes a college-by-college cost of getting selected. That total is not published.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
For the majority it is between $10,000 and $25,000 a year.
Should be said that these costs also apply to junior doctors who are earning $100-150k /year. So more than 10% of their total income is going to maintenance
The median cost for part-timers (n=246): $12,500
Most people spend about $75 000 getting their application to the point of being ready
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 /(cost|spent|spend|expense|\$).{0,45}(CV|course|conference|training|research|fellowship exam)|cost.{0,30}(be|being|work as) a doctor/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments carrying an actual dollar figure, taking the survey numbers from the thread where they were posted and the $75,000 CV estimate from the surgical-competitiveness thread.