Doctors’ pay: Poland compared with its neighbours.

Amounts quoted as doctors’ pay in different countries often mean different things: sometimes a statutory minimum, sometimes a rate from a pay table, sometimes an average from statistics. That is why we compare pay here with a single measure that the OECD collects for many countries: how many times more than the average worker a specialist doctor earns.

The rest of the text addresses a question that such comparisons usually miss: how Poland, Czechia, Germany, Austria and Sweden pay their doctors and what is publicly known about that pay. We describe each country using the same template — who pays for treatment, how the doctor is employed, what is public and how we know it. At the end we compare the number of doctors per population, counted the same way as in our analysis Why Poland is short of doctors.

Pay with one measure: a multiple of the average wage

The OECD compares doctors’ pay with the average wage of a full-time employee in the same country. The ratio does not depend on exchange rates and shows how the profession ranks against other earnings. According to Health at a Glance 2025, a salaried specialist earned 3.2 times as much as the average worker in Germany, 2.9 times in Poland, 2.5 in Czechia and 2.2 times in Sweden. The average of the 31 OECD countries with such data is 2.8. The data refer to 2023, and for Poland to 2022.¹

A salaried specialist in Poland earns 2.9 times as much as the average worker — less than in Germany, more than in Czechia and Sweden

1. Germany3.2×
2. Poland 2022 data2.9×
3. Czechia2.5×
4. Sweden2.2×
5. Average of 31 OECD countries2.8×

Poland appears in this comparison only through its salaried doctors. OECD data do not include earnings from contracts, as Demagog, a Polish fact-checking organisation, pointed out when checking a claim about Polish doctors’ pay compared with the rest of Europe.² This is a large gap: according to an AOTMiT working document from February 2026, 73% of specialists work under civil-law contracts, mostly as contractors.³ OECD data do not show how much the average Polish specialist earns once contracts are counted. We show median payments under contracts and employment in the pay distribution, and the differences between forms of employment in Contract or employment.

For Austria the OECD has no data on salaried specialists, only on self-employed doctors: their income in 2021 was 4.6 times the average wage. In Germany the same group stood at 4.9 in 2023.¹ This is practice income after costs and before tax and contributions, not a salary — which is why we do not put it on the chart next to salaried doctors.

The measure also has limits, which the OECD itself lists. Salaries may be underestimated because some countries exclude overtime, bonuses and income from private practice, and some report data for the public sector only.¹ Nor does the ratio to the average wage say what the pay can buy: in US dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity, which the OECD gives in the same dataset, a salaried specialist earned more in Sweden than in Poland.¹

What is public in the five countries

Pay transparency is not all or nothing. In each of the five countries part of doctors’ pay is publicly known and part is not. The countries differ in what is public: only the minimum, a full table of rates, statistical averages or the pay of a specific person. The table orders them from the narrowest to the broadest scope of transparency; details and sources are in the country sections below.

Transparency of doctors’ pay comes in degrees: from a statutory minimum to the pay of a specific person

	Pay of a doctor in a public hospital	What is public	What remains hidden
Poland	Employment contract with a statutory minimum, or a civil-law contract at a rate agreed with the hospital	The statutory minimum, resident doctors’ pay set by regulation, medians from a one-off AOTMiT compilation	Contract rates and the total paid to one person by several facilities
Czechia	A tarif from a government pay table in public facilities; contractual pay in companies and private facilities	The tarif table, average pay from official statistics	What an individual doctor is paid, including on-call duty and overtime
Germany	Salary from a collective agreement table; heads of department and some senior doctors outside the table	The full table: job group and seniority step	Above-table contracts, incomes of individual practices
Austria	Salary from the employer’s table in a given federal state	Hospital pay tables; practice incomes only in studies based on pseudonymised data	Incomes of individual practices
Sweden	Pay set individually within a collective agreement	Averages from official statistics; the pay of any public employee on request	Pay at private employers, including clinics funded by the regions

None of these countries publishes, of its own accord, how much public money one person received in total from all their workplaces. Outside Europe the picture is similar: Taiwan shows averages for the profession and hospital reports (our analysis of Taiwan), and two Canadian provinces publish annual payments to individual doctors, but each only from one insurance plan (our analysis of Canada).

