About 7 in 10 physicians report receiving a continuing medical education allowance, but only 6.7% of physician job listings publish its dollar value, according to a Sept. 24 analysis from clinician salary and job listing platform Marit.
The analysis covers salary submissions from 22,647 physicians and 8,405 advanced practice providers, plus 427,795 active physician job listings, as of August 2026.
Here are eight things to know:
1. Of the physicians surveyed, 69.7% report a CME allowance, at a median of $4,000 a year.
2. APPs report CME allowances more often than physicians but receive less. The share reporting one is 85.9% for nurse midwives, 83.6% for physician assistants and 73.8% for nurse practitioners. All three groups report a median of $2,000. CRNAs and anesthesiologist assistants report a median of $2,500.
3. Eleven specialties report a $5,000 median: ENT, pathology, general surgery, pulmonology, urology, hematology oncology, radiation oncology, orthopedic surgery, plastic surgery, radiology and neurosurgery. Nearly all are surgical or hospital-based.
4. Podiatry and preventive medicine report the lowest median, at $2,500. Pediatrics, psychiatry, nephrology and oral and maxillofacial surgery report $3,000, and family medicine reports $3,500.
5. Urgent care physicians are the most likely to report a CME allowance, at 84.3%. Oral and maxillofacial surgeons are the least likely, at 45.5%.
6. Rural physicians report a CME allowance more often than urban physicians (80.5% vs. 69%), and their median allowance is higher, at $4,800.
Only 35.1% of active physician job listings mention CME at all, and 6.7% list a dollar amount. 7. When a listing does include an amount, the median is $4,000, the same as what physicians report receiving.
8. Rob Anderson, MD, who wrote the analysis, said employers likely leave CME out of listings by oversight rather than by strategy.
“A CME allowance tends to get set once at the system level and then applied to every new hire, so by the time anyone sits down to write a job description, it isn’t something they’re thinking about as a variable,” Dr. Anderson wrote.
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