Hours Per Week Doctors Spend Charting at Home by Specialty
- Nisha Mehta, MD
- Mar 27
- 9 min read
In our how much doctors make by specialty series, we’ve looked at how many hours doctors work per week, as this is one of the factors that can heavily influence physician salaries. In that piece, we didn’t include the number of hours charting, as that had been collected in a separate data point in our physician salary and compensation database, which we offer as a free resource to members of our online communities for physicians. However, as this significantly contributes to the amount of time working per week, we wanted to supply data for these hours as well. It’s been clear that charting responsibilities can add a significant burden to physicians’ schedules and may increase physician burnout. Below, we assess averages and trends for how many hours a week doctors spend charting at home by specialty and by practice environment, and offer some tools and resources to help physicians looking to decrease this aspect of administrative burden.
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How the average number of hours doctors spend charting at home were determined
For our analysis below, we used the anonymous contributions to our salary and compensation negotiation database that were provided by members of our online physician community from mid-2023 through early-2025. In our compensation survey for the database, we asked members, on average over the past year, how many hours a week they spent charting at home.
These hours were not included in the average number of hours worked a week they also reported, and that we have used in our article on how many hours physicians work per week by specialty, but can be used in complement with that article to find the total average number of hours worked per week when including charting.
To be included in this article, we filtered the 6000+ data points to only include data from physicians that:
Work 1 FTE or higher (full time physicians only)
Are attending physicians (resident and fellow data was not used)
Opted to answer the question about charting hours (this was an optional question on our survey)
Our data on hours spent charting at home per week are reported in one hour increments from 1 to 5 hours a week, then in ranges which include: less than one hour; 6-9 hours; 10-14 hours; 15-19 hours; and 20+ hours. Doctors can also report that they don’t spend any additional time charting at home (“none”). To assess an average, in the case of hours reported in a range of intervals, we used the middle of the range, i.e. 7.5 hours a week, or 12 hours a week. For our top range of 20+ hours a week, we used 20 in the calculations below. Averages were rounded to the nearest 0.25 hour.
There is always room for reporting errors in self-reported data, but we hope the data below can help physicians understand trends in their specialties and practice environments. Also note that smaller specialties had fewer data points, allowing more room for outliers influencing averages.
What is the average number of hours a week doctors spend charting at home by specialty?
We started by looking at the average hours worked a week by specialty for 1 FTE physicians:
Addiction Medicine: 1.5 hours a week
Allergy and Immunology: 2.75 hours a week
Anesthesiology: 1 hour a week
Cardiology: 3.25 hours a week
Critical Care Medicine: 1.5 hours a week
Dermatology: 3.5 hours a week
Emergency Medicine: 1.5 hours a week
Endocrinology: 3.75 hours a week
Family Medicine: 4.25 hours a week
Gastroenterology: 3 hours a week
Geriatrics: 4.25 hours a week
Hematology/Oncology: 5.75 hours a week
Hospice/Palliative Care: 4 hours a week
Hospital Medicine: 2.5 hours a week
Infectious Disease: 5.75 hours a week
Internal Medicine: 3.75 hours a week
Nephrology: 3.25 hours a week
Neurology: 4.25 hours a week
Obstetrics/Gynecology: 3.5 hours a week
Occupational Medicine: 0.25 hours a week
Ophthalmology: 1 hour a week
Orthopedics: 3.5 hours a week
Otolaryngology (ENT): 3 hours a week
Pain Management: 2 hours a week
Pathology: 1.25 hours a week
Pediatrics: 3 hours a week
Physiatry (PM&R): 3.5 hours a week
Psychiatry: 2.25 hours a week
Pulmonology: 2.75 hours a week
Radiation Oncology: 3 hours a week
Radiology: 0.75 hours a week
Rheumatology: 3.5 hours a week
Surgery, Bariatric: 4.25 hours a week
Surgery, Breast: 4 hours a week
Surgery, Colon & Rectal: 2.5 hours a week
Surgery, General: 2.5 hours a week
Surgery, Neurological: 4.75 hours a week
Surgery, Plastic & Reconstructive: 3.5 hours a week
Surgery, Trauma: 3 hours a week
Surgery, Vascular: 2.75 hours a week
Urology: 2.5 hours a week
Below, we break this data down a little further, then cover other factors that can impact how much time a physician spends charting at home.
Which medical specialties spend the most time charting at home?
The 10 specialties that reported spending the most time charting at home, on average, every week were:
Our hematologist/oncologists and infectious disease physicians reported the highest average hours spent charting at home at 5.75 hours a week.
Both endocrinologists and internal medicine doctors averaged 3.75 hours a week, so you’ll see 11 specialties included in the chart above.
Interestingly, the specialties which see the most patients per hour did not necessarily correlate with those that spent the most time at home charting. However, this could be easily explained by the level of complexity and documentation needs / depth of the notes of the patient visits in the specialties that spend more hours charting. Certain specialties may be more prone to having templated notes or more straightforward 1 issue rather than multiple issue visits, or may tend to have more support staff to help with charting, etc.