Poland: a public minimum, hidden contracts

Treatment in the public system is paid for by a single payer — the National Health Fund (NFZ), financed mainly by the health contribution. A hospital doctor works either as an employee or under a civil-law contract, most often as a contractor running their own business; as noted above, this is how most specialists work.

There is no pay table for doctors. A 2017 act sets only the minimum base salary for employees: from 1 July 2026 a specialist must receive at least PLN 12,910.16 (≈ €2,930) gross a month, excluding on-call duty and allowances.⁴ Resident doctors’ pay is set by a regulation of the minister of health — we list it by specialty. Everything above the minimum is agreed between the hospital and the doctor.

No register collects contract rates. Most of what is known comes from a one-off AOTMiT compilation from February 2026, known from press reports: the median monthly payment to a specialist under a single contract was PLN 25,595 (≈ €5,810) gross.³ That is the amount from one facility. The agency has no data linking payments to the same person from different hospitals,⁵ so a doctor working in several places appears in the compilation as several separate entries.

Since 5 August 2026 the minister of health may request from facilities pay data linked to the PESEL number and the licence to practise (PWZ) number — in other words, data that can be summed for one person. The act does not, however, provide for their publication.⁶ We describe the details in our analysis The pay data act.

Czechia: a government table in public facilities

Czechia has compulsory health insurance run by seven funds; the largest covers more than half of the population.⁷

A doctor’s pay depends on who runs the facility. In public facilities — state, regional and municipal bodies that are not companies — a doctor receives a plat. Its base part, the tarif, is set by Government Regulation No. 341/2017 Sb., in which doctors, dentists and pharmacists have a separate table. The rate depends on the class, i.e. the requirements of the post, and on the step, i.e. years of practice.⁸ A doctor with a specialisation is usually placed in class 14.⁹ Companies and private facilities pay contractual wages (mzda) and are not bound by the table; the medical statistics office ÚZIS counts the two groups separately.⁹¹⁰

What is public, then, is the table of rates and averages from official statistics. We give the amounts from the table below, in the comparison of public pay tables. ÚZIS reports that in 2024 a doctor (together with dentists) earned on average CZK 126,109 (≈ €5,180) a month in public facilities and CZK 120,123 (≈ €4,940) in companies and private facilities.¹⁰¹¹ The average is clearly higher than the tarif even at the top step of the table. The tarif is therefore only part of the pay, and these data do not show how much of the average comes from allowances, bonuses and overtime. Nor is it known how much a specific doctor earns.

A 2023 dispute showed how much work beyond normal hours matters. An amendment to the Labour Code doubled the permitted limit of voluntary overtime for doctors to 832 hours a year. Doctors protested, and the agreement between the government and their organisations of 8 December 2023 brought raises of CZK 5,000–15,000, depending on qualifications.¹²

A pay table in public facilities existed before: the 2017 regulation replaced Regulation No. 564/2006 Sb. and its amendments.⁸ In February 2011, after the “Děkujeme, odcházíme” (“Thank you, we’re leaving”) campaign, in which more than 3,800 of about 20,000 doctors handed in their notice, the minister of health agreed a memorandum with their organisations: doctors’ pay was to rise by CZK 5,000–8,000 a month, with the revised tarifs applying from 1 March 2011. The memorandum also assumed that from 2013 the average doctor’s pay would reach between 1.5 and 3 times the national average wage.¹³ The protest was thus about the level of pay, not about the transparency of the table.

