News
New tool: doctors’ pay around the world.
An interactive globe with doctors’ pay in 43 countries: the ratio to the average wage, the amount, purchasing power and pay transparency. OECD and national data.
There is a new tool on the site: What doctors earn around the world. On a globe and in the table next to it we compare doctors’ pay in 43 countries, using OECD data and national statistical offices. Pay can be shown as a multiple of the average wage in the country, as a multiple of a nurse’s pay, in US dollars, euro or zloty, and in purchasing power. A separate layer shows whether the pay of an individual doctor paid from public money can be known.
What the globe shows
- A specialist on an employment contract in Poland earns 2.86 times as much as the average employee (OECD, 2024). That is 16th of the 42 countries with this measure; Hungary is highest (4.41 times).
- These data do not cover civil-law (B2B) contracts. According to a working document of the Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Tariff System (AOTMiT), 73% of specialists work under civil-law contracts, and the statistics do not add up one person’s pay from several jobs.
- Compared with a hospital nurse, a salaried specialist in Poland earns 1.72 times as much (OECD, same year).
- None of the 29 countries we studied publishes the total payments from public money to each doctor. The closest are Italy (senior staff only, including heads of hospital departments) and British Columbia in Canada (payments from one plan).
How to read these numbers
The comparison is very approximate: countries measure pay differently, and the data come from 2015–2026. For every country we give the source, the year and whom the number covers. The tool is also in Polish, with amounts in zloty.