Source utility
NPPES
Useful for
- workforce geography
- taxonomy-based specialty presence
- state/metro density proxy
Not useful for
- income
- active case volume
- physician quality
- job availability
Methodology
How this is built, and what it can’t do
DoctorCalculator is decision-support, not a salary predictor. It prices the life you want, names the career archetype your limits imply, and compares paths using a physician-reviewed taxonomy plus public-data proxies. Every claim is built to show how much to trust it.
How a report is built
- 1.Your target life is priced into annual after-tax spending plus the investment needed for your selected wealth target, then solved through progressive taxes into a required pre-tax income range.
- 2.Your stated limits (hours, nights, call, training tolerance, geography, and practice model) map you to one of ten career archetypes.
- 3.Your diagnosis names the central conflict, what must be true, what’s most likely to disappoint you, and the trade to make on purpose.
- 4.When you compare two paths, a 14-dimension battle card reads a physician-reviewed taxonomy and public-data proxies. Each score with its claim, why it matters, the signal behind it, its limitation, and its decision impact.
Required-income formula
The report first sums the annual target-life spending you entered: housing, cars, family support, leisure, and debt service. For kids, it assumes the household is paying either childcare or private school in a given year, not both; college funding remains separate.
It then computes the annual investment needed to reach the chosen net-worth target by the retirement age you selected: target net worth divided by the future-value annuity factor for the attending years left. The default real return assumption is 4.5%, with 2.5% and 6.5% used for sensitivity.
Required net income equals target-life spending plus that annual investment, minus partner take-home income when present. Required gross income is found with a deterministic progressive-tax solve, not a flat tax shortcut.
Tax and wealth assumptions
Tax model
Federal tax uses ordinary-income brackets and the standard deduction for married filing jointly or single. FICA includes Social Security, Medicare, and additional Medicare. State tax uses a state effective-rate table when a state is chosen; otherwise it uses the lifestyle preset's labeled fallback rate.
Wealth target
Net worth is a standalone input: $3M financial independence, $5M comfortable retirement, $8M high-wealth, or a custom amount. Lifestyle presets suggest a default target, but the required-income math reads the wealth target separately from lifestyle spending.
How income estimates are computed
Every specialty and career-path income figure is a DoctorCalculator modeled estimate, triangulated from cited public benchmarks. Never a reproduction of a licensed survey. Each specialty's base is the weighted median of publicly released figures (national physician-compensation reports and published recruiting starting salaries, weighted by recency and source breadth). Career-path lanes scale that base by a documented factor: a published subspecialty figure where one exists, otherwise a labeled practice-setting factor (academic, employed, production/ASC, cash-pay). BLS OEWS employed-wage rows are used only as floor and 90th-percentile sanity checks, and federal VA pay tables only as employed-pay rails. Neither sets a central estimate.
Ceilings and production bands are explicit modeled scenarios above each lane's base range, not survey rows. Where no public figure exists for a subspecialty (for example pediatric neurosurgery, which national reports do not break out), the lane is modeled at parity with its specialty's average with a widened, setting-dependent band, and says so. The full anchor list, weights, and per-lane factors are versioned in the repository and regenerated whenever the anchor file is refreshed; the current benchmark vintage is shown with the data versions below.
What this is not
- • CMS Medicare payments are not physician income. They’re a partial, biased professional-fee slice.
- • Open Payments are transfers of value, not income, and are never attributed to rank a physician.
- • Public claims data is proxy evidence only; ownership, facility, and cash-pay income are largely invisible.
- • No individual physician is ranked, and no NPI-level output is ever exposed publicly.
- • Scores are relative, directional signals. Never a dollar figure or an income promise.
Evidence source types
Every insight is tagged with where it came from, so you can weight it.
Public-data proxy
Aggregated NPPES taxonomy/geography density, CMS Medicare procedure/service mix, place-of-service patterns, and submitted-charge/utilization proxies. Directional context only.
Clinician assumption
Qualitative assumptions reviewed by practicing physicians. How a path actually behaves on call, ownership, and lifestyle.
Curated field note
Anonymous, consented field notes from physicians in a path; used for color and caution, never as hard numbers.
Your input
What you told us. Your target life, limits, and constraints. Drives the diagnosis, not a market claim.
Low-confidence estimate
Early, weakly-supported signals flagged as low confidence so you discount them appropriately.
Not included by design
Not included by design. Licensed compensation surveys are not scraped, ingested, or redistributed. If you use an externally published compensation report, treat it as an external benchmark reference - verify independently.
Signals we read
- NPPES taxonomy & geography density (job-market and access proxies)
- CMS Medicare Physician & Other Practitioners procedure/service mix
- Medicare place-of-service patterns (facility vs office)
- Submitted-charge / utilization proxies
- Open Payments industry/device adjacency (transfers of value, not income)
- ClinicalTrials.gov innovation/research density
- FDA / openFDA device category signals
- Specialty-specific CPT/HCPCS taxonomies (physician-reviewed, never shipped to the browser)
- Expert-reviewed qualitative assumptions
- Curated anonymous field notes, with consent
Source Utility & Limitations
We use many datasets, but we enforce strict rules about what each source can actually answer. Here is exactly how we use each source and where their limitations lie.
