About
Moonlighter is a salary transparency website for emergency medicine physicians.
Mission
I created this website to solve information asymmetry in the emergency medicine physician job market. As a new attending, I found corporate groups and agencies would often deliberately offer below market rates and take the difference in profit. My solution was to create a community project with other EM physicians to allow salary transparency.
How It Works
Members are verified at registration against the NPPES (National Plan and Provider Enumeration System) registry. Each new account must supply a valid, active NPI. We never store the raw NPI. Attendings must contribute their own salary data in order to view others.
The estimated hourly wage displayed on the map is based on inverse distance weighting interpolation. We take an average of nearby points using relative distance to determine weight. The closer a data point is to a given location, the more weight it receives. Areas are only shown if there is a confluence of 3 different physician submissions for estimation.
How the Rate Is Calculated
Physicians are paid in different ways, so a raw hourly rate is not comparable across jobs. Every submission is converted to one common figure before it reaches the map: a 1099-equivalent hourly rate, net of self-paid malpractice.
- Reported hourly rateWhat the physician is actually paid, per hour worked, at one site.
- + employer FICA, for W-2 only (7.65%)A W-2 employer pays Social Security and Medicare on top of the wage; a 1099 or K-1 physician pays both halves themselves. We add the employer's share back to W-2 rates so the two are comparable. Social Security stops at the $184,500 wage base, projected against that physician's own annual hours rather than an assumed schedule.
- − self-paid malpractice, per hourWhen the physician pays their own premium, it is divided by their annual hours and subtracted. Employer-paid coverage deducts nothing.
- = the rate the map showsA 1099-equivalent hourly rate, net of self-paid malpractice. This is the only figure the heatmap, the facility cards, and the in-view summary aggregate.
- + benefits, only with "Include benefits" onReported annual benefits divided by annual hours, added on top. Submissions predating the expanded survey carry no benefits figure and are unchanged by the toggle.
Who's Behind This
My name is Matthew Behrens, MD. I am a practicing emergency medicine physician and a hobbyist developer in New York.
Get in Touch
Feel free to reach out with feedback, bugs, thoughts, or comments to info@moonlighterjobs.com