Germany: a full table in hospitals, practices outside it

In Germany 89.0% of the population has statutory health insurance with one of 96 sickness funds, and 10.4% has substitutive private insurance (2024 data). Outpatient care is provided mainly by doctors’ practices, inpatient care by hospitals.¹⁴

Doctors employed in hospitals are paid under collective agreements. One example is the agreement for municipal hospitals (TV-Ärzte/VKA), which the doctors’ union Marburger Bund publishes in full. It has four groups — doctor without a specialisation, specialist, senior physician (Oberarzt) responsible for part of a department, and deputy head of department — each with steps based on years of work. Standard working time is 40 hours a week.¹⁵

Heads of department (Chefarzt) stay outside the table when their terms are set by an individual contract — the agreement then does not cover them. With doctors in the two highest groups, after long enough at the top step, a hospital may also agree pay above the table.¹⁵ The agreement does not give the amounts of such contracts.

A doctor with their own practice does not receive a salary: their income is the practice’s result after costs. Such incomes are known only as averages for groups of doctors, like the OECD data described above.¹

Austria: tables of the federal states, contracted and private practices

Austrian health insurance covers 99.9% of the population. Since a 2020 reform it has been run by three main institutions, including the employees’ fund ÖGK. Hospitals are planned by the federal states, which run about 75% of acute hospital capacity, while outpatient care is provided mainly by doctors in their own practices.¹⁶

The pay of hospital doctors is set by each federal state separately, so there are several tables. One example is the table of the Styrian hospital company KAGes, in which specialists and senior physicians (Oberarzt) are in one group (SI/N4) with 19 steps.¹⁷ Two extra payments a year come on top of the monthly salary: under Styria’s civil service law an employee is entitled every quarter to an extra payment of half a monthly salary.¹⁸

Outside hospitals a doctor works either as a contracted doctor (Kassenarzt), who has a contract with a fund and whose patients pay nothing, or as an elective doctor (Wahlarzt), without such a contract. A Wahlarzt’s patients pay themselves, and ÖGK usually reimburses 80% of the rate it would have paid a contracted doctor — often much less than the bill. The number of contracted doctors has stagnated, while the number of elective doctors has grown by 61% since 2004.¹⁶

Nobody publishes the incomes of individual practices. The IHS institute calculated them in a report published in 2025 by the association of Austrian social insurance institutions, using pseudonymised data from the ministry of finance and the social insurance system. The median annual income of a doctor with contracts with all funds was €201,306 before tax in 2022, and of an elective doctor €100,849. Both figures also include employment income. The authors note that there is generally little transparency about incomes in Austria and that, unlike in Germany, the costs of running a practice are not studied.¹⁹

Sweden: no table, but pay on request

The Swedish system is financed mainly from taxes. Twenty-one regions are responsible for financing and for most services, and about 44% of primary care centres are run by private providers.²⁰

Doctors employed by the regions are covered by a collective agreement, but there is no table of rates. The agreement and the region’s pay policy require pay to be set individually and to differ between employees.²¹ Official statistics give averages: according to the statistics office SCB, a specialist earned on average SEK 98,000 (≈ €8,830) a month in 2025, on a full-time basis.²²¹¹

The pay of a specific person employed by a public body, on the other hand, is an official document. The principle of public access (offentlighetsprincipen) derives from the Freedom of the Press Act: everyone has the right to see official documents, and the authority may not ask who is requesting them or why.²³ The trade union ST explains that pay data in public authorities are public and anyone may request them, whereas there is no such right at private employers.²⁴ Exceptions are set out in the Public Access to Information and Secrecy Act.²⁵ The pay of doctors in private clinics, including those funded by the regions, therefore remains outside this principle.

Public pay tables in figures

The tables from Germany, Czechia and Austria give the base pay of a salaried specialist in a public hospital.¹⁵⁸¹⁷ Each covers a different group of hospitals and a different scope of duties, and none includes on-call duty or allowances. That is why we do not calculate differences between countries from them and do not set the Polish minimum, which is a floor rather than a rate, beside them. Sweden has no table; the Polish minimum and the Swedish average are given in the country sections.

