← all questions · Pay and money
Benchmark against booked shifts, not agency cards. Medlo's 2025 averages from actual bookings are $141.20/hr for RMOs (n=16,321), $176.30 for registrars (n=41,424) and $231.82 for consultants (n=6,063) 567. Agency guide rates sit systematically below that. Then add ~30% for what you are giving up.
The only real benchmark. Medlo publishes averages from shifts actually booked, with the shift count attached: RMO $141.20/hr and $1,129.58/day across 16,321 shifts; registrar $176.30/hr and $1,410.42/day across 41,424; consultant $231.82/hr and $1,854.60/day across 6,063 567. Emergency and South Australia sit at the top of the RMO band, emergency and Victoria at the top of the registrar band 56.
Agency guide rates are lower than the market. Recruiter cards quote NSW RMO locums at $85–130/hr against 11,293 NSW shifts averaging $139.71/hr on Medlo 5. The card is an opening offer, not a rate.
There are actual ceilings in some states. Queensland's Health Employment Directive 04/24 caps the employee locum flat payment at $10,000 a fortnight for an SMO and $6,500 for an RMO, on top of normal salary, for engagements of three days to twelve weeks 3. Contracted locums run under QH-POL-166, which holds a maximum daily rate schedule 4. NSW governs locum engagement through PD2019_006 and pays only agencies on its own register 12. If a rate sounds impossible in those jurisdictions, it usually is.
Work out your floor before you negotiate. You get no sick leave, no annual leave, no long service, no study leave, no super from the agency, and often no professional development; you carry travel, invoice-chasing and your own indemnity. The rule of thumb on the sub is that a normal job's benefits are worth roughly 30% — so price accordingly rather than comparing a locum hourly rate with your award hourly rate 8. At consultant level, people who have done the arithmetic argue anything under about $2,500–3,000 a day is underpaid once leave accrual and super are counted 8.
The counter-argument nobody likes. Rates are set by what people accept. Every under-priced shift someone takes becomes the new normal, which is why RMO locum rates are lower in real terms than a decade ago 9.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
You just get no training or professional development.
I'm locuming this year as an ED SRMO. Most shifts I'm working are $160-190/hr.
Generally for locum rates in ED, it's about $1500-2000 for a non-FACEM GP/RG or SMO/CMO or Senior Registrar
with today's EBA rates, any locum shift for less than 2.5k - in fact, probably fair to say 3k - is awfully underpaid
Asked 17 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.{0,50}(rate|pay|\$|hour|day|worth|charge|much|salary|market)|(rate|pay|\$|hourly|how much|charge).{0,40}locum/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments giving a concrete rate or a concrete reason the headline rate overstates the deal; the canonical 'what is a fair RMO locum rate' thread has no comments in the archive, so it is cited as a thread only.