← all questions · Pay and money
Queensland on base, at every junior grade: intern $97,509 against NSW's $80,638 21. But Victorian and Tasmanian registrars work a 43-hour ordinary week and WA a 40-hour one, so the annual ranking is not the hourly ranking 4. Overtime and penalties move people further than base does.
On base salary, Queensland. MOCA7 rates put the QLD intern at $97,509 and Resident Year 1 at $105,119 2; NSW's determination for the same year sets intern at $80,638 and Resident Year 1 at $94,521 1. That gap is real and it is the reason "QLD best, NSW worst" is the single most repeated claim on the sub.
Then divide by hours before you rank. Victorian and Tasmanian registrars work a 43-hour ordinary week (38 plus 5 training hours) and WA works 40; the rest are 38 4. Tasmania tops registrar annual base and drops to fifth on an hourly basis 4. Penalty multipliers also differ — QLD and NT pay Sunday at double, VIC, SA and TAS at time and a half 4.
Base is a poor predictor anyway. A NSW Registrar Year 3 on a heavy after-hours roster reaches roughly $211,000 gross against about $129,000 for a Year 1 on a light one 4. Three jurisdictions have now settled unpaid-overtime class actions totalling over $400 million, which is the strongest available evidence that rostered base understates hours worked 4.
What the sub adds that the awards do not. Two claims recur and neither is in any instrument: that NSW LHDs keep trainees a pay step behind their actual role, and that NSW has the fewest registrar steps 5. Treat both as lore until you see a payslip. Also note NSW Health retains half the salary-packaging tax saving 4, and that training fees rise as you progress — around $15,000 in a BPT exam year 6.
The counter-argument the sub upvotes most: cost of living and commute beat a pay step. NSW is both the worst paid and the most expensive place to live 53.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
Live where you want to live, then work somewhere that's less than 30 minutes' drive away.
Most LHDs in NSW will usually will try to keep you in a bracket lower than your actual role.
QLD is the best paid, NSW the worst. NSW also has the most amount of people, therefore most amount of patients. The remaining states are somewhere in between. Perth is known to have good wages as well as a good work life balance. Both ACT and SA are also well paid, SA more than ACT.
The thing never considered in these discussions of salary is the increase in fees payable as you progress through training.
Asked 201 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 /(pay|salary|wage|paid|income|earn|remunerat).{0,50}(state|NSW|QLD|Queensland|VIC|Victoria|\bWA\b|\bSA\b|\bNT\b|\bACT\b|Tas)|(state|NSW|QLD|Queensland|VIC|Victoria|\bWA\b|\bSA\b).{0,40}(pay|salary|wage|paid|earn|income)|best.{0,25}state.{0,25}(work|doctor)/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in state-pay-comparison threads, balanced so the 'live where you want' counter-argument sits beside the ranking.