The Medical Transcription Salary: What You Can Earn
To know the truth about a medical transcription salary, you must first realize there is no standard rate for any medical transcription salary. Even making an estimation of the average medical transcriptionist’s earnings can be difficult because, as with most professions, one person’s salary will differ widely from the next.
About the best we can do is an educated guess. To accomplish this, we look at the average starting wage followed by the expected maximum earnings anticipated for a medical transcriptionist. Data from the United States Department of Labor from May of 2006 shows the average earnings for a medical transcriptionist will vary between $10 to $20 an hour. Given this, we can get a general idea of just how much the average medical transcriptionist’s income should be.
Other factors which influence the medical transcription salary will include the type of workplace where one is employed. Among the various medical transcriptionist employers, diagnostic laboratories rank as one of the highest paying with an average salary of $16 per hour.
The health care facilities paying the least will usually be physicians’ offices, which may offer somewhere in the range of $14 per hour. In order to obtain the highest-paying opportunities, working as a medical transcription independent contractor will often give you the ability to earn as much as $20 per hour, sometimes more.
Work experience will also affect each individual’s salary. Experience, as in any career field, is key to achieving the highest income level. An inexperienced transcriptionist can expect to start with a salary of about $9 per hour. However, the experienced transcriptionist can expect to earn a salary from $15 to more than $20 per hour. As your experience and skill level grow, your medical transcription salary will be limited only by your willingness to work hard, and you should be able to almost write your own paycheck.
Your medical transcription salary could be computed in any number of ways, and this will affect your salary as well. Medical transcriptionists are sometimes paid by the hour regardless of the amount of work they do or how many hours they work. Others are paid based on the number of lines and sometimes minutes of dictation they transcribe per day. In order to make the best employment decision for yourself, you will need to weigh the advantages and disadvantages in the way your salary is determined.
As has been stated prior, the medical transcription salary varies greatly based on the skill and experience level of each transcriptionist. Anyone who is able to work quickly, efficiently, and is willing to put in long hours will likely earn a larger salary than their peers. Therefore, an experienced, highly skilled and motivated medical transcriptionist working full time could expect to earn $50,000 per year or more.
The medical transcription salary should not be judged by the dollar figure alone. When compared with many other professions, the medical transcriptionist enjoys much more flexibility in scheduling and in other areas as well. That can be worth just as much, perhaps more, than the income earned.
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May 18th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
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