Source utility
CMS Physician & Other Practitioners
Useful for
- Medicare service mix
- procedure/service-family proxies
- site-of-service and utilization signals if available
- specialty activity patterns
Not useful for
- salary
- total practice revenue
- commercial payer revenue
- employed hospital support
- private contracts
Source utility
Open Payments
Useful for
- industry adjacency
- device/drug/company relationship signals
- research and ownership/investment signals where available
Not useful for
- clinical income
- salary
- net personal income
- quality
Source utility
BLS OEWS
Useful for
- broad occupational wage baseline
- geography wage context
- non-specialty labor market context
Not useful for
- subspecialty compensation
- private practice owner income
- productivity/collections
- physician-specific deal terms
Source utility
BEA Regional Price Parities
Useful for
- cost-of-living adjustment
- metro/state purchasing-power pressure
Not useful for
- exact household expenses
- exact tax burden
- school quality
Source utility
Census ACS
Useful for
- housing context
- family/household context
- metro/county demographics
- commuting/community context if available
Not useful for
- physician income
- exact home affordability
- exact school fit
Source utility
ACGME
Useful for
- training program availability
- training pipeline
- specialty/fellowship context
Not useful for
- job quality
- compensation
- fellowship ROI by itself
Source utility
NRMP
Useful for
- match competitiveness context
- applicant/program landscape
Not useful for
- attending lifestyle
- job outcomes
- salary
Source utility
ClinicalTrials.gov
Useful for
- research activity proxy
- academic/innovation density
- disease/device research signal
Not useful for
- job availability
- income
- clinical lifestyle
Source utility
FDA / openFDA / 510(k)
Useful for
- device-market activity proxy
- procedural technology adjacency
- innovation signal
Not useful for
- physician income
- adoption in a specific job
- quality
Source utility
CMS ASC / facility datasets
Useful for
- facility landscape
- ASC/site-of-service signal
- possible ownership/practice-model adjacency
Not useful for
- individual physician ownership
- exact distributions
- practice income
Source utility
Tax model/user assumptions
Useful for
- required gross income
- after-tax affordability pressure
- savings/lifestyle feasibility
Not useful for
- formal tax advice
- exact tax liability
Not included by design
- MGMA - external benchmark reference; not ingested
- AMGA - external benchmark reference; not ingested
- Doximity compensation data - external benchmark reference; not ingested
- Medscape compensation data - external benchmark reference; not ingested
- Private contract databases - not ingested
- Individual physician rankings - not produced
These sources may be useful in other contexts, but DoctorCalculator does not ingest, scrape, or redistribute licensed compensation datasets. If a published compensation report is discussed, it is an external benchmark reference - verify independently.
Readiness levels
We gate how much precision we show by how validated a specialty module is. Premium access can be available while evidence depth and model confidence still vary by specialty.
Level 3
Evidence depth: high
Reviewed assumptions, stronger public-data support, and specialty-specific path structure.
Public output: Source-labeled memo and full path comparison where available.
Level 2
Evidence depth: moderate
Public-data support is useful, but key job economics still need human verification.
Public output: Source-labeled memo with clear verification prompts.
Level 1
Evidence depth: limited
Qualitative guidance with public-data context where useful.
Public output: Path families, trade-offs, and assumption-labeled guidance.
Level 0
Evidence depth: unavailable
Not enough source-labeled support for a report surface yet.
Public output: Description and what to verify.
RVU reference dataset
Version 2026.JulBuilt 2026-07-08CF $33.40098,068 codes
- • RVUs & global periods: CMS National Physician Fee Schedule Relative Value File RVU26A (Jan 2026 release, non-QPP conversion factor)
- • Physician times: CMS CY 2026 PFS Final Rule physician work time file (efficiency-adjusted, updated 2026-01-08)
- • Descriptions: CMS plain-language HCPCS descriptions from the Medicare Physician & Other Practitioners public use file. AMA CPT descriptors are not included.
Refreshed from official CMS releases (each January, plus quarterly corrections) by an automated pipeline; the version above always matches the data served in the RVU calculator, including 109 Medicare payment localities (GPCI). Medicare amounts are practice payments, not physician income.
All dataset versions
Manifest generated 2026-07-08- RVU / fee-schedule reference (CMS PFS)2026.Jul · 2026-07-08 · CF $33.4009 · CMS National Physician Fee Schedule Relative Value File RVU26A (Jan 2026 release
- Ingestion: nppessuccess · 2026-07-08 · 9,606,683 rows
- Ingestion: cms_physiciansuccess · 2026-07-08 · 9,660,647 rows
- Ingestion: open_paymentsmanual_required · 2026-07-08
- Ingestion: clinical_trialsnot_implemented · 2026-07-08
- Ingestion: fda_510kmanual_required · 2026-07-08
- Ingestion: bls_oewssuccess · 2026-07-08 · 100 rows
- Ingestion: bea_rppsuccess · 2026-07-08 · 100 rows
- Ingestion: census_acssuccess · 2026-07-08 · 100 rows
- Ingestion: cms_ascerror · 2026-07-08
- Ingestion: clinicaltrialssuccess · 2026-07-08 · 100 rows
- BEA Regional Price Parities2024 · 2026-07-08 · 438 aggregate rows · U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities
- HUD Fair Market Rents2026 · 2026-07-08 · 12 aggregate rows · U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Fair Market Rents
- Census ACS household context2023 · 2026-07-08 · 51 aggregate rows · U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey table B19013
- Benchmark-triangulated income models2026-07 · 2026-07-08 · 75 lanes across 21 specialties · cited public anchors
- Procedure-taxonomy candidates21 specialties · 2026-07-08 · Machine-checked; clinician review promotes coverage tiers
Upstream raw sources: Medicare Physician & Other Practitioners PUF (2026-06-21); NPPES full registry (2026-06-27); Open Payments general payments (not loaded, refresh due); Compensation benchmark anchors (Doximity/AMN/BLS/VA public figures) (2026-07-06).