Physicians and recruiters got some eye-opening data last week when Doximity launched Career Navigator.

You’re a physician recruiter, so you have a pretty good idea about the kind of money physicians can earn in different cities—and if candidates specialize beyond primary care. You also know that those candidates emerged from medical school with a high debt (the average is about $170,000) and that costs like malpractice insurance have to be added into the mix. So your physician candidates need to earn a good salary to get ahead.

How lucrative is being a physician in the U.S.? “Variations in salary are drastic and opaque,” says The Atlantic, when reporting on the launch of Career Navigator. The data is based on anonymously shared data from more than 18,000 verified physicians, which means physicians can zoom in on county-level salary information for 48 specialties in the U.S.—and it’s updated in real-time.

Brian Vartabedian, MD, who writes at 33 charts calls the Doximity Career Navigator “Crazy fascinating” and says he could spend hours “gliding the cursor over the U.S. map to see who’s got what where.” As someone who’s always been skeptical of physician salary reports, he says the Career Navigator data is different because if comes from verified practicing physicians.

The question is: Do the opportunities you’re recruiting for offer competitive compensation? Career Navigator found some striking disparities across the country. Here are six key findings:

1. For a higher salary, recruit physician candidates for rural posts. Most urban workers make a higher salary—the bigger the city the higher the pay. Health care is just the opposite. Doximity’s maps show coastal population centers have lower salaries than rural areas and “fly over” states of the country. On average, rural physicians earned about $1,500 more per year than their urban counterparts. Rural areas tend to offer a lower cost of living, too, so recruiting physicians to work in rural America means they can really come out ahead.

2. Emergency medicine, family medicine, occupational medicine, and psychiatry have the highest shortages at the moment (those findings are fairly similar to a Merritt Hawkins Report released last year).

3. Among the states with the highest salaries for Emergency medicine physicians are Texas, Florida and Minnesota. The lowest reported salaries for EM were in Massachusetts, New York and California.

4. The fewer the specialists in an area, the higher the salaries. Doximity’s data shows that for every new specialist who moves into an area with a population of 100,00 people, other specialists lost about $1,500 in annual salary. 

5. Private practice does pay. Internists working in private practice make an estimated 12 percent or $28,000 more annually than their peers who work in academic and government posts.

6. Interestingly enough, data shows that regions with higher rates of obesity tend to have slightly higher pay for physicians.

Career Navigator now enables physicians to see what they’re earning relative to their peers. Plus, Doximity physician members who are interested in career or consulting opportunities can opt in to receive targeted career opportunities by preferred location, schedule, and compensation via Doximity Talent Finder.  

Are you posting your opportunities with Doximity’s Talent Finder? To date, over 215,000 job opportunities have been extended to physicians. Combined with these findings on physician compensation trends, your recruitment strategy is in for a real boost.