In Germany, Czechia and Austria the pay of a salaried specialist in a public hospital follows a public table

	Table	Lowest step	Highest step	Remarks
Germany	TV-Ärzte/VKA (municipal hospitals), group II — specialist; from 1 June 2026	€7,552.19	€9,698.91 — step 6, after 12 years as a specialist	12 payments a year; the agreement provides no extra annual payment
Czechia	Government Regulation 341/2017 Sb., table 3 (doctors), class 14; from 1 April 2026	CZK 52,000 (≈ €2,140)	CZK 70,010 (≈ €2,880) — step 12, over 32 years of practice	monthly tarif; allowances and bonuses are not part of the table
Austria	Styria, KAGes, SI/N scheme, group SI/N4 — specialists and senior physicians (Oberarzt); from 1 July 2026	€8,752.40	€13,187 — step 19	14 payments a year: an extra half-salary every quarter

How many doctors per population

According to the OECD, in 2023 Poland had 3.9 practising doctors per 1,000 population — equal to the OECD average and below the European Union average of 4.3.²⁶²⁷ That is the fewest of the five countries compared: Austria had 5.5 doctors, Germany 4.7, Sweden 4.5 (2022 data) and Czechia 4.2.²⁶

Poland has the fewest doctors per population of the five countries — equal to the OECD average and below the EU average (4.3)

average 3.9 doctors

1. Austria5.5
2. Germany4.7
3. Sweden 2022 data4.5
4. Czechia4.2
5. Poland3.9

The OECD counts doctors who treat patients, in most countries including doctors in specialist training.²⁶ Polish sources count doctors in several ways and each gives a different number — we explain the differences in our analysis Why Poland is short of doctors.

The number of doctors alone does not determine access to care. In Austria, which has the most doctors of these five countries, a report by the European Commission and the OECD points to an uneven distribution of doctors, 80 unfilled positions for family doctors with a fund contract in mid-2024, and doctors moving to practices without such a contract.¹⁶

What this means for Poland

Relative to the average wage, a salaried Polish specialist earns more than in Czechia and Sweden and less than in Germany. That figure, however, does not cover contracts, on which most Polish specialists work, so it does not say how much the average specialist earns.

In Czechia, Germany and Austria the reference point for pay in a public hospital is a public table, and in Sweden it is the pay of a specific person, available on request. In Poland only the statutory minimum for employees plays that role.

None of these countries publishes the total income of one person from different sources. Austria comes closest, but only in a study: the IHS institute added up doctors’ income from practice and employment on pseudonymised data, without revealing whom it concerns.¹⁹ We call for such a total to be published in Poland: the total paid to each person from public money, under a permanent identifier, without names.

Method

We compare pay with a single measure from the OECD report Health at a Glance 2025: the ratio of a specialist’s average annual gross pay to the average wage of a full-time employee in the country, for 2023 or the nearest year with data. We take the number of practising doctors from the same report, and the EU average from Poland’s profile in State of Health in the EU 2025, as in our analysis of the doctor shortage. The descriptions of the systems are based on the country profiles from the same series, and the rates on the texts of regulations and collective agreements and on employers’ tables.

Amounts in zloty and in Czech and Swedish koruna are given in the original currency, with an approximate euro equivalent at the National Bank of Poland mid rate shown at the bottom of the page.¹¹ We write about mechanisms, not individuals, so the text names institutions rather than people.

Notes 27laws, data and statements we relied on

1. OECD, Health at a Glance 2025, “Remuneration of specialists”, fig. 8.11, p. 187, and data for the figure — salaried specialists, multiple of the average wage, 2023 or nearest year: Germany 3.2, Poland 2.91 (2022), Czechia 2.45, Sweden 2.2, average of 31 OECD countries 2.79; self-employed doctors: Germany 4.9 (2023), Austria 4.6 (2021); in US dollars at purchasing power parity, a salaried specialist earned 123.4 thousand in Sweden and 108.4 thousand in Poland (2022). Definitions and caveats (gross pay, practice income after costs, reasons why salaries are underestimated) — section on general practitioners’ pay, p. 184. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. Demagog, fact-check of a claim about doctors’ pay in Poland compared with Europe (in Polish), 25.06.2026 — based on the OECD report Health at a Glance 2025; the data on doctors’ pay cover salaried doctors only. ↩

