If you’re like most hospitals, you’re wrestling with an urgent staffing shortage. In addition to competitive compensation, you most likely offer a relocation allowance to attract candidates from afar. But while you undoubtedly benchmark compensation, do you know how your hospital relocation allowance compares to the industry average?
With everything else going on in healthcare right now, this isn’t a subject you hear about very often. But in light of the current battle for talent, it really is an important one. If you want to attract quality talent, you need to be competitive across the board.
According to Merritt Hawkins’ 2021 Review of Physician and Advanced Practitioner Recruiting Incentives, 74% of the nearly 2,500 U.S. healthcare organizations studied offered a relocation allowance in 2020-2021.
For physicians, the average relocation allowance was $10,634. For nurse practitioners and physician assistants, the average was $8,363. While the highs and lows were wide-ranging, this should give you some idea where you stand.
To provide some context, we went back nearly a decade to an earlier edition of the same report, and discovered some interesting findings.
In 2012-2013, the average relocation allowance was $9,555 for physicians and $6,904 for nurse practitioners and physician assistants.
In other words, over the last eight years, the relocation allowance for physicians increased by 11.21%—less than 1-1/2% per year. Nurse practitioners and physician assistants—positions which have grown increasingly in-demand—fared better, reaping a relocation allowance increase of 21.13%.