Which medical specialties spend the least time charting at home?
The 10 specialties that reporting spending the least time charting at home, on average, every week were:
Our occupational medicine physicians reported the least amount of time charting at home at 0.25 hours a week.
Not surprisingly, many of the specialties on this list are those where encounters occur during shifts, inpatient care, or visits (or in the case of radiology, interpretations) where documentation needs to completed at the time of the visit.
What other factors may go into how much time a physician spends charting at home?
There are of course many other factors that go into how much time is spent charting at home such as:
Average complexity of patients seen
Average number of problems discussed in a visit
How much support staff that is available to help with charting, including MAs, dedicated scribes, residents/fellows, PAs or NPs, etc.
The availability of an AI scribe
Administrative time
While we were able to support these assumptions based on the notes made in the submitted answers, it is hard to quantitatively compare these. We urge physicians in our online communities for doctors to make apples to apples comparisons by looking at the source data for our physician salary, compensation, and negotiation databases.
How can physicians reduce the amount of time they spend charting at home?
If you find yourself spending hours every week charting at home, it may be time to reassess what tools you have at your disposal and your workflow during your day to see if you can reduce your time spent charting. A few tips we have for doctors regarding charting based on feedback from physicians in our online communities include:
See if you can optimize your patient scheduling template to provide time for charting during your normal work day. This might include setting aside a specific block(s) of time for charting between appointments, or optimizing time such as patient cancellations or late arrivals to get charting done throughout the day.
Try to set a goal to close notes out before you leave for the day, as this can cut down on additional time picking the task back up at home.
Assess what information you’re including in your charts and see if there are any excessive details that aren’t needed for the patient’s medical record.
Check what templates you’re using for your notes and see if you can create custom ones that include common information to help reduce the time spent on each individual chart.
Consider using speech-to-text software or an AI scribe to help automate your charting.
Utilize medical scribes, medical assistants, or other support staff to help assist with inputting medical histories, visit notes, medication lists, etc.
We have a few resources, including special perks for our members, that might help you reduce your time spent charting:
Abridge, founded by one of our physician members, offers PSG members 50% off AI scribing services, bringing the price down to only $99 dollars per month. You can try this free for one month without inputting payment information through our affiliate link with code PSG50, after which you will receive the 50% off price.
We have partnered with Charting Champions, an online physician-only program founded by PSG member Dr. Sarah Smith to help you complete your charting after every patient, run closer to time, manage interruptions and empty those in-baskets as fast as possible. PSG members get $150 off through our affiliate link.
Edge Health provides college educated remote employees that work full time for your practice. They perform tasks such as primary or secondary phone support, billing, claims, insurance verifications, scribing, social media, and other tasks. Practices tend to use the services in multiple different ways. They are trained prior to starting in your office, and the cost is substantially less than what you would pay an in-house employee. To learn more about Edge's services and schedule a demo, and receive $500 off each of your first 3 months, connect through our affiliate link.
GSD Associates provides full-time and part-time virtual assistants for a comprehensive range of administrative, sales, marketing, and management services, with a focus on enhancing efficiency and productivity. Their mission is to streamline and optimize business management for physicians and other professionals, offering efficient solutions that free up valuable time and resources. Use our PSG partnership inquiry form for 10% off your first year of services.
Conclusion
Not surprisingly, the number of hours spent charting per week varies significantly by specialty, with those with more complex visits that may involve more in depth discussions and decision making processes or which may address multiple issues in one visit spending more time charting. Other factors, such as the practice environment, may also factor in, as certain practice environments may see more complex patients. Additional staffing, such as having a medical assistant, as well as tools such as an AI scribe, can also help reduce the amount of time that physicians spend charting and the amount of work they take home with them after hours. In the next iteration of our database, we’d love to explore how these numbers change amongst physicians who have implemented AI scribing into their workflow.
We hope the data above can give you an idea of expectations and a sense of what to expect for your specialty. When negotiating your employment agreement for a new job opportunity, discuss the expected schedule and required hours, as well as what an “average” day looks like. Get a sense for what support your prospective employer has for charting needs such as the use of scribes or AI scribes, or dedicated admin time, to gauge how much time you might spend charting at home.
If you’re looking for a new career opportunity for a better balance, we have a job board to help!
And if you need help as you navigate a potential job change, a contact review attorney can often assist and guide you through the process.
Additional salary and career resources for doctors
Explore our related articles and resources on doctor compensation and salaries:
If you need guidance on negotiating your next contract to optimize your work week, check out:
If you haven’t recently, please take a few minutes to contribute! The data provided is used only for the purpose of our database to help physicians like yourself negotiate better compensation by helping provide salary transparency with relevant data. The data is completely anonymous and is only available to members of our Physician Side Gigs Facebook group. Contribution links can be found on our compensation data for physicians page.