3. Rzeczpospolita, “Wypłaty lekarzy na kontraktach większe niż 100 tys. zł tylko w 1 proc. przypadków” (“Payments to contract doctors above PLN 100,000 in only 1% of cases”, in Polish), 18.06.2026 — AOTMiT working document of February 2026: 73% of specialists on civil-law contracts, median monthly pay under a contract PLN 25,595 gross. ↩ ↩²

4. Rynek Zdrowia, Od dziś 12 910 zł dla lekarzy, 11 485 zł dla pielęgniarek — 1 lipca podwyżki medyków (“From today PLN 12,910 for doctors, PLN 11,485 for nurses”, in Polish) — minimum base pay from 1.07.2026 under the act of 8 June 2017: the group coefficient times the base amount. ↩

5. Rynek Zdrowia, interview with the president of AOTMiT (in Polish), 17.06.2026 — the agency has no data linking the pay of the same person from different entities. ↩

6. Act of 19 June 2026 amending the Act on publicly funded healthcare services and the Act on medical activity (in Polish; Dz.U. 2026 item 972), in force from 5.08.2026 — new wording of Article 27a of the Act on medical activity. ↩

7. OECD and European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, State of Health in the EU: Czechia, Country Health Profile 2025, chapter 4 — compulsory health insurance, seven funds, the largest covering more than half of the population. ↩

8. Nařízení vlády č. 16/2026 Sb. (in Czech) of 26.01.2026, in force from 1.04.2026, with the consolidated text of Regulation No. 341/2017 Sb. on the pay of employees in public services and administration — § 5(3) (table 3 for doctors, dentists and pharmacists), § 11 (repeal of Regulation No. 564/2006 Sb. and its amendments), annex 3: class 14 — from CZK 52,000 (up to one year of practice) to CZK 70,010 (over 32 years). ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Medijob.cz, Platy lékařů 2026 (in Czech) — class 14 for a doctor who needs a specialisation to work independently; the regulation’s tables apply in state, regional and municipal bodies (příspěvkové organizace), not in the contractual-pay sector. ↩ ↩²

10. Zdravotnický deník, article on pay in Czech healthcare in 2024 (in Czech), 6.10.2025 — ÚZIS data: average monthly plat of doctors (with dentists) CZK 126,109, average mzda CZK 120,123; in 2023 CZK 106,603 and 100,489. ↩ ↩²

11. National Bank of Poland, average exchange rates, table A — euro equivalents on this page use the table named at the bottom of the page and are recalculated with each site update. The Polish original converts amounts into zloty at the rates of table 201/A/NBP/2026 of 15.10.2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³

12. Zdravotnický deník, government agreement with doctors ending the protests (in Czech), 8.12.2023 — the Labour Code amendment doubled the maximum voluntary overtime to 832 hours a year; raises for doctors of about CZK 5,000–15,000 depending on qualifications; signed by, among others, the prime minister, the minister of health, the Czech Medical Chamber, trade unions and the largest health insurance fund. ↩

13. ČT24, memorandum of the minister of health with doctors after the “Děkujeme, odcházíme” campaign (in Czech), 14.02.2011 — more than 3,800 resignations out of about 20,000 doctors; pay higher by CZK 5,000–8,000 a month, revised tarifs from 1.03.2011; target in the memorandum for 2013: the average doctor’s pay at 1.5–3 times the national average wage (the unions’ demand). ↩

14. OECD and European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, State of Health in the EU: Germany, Country Health Profile 2025, chapter 4 — in 2024, 89.0% of the population in statutory health insurance (96 funds), 10.4% in substitutive private insurance; outpatient care usually in doctors’ practices. ↩

15. Marburger Bund, collective agreement for doctors in municipal hospitals TV-Ärzte/VKA (in German), as amended by the 10th amendment — § 1(2) (heads of department with individual contracts not covered), § 7 (40 hours a week), § 16 (groups I–IV; group IV is the permanent deputy head of department), § 18 (table pay; above-table pay allowed for groups III and IV), § 19 (steps), § 24 (special payments, no annual payment); annex: table from 1.06.2026, group II — from €7,552.19 (step 1) to €9,698.91 (step 6, after 12 years as a specialist). ↩ ↩² ↩³

