Private Practice Partnership Tracks: What Determines Timelines for Years to Partner
- Nisha Mehta, MD
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
Becoming a partner in a private practice is a goal for many doctors and a huge milestone in a physician’s career, and we often see questions in our physician communities from members negotiating contracts about whether their proposed partnership track is fair. As we’ve seen in our how much doctors make by specialty series, as owners in the business, private practice partners often earn significantly more than W2 employees. This is both because they may get to keep a greater percentage of their collections, and because they share in the ancillary revenue streams of the practice, such as practice real estate, ownership in ambulatory surgery centers, product sales, and income generated by employed clinicians. The partnership track can vary depending on different factors, including the specialty, type of practice, and geographic market. Along with salary and compensation data, our members include information about the partnership track at their employer in our physician salary and compensation database, which we offer as a free resource to members of our online communities for physicians. Using this data, we break down the average years to partnership by specialty below, then look at other factors that can influence the path to partnership.
Disclaimers/Disclosures: This information is derived from our physician salary and compensation databases, but is subject to self-reporting errors and availability of relevant data points from our online communities. This information is provided for educational purposes only, and is aimed at advocating for individual physicians. It is not intended to be used for collective bargaining; please see additional disclosures and disclaimers on the physician salary data pages. Please also do your own research before making any decisions based on the information provided. We are not formal financial, legal, or tax professionals and do not provide individualized advice. You should consult these as appropriate. We highly recommend having your physician employment agreement reviewed by a physician contract review attorney to ensure you have the most up to date and relevant information for your specific situation.
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How the average years to partnership were determined
For our analysis below, we used the 6,500+ 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, if applicable, how many years is the partnership track at their current employer.
For contributions reported as a range (i.e. 1-2 years), we used the middle of the range (i.e. 1.5 years) to help assess an average for the specialty. Averages were rounded to the nearest 0.25 year.
If a solo private practice owner reported “0” years, we removed their contribution so as not to skew results. Starting a solo private practice can be the quickest partnership track for those interested, but it comes with more inherent risks as you assume all responsibilities for the business and financial sides of the practice.
Explore related PSG resources:
Average years to partnership for doctors by specialty
In general, the average years to partnership ranged from 2-4 years. While this is not much of a range, if you are an employee in a private practice, you know that an additional year or sometimes even a few months can seem like forever, given that earning potential jumps so much, and the growing trend towards private equity acquisitions that could jeopardize your ability to become a partner or get a buyout when others around you may be getting one. Those seeking partnership usually want to lock it down right away.
Breaking this down by specialty, we saw:
Anesthesiology: 2.5 years
Cardiology: 2.75 years
Dermatology: 2.25 years
Emergency Medicine: 3.25 years
Family Medicine: 2.25 years
Gastroenterology: 2.25 years
Hematology/Oncology: 2.5 years
Hospital Medicine: 3.25 years
Internal Medicine: 2.75 years
Nephrology: 3 years
Obstetrics & Gynecology: 2.75 years
Ophthalmology: 2.5 years
Orthopedics: 2 years
Otolaryngology (ENT): 2 years
Pathology: 3.25 years
Pediatrics: 2.75 years
Psychiatry: 3 years
Radiology: 2 years
Surgery, General: 2.5 years
Urology: 2.25 years
If you do not see your specialty listed above, we did not have enough data points to feel confident projecting an average. To see your specialty added in future updates, please consider contributing your anonymous physician salary and negotiation information today if you haven’t already for the year.
Why might specialty influence length of partnership track?
There’s a lot of things that go into this, but some factors cited by our community members include:
How many hard assets practices in a specialty tend to have
How many revenue streams and how much passive income practices in a specialty tend to have
How hard it is to recruit new physicians and the bargaining power that applicants have
How much time it takes to build a practice in a specialty to the point where you are profitable
How much overhead practices in the specialty tend to have that needs to be split amongst partners
Other factors that can influence the length of the partnership track for doctors
Other factors can influence a physician’s path to partnership along with specialty, including:
Your experience level and whether you can bring patients with you: Established physicians may be able to negotiate an accelerated partnership track compared to doctors who have recently completed training, especially if they are able to bring existing patients to the practice with them.
Your productivity: Many physicians in our survey mentioned you could request partnership earlier than the stated timeline if you were highly profitable and/or exceeding expectations.
Practice size and structure: Larger practices are more likely to have a formal partnership track that is clearly outlined, while smaller practices may be more flexible about partnership tracks based on their current circumstances. Additionally, practices that have lots of ancillary revenue streams or hard assets, which mean that the practice needs more time to offset their costs of bringing you on while keeping the buy-in amount reasonable. On the flip side, they may need partners to help share in the costs of overhead
Who the current partners are: This can be especially important in smaller practices with fewer partners, where each individual partner has more say and stake. A practice with a physician planning on retiring in a year or two may offer a partnership opportunity far sooner than a small practice that just brought on its newest partner last year. Additionally, practices with older physicians may feel that they put more time into building the practice and therefore feel employed physicians should put in more sweat equity before getting partnership. Some physicians point out that they’ve seen cases where older partners may have an ulterior motive in delaying partnership because they’re anticipating selling the practice to private equity and don’t want to decrease the size of the slice of the pie that they receive.
Buy-in requirements and affordability: There is usually some balance between sweat equity and monetary equity. Many partnerships require a monetary buy-in, and practices can structure partnership buy-ins however they desire, so your personal finances can also impact when you can feasibly accept a partnership offer. We cover buy-in structures in our article on assessing a private practice partnership opportunity, and our physician salary and negotiation database includes data on reported partnership buy-ins amounts.
With the different contributing factors, we always recommend comparing apples-to-apples when you are assessing an opportunity. We offer our salary and negotiation data to physicians for free to help them find comparable situations to theirs. (Note, you must be a member of our online physician community to access the database.)
If you are in talks for a new career opportunity and are reviewing a contract with terms for partnership included, we recommend working with a contract review attorney to make sure all the details are covered and any potential red flags are addressed. An attorney may even be able to help you negotiate better partnership terms, depending on the situation.
Conclusion
Ultimately, partnership tracks remain highly variable from job to job, and even from specialty to specialty. Understand the history of the practice, how they’ve conventionally offered partnership, and what factors go into when you will be offered partnership. Also make sure you ask about people who weren’t offered partnership and why that was. Make sure your expectations as well as their expectations are realistic by looking at data from prior physicians that were offered partnership. If your partnership track varies significantly from others in your specialty, ask why this is, and as always, leverage your own strengths to negotiate.
Additional salary and career resources for physicians in private practice
If you need guidance on negotiating a potential partnership opportunity, check out:
If you are looking for a new career opportunity, explore the PSG job board for current opportunities, including ones that offer partnership tracks.
Explore our related articles and resources on doctor compensation and salaries:
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 and partnership deals by helping provide transparency with relevant data. Contribution links can be found on our compensation data for physicians page.