The Doximity 2026 Physician Compensation Report Found That 46 Percent of Physicians Polled Are Considering Early Retirement. That Is Up 12 Points From the Year Before.

Analysis by DPC Insider — Research Desk
#physician compensation#physician workforce#early retirement#primary care economics#AI in medicine#Doximity
Sources: Doximity 2026 Physician Compensation Report · The Doximity 2026 Physician Compensation Report finds AI fluency emerging as a potential career advantage, even as overwork and early-retirement intent climb — Doximity Blog

Forty-six percent. That is the share of physicians who told Doximity in June 2026 that they were considering early retirement. Doximity reported that number as 34 percent the year before.

The 2026 Doximity Physician Compensation Report, released August 25, draws on nearly 23,000 physician surveys collected in 2025 as part of a seven-year dataset. Alongside it, Doximity fielded a June 2026 poll of more than 600 physicians on career satisfaction and early retirement intent, a separate instrument from the compensation survey. That poll produced the 12-point jump. The compensation dataset found physician pay grew just 2 percent from 2024 to 2025 (its slowest rate in several years) and that the pay gap between surgical specialists and primary care physicians widened for the first time after three consecutive years of modest narrowing.

What the Survey Measured

The June 2026 poll found that 82 percent of physicians said they are overworked, a high share even as AI tools have spread through clinical settings. The compensation picture from the 23,000-survey dataset is a mix of slow growth and uneven distribution. Interventional radiology gained 10.8 percent and neurosurgery gained 10.7 percent, leading all specialties.

The surgical-to-primary-care pay gap reached 90.1 percent in 2025, up from 87.3 percent in 2024. The shift matters less in absolute terms than in direction. From 2022 through 2024, the gap had been closing slowly. That generated some optimism about rebalancing. The trend reversed in 2025. Primary care physicians are now falling behind surgical specialists again after three years of relative progress.

The report also tracked how physicians are thinking about AI. About two-thirds said staying current with AI tools would give them a meaningful earnings edge over peers who don’t. Roughly a quarter expect AI to increase their compensation within the next year.

Who Keeps the Dividend

The more revealing finding may be this: 44 percent of physicians told Doximity they believe they should be the primary financial beneficiaries when AI allows them to complete more clinical work in the same amount of time.

The question was normative: who should benefit, not a prediction about who will. In a traditional employment or hospital-employed setting, when AI reduces the time needed to complete a chart or coordinate a referral, the efficiency gain flows to the organization first. A physician’s contracted income doesn’t automatically adjust because throughput increased. The concern is structural, not cynical.

In a DPC practice, the physician sets the terms of the relationship with patients and controls the economics of the practice directly. A DPC physician who adds an AI tool that frees 40 minutes per day makes the call about what happens to those 40 minutes. That is a structurally different position from the default in a hospital-employed setting.

Why the 12-Point Jump

The publicly available findings don’t point to a single cause for the acceleration in early retirement intent. The data suggests a convergence: pay growth at its slowest point in years, a pay gap that just reversed direction after improving, and a workforce already running above 80 percent on the overwork measure. Physicians who were waiting to see if compensation conditions would improve had three years of modest data to support that hope. The 2025 data cuts against it.

Administrative burden sits underneath a lot of this. Documentation, prior authorization and insurance-related tasks are structural features of fee-for-service practice, not a volume problem that scaling up or down would fix.

The Open Question

The publicly available findings from both instruments don’t show a DPC-specific breakdown. The compensation dataset, with nearly 23,000 respondents, tells you a great deal about physician pay across the workforce as a whole. The poll can’t tell you whether the 46 percent early retirement figure is uniform across practice models, or whether physicians who’ve already exited traditional practice for DPC show different intent rates.

That’s the gap that matters most here. Administrative burden and primary care pay compression are the specific conditions that DPC practices are built to address differently. Whether that structural difference shows up in lower early retirement intent among DPC physicians, or in different rates of actually staying in medicine longer, is a question this survey can’t answer. It’s worth asking.