The average debt for medical students now exceeds $200,000; when including undergraduate loans, the average student loan debt for doctors is $250,995. Here’s how locum tenens can help you maximize your income to get out of debt faster.
Balancing medical student loan repayment with your other financial priorities can be a struggle—especially now that the pandemic student loan pause is over. While the standard federal student loan repayment time is 10 years, for many physicians, medical student loan repayment can take even longer to pay off.
Even if you do manage to pay off your medical student loans within ten years, that can come with staggeringly high interest rates—even with regular repayment, a $200K medical student loan can double in ten years. The average physician ultimately pays anywhere from $135,000 – $440,000 for their medical school loans plus interest.
If you’re ready to get out from under the burden of medical student loan debt, locum tenens can help you pay off your loans faster—without sacrificing your other priorities.
Here’s how locum tenens can help you tackle your medical student loans:
Earn Higher Rates
While most physicians do make a good income, those higher incomes only come after 3-8 years of earning comparatively lower incomes during residency and fellowship. That’s where locums comes in: you can earn higher rates through locums, so you can tackle your medical student loan repayment faster.
Locums assignments tend to pay higher rates than full-time W-2 roles, because facilities depend on locums when they have a specific—and often urgent—need to fill, and are willing to pay a higher rate to ensure they have coverage.
While the exact rates you’ll earn depend on a number of factors, including your specialty and the location and type of assignment, you can generally rely on making more per hour than you would at a full-time practice position. That said, certain assignments do tend to pay more—your consultant can help find assignments that will offer the highest rates for your experience and specialty.
Supplement Your Full-Time Income
Short-term locum assignments can be a great option to earn extra income, especially for physicians who are newly out of residency, still completing their fellowship programs, or looking to bridge a gap between completing a program and starting a new job. With short-term locums, you can use your full-time income for regular life expenses, and your locums income to pay off your medical student loans.
Short-term locums assignments can be anything from working occasional weekends to help a hospital in need of call coverage, or picking up holiday assignments to cover for staff that’s on vacation (these are a particularly good way to earn additional income, since they pay time and a half).
In addition to supplementing your income without sacrificing your permanent position, short-term locums is also a great choice for physicians who are early in their career, as it offers the opportunity to gain experience in different practice settings.
Get Support in Meeting Your Financial Priorities
Your Hayes Locums consultant can support you in strategizing how to pay down your medical student loan debt faster by providing you a projection of how much income you can expect to make through locum tenens work. Once you have a sense of that number, you can use the student loan calculator below to figure out a realistic timeframe for your medical student loan repayment. Make sure to factor in expenses like taxes—as 1099 employees, locums physicians are responsible for paying their own taxes on their locums income.
While your exact timeframe will depend on your specialty, expenses, how willing and able you are to travel, and how much time you can commit to locums work, you may find you’re able to pay off debt faster than you think. For example, if you’re able to supplement your full-time income with $5,000 a month, you could pay off $200K of medical student loans in just over 3 years.
Once you figure out a realistic budget and timeframe for your medical student loan repayment, you can communicate that to your consultant, so they can search for assignments that will help you meet your financial goals.