16. OECD and European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, State of Health in the EU: Austria, Country Health Profile 2025, chapters 4 and 5 — insurance covers 99.9% of the population, three main institutions after the 2020 reform (ÖGK, SVS, BVAEB); the federal states run about 75% of acute hospital capacity; ÖGK usually reimburses 80% of the contracted rate for a visit to a doctor without a fund contract; the number of doctors without a fund contract has grown by 61% since 2004; 5.5 doctors per 1,000 population in 2023; 80 unfilled positions for family doctors with a fund contract in mid-2024. ↩ ↩² ↩³

17. KAGes (Steiermärkische Krankenanstaltengesellschaft), pay rates from 1.07.2026 (in German) — SI/N scheme, group SI/N4 (specialists and senior physicians): from €8,752.40 (step 1) to €13,187.00 (step 19) a month. ↩ ↩²

18. Styrian Act on the service law and pay of state employees (Stmk. L-DBR) (in German), RIS, § 147(2) (an extra payment of 50% of the monthly salary every quarter) and § 152 (payment dates). KAGes employees are covered by a separate Styrian act, StKDBR (LGBl. 100/2023), whose § 6(2)(a) applies § 147 L-DBR to them. ↩

19. IHS institute for the association of Austrian social insurance institutions (DVSV), Health System Watch: “Einkünfte von Ärztinnen und Ärzten in Österreich: Ein Update” (in German), 2025 — pseudonymised data from the ministry of finance (BMF) and DVSV for 2015–2022; income from practice and employment summed for each doctor, before tax; table 1: median for 2022 — €201,306 (contracts with all funds), €100,849 (doctors without a fund contract); the authors’ remark on the low transparency of incomes and the lack of studies of practice costs. ↩ ↩²

20. OECD and European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, State of Health in the EU: Sweden, Country Health Profile 2025, chapter 4 — financed mainly from taxes, 21 regions responsible for financing and most services, about 44% of primary care centres run by private providers. ↩

21. Region Västmanland, minutes of negotiations with Läkarförbundet on pay rises for 2026 (in Swedish), 27.11.2025 — based on the HÖK 25 collective agreement; the agreement and the region’s pay policy state that pay is to be set individually and differentiated. ↩

22. Statistiska centralbyrån (SCB), statistics on doctors’ pay (in Swedish), updated 16.06.2026 — average monthly pay of a specialist (specialistläkare) in 2025: SEK 98,000, on a full-time basis. ↩

23. Tryckfrihetsförordningen (Swedish Freedom of the Press Act, in Swedish), chapter 2 § 1 (right of access to official documents), § 4 (an official document is one held by an authority) and § 18 (ban on asking about the requester’s identity and purpose). ↩

24. Fackförbundet ST, “Har jag rätt att få veta mina kollegors löner?” (“Do I have the right to know my colleagues’ pay?”, in Swedish), updated 29.04.2026 — in public authorities pay data are a public document that anyone may request without giving their identity or purpose; at private employers there is no right to these data. ↩

25. Government of Sweden, Offentlighetsprincipen (in Swedish) — the principle of public access to official documents and the exceptions in the Public Access to Information and Secrecy Act (offentlighets- och sekretesslagen, 2009:400). ↩

26. OECD, Health at a Glance 2025, chapter “Doctors (overall number and distribution)”, fig. 8.4, p. 181, and data for the figure — practising doctors per 1,000 population in 2023: Austria 5.5, Germany 4.7, Sweden 4.5 (2022), Czechia 4.2, Poland 3.9, OECD average 3.9; definition: doctors who treat patients, in most countries including doctors in specialist training. ↩ ↩² ↩³

27. OECD and European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, State of Health in the EU: Poland, Country Health Profile 2025, p. 7 — 3.9 practising doctors per 1,000 population in 2023, against 4.3 on average in the EU. ↩