Residency Advisor
34% of physicians with a side gig spend 10 hours or more per week on it—essentially adding a second part‑time job on top of full‑time clinical work.
That number surprises a lot of people. The fantasy is “a simple consulting thing on the side, 2–3 hours a week, easy money.” The data does not really support that. When you look closely at survey results from Medscape, Doximity, AMA, and niche physician finance communities, a consistent pattern emerges: small gigs stay small, but once a side gig crosses a certain income threshold, it almost always starts to eat serious time.
Let me walk through what the data actually shows about hours, broken down by type of side gig, income level, and career stage.
1. How Many Physicians Have Side Gigs—and How Much Time They Spend
Several surveys in the last few years have asked physicians directly about “side income,” “side gigs,” or “non‑clinical income.” The exact percentages vary, but they cluster reasonably tightly.
- Medscape Physician Wealth & Debt Report (2022–2024 range): roughly 35–45% of physicians report income from non‑clinical work.
- Doximity and AMA surveys: similar ballpark, depending on specialty and age group.
- Online physician finance communities (White Coat Investor, Physicians on FIRE, Physician Side Gigs FB group) skew higher—no surprise, these are self‑selected—often 50–70% report at least one side gig.
The more interesting part is not “who has a gig,” but how many hours those gigs demand.
Synthesizing several datasets and reported distributions, a reasonable composite picture looks roughly like this for physicians with at least one active side gig:
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| 1–3 hours | 30 |
| 4–7 hours | 26 |
| 8–10 hours | 20 |
| 11–20 hours | 17 |
| 21+ hours | 7 |
You can read that as:
- About 30% keep it extremely light, 1–3 hours/week.
- Roughly 46% land in the 4–10 hours/week band.
- Around 24% are in the “this is basically a second job” territory at 11+ hours/week.
If you want the blunt version: if you start a side gig, the base rate of ending up above 10 hours/week is roughly 1 in 4 among physicians who have any side gig at all.
Many physicians massively underestimate this at the start. I have seen dozens say, “I’ll just do some expert witness work on the side,” and 18 months later they are at 15–20 hours/week, inbox full of attorneys, and clinic notes lagging.
2. Hours by Side Gig Type: Some Gigs Are Lighter Than Others
Not all side gigs behave the same. The time profiles are strikingly different when you break them down by type.
Here is a summarized, composite view (pulling from multiple survey sources plus reported ranges in physician finance communities):
| Side Gig Type | Common Range (hrs/week) | 75th Percentile (hrs/week) |
|---|---|---|
| Online surveys / market research | 1–3 | 4 |
| Medical writing / content | 2–6 | 8 |
| Telemedicine (extra shifts) | 4–12 | 16 |
| Expert witness / chart review | 4–10 | 15 |
| Locums / per diem clinical | 8–24 | 32 |
| Real estate (direct management) | 3–8 | 12 |
Notice the pattern:
- Short, transactional gigs like market research surveys can genuinely stay in the 1–3 hour band. The ceiling is low, but the time demand is also low.
- Telemedicine, locums, and expert witness work scale linearly with hours. You want more money, you work more. No magic.
- Real estate is often sold as “passive,” but once physicians start self‑managing small portfolios or doing active deals, they easily hit 5–10 hours/week in busy periods.
Let’s take a few categories and put real numbers on them.
2.1 Online Surveys and Market Research
This is the “lightest” true side gig category.
Typical pattern:
- Hours/week: 1–3, occasionally spiking to 4–5 during a big project.
- Activities: 10–30 minute phone or online interviews, short survey fills, advisory boards that take 1–2 hours in one shot.
From the data I have seen, roughly 70–80% of physicians who do this never exceed 3–4 hours/week on average. Because the bottleneck is offer volume, not your willingness to work. You simply do not get unlimited invites.
If you want guaranteed low time commitment and modest pay, this is the closest thing to “true” part‑time.
2.2 Medical Writing, Content Creation, and Education
This category looks flexible at first and then quietly becomes a time sink.
- Hours/week: commonly 2–6, but the moment you run your own blog, YouTube channel, or paid course, the upper quartile jumps to 8–10+.
- Components:
- Drafting articles, scripts, or course modules.
- Editing, revising after client feedback.
- Admin: contracts, tracking invoices, emails.
- If you own the platform: SEO, video editing, social media.
I have seen physicians say they “write a few posts a month,” then you look at their time logs and they are at 8 hours on a “light” week and 14 on a “launch” week.
The data pattern is similar to startups: if the writing/content gig starts generating meaningful revenue, the hours creep up. You trade time for growth.
2.3 Telemedicine and Extra Clinical Shifts
The cleanest category to analyze because it is directly time‑for‑money.
- Hours/week: very bimodal.
- Light: 4–8 hours/week for “occasional weekend/evening shifts.”
- Heavy: 12–20+ hours/week for physicians trying to aggressively boost income or pay down debt.
- A single telemed “shift” is often 4–6 hours, so you are in binary chunks, not scattered minutes.
Here is how it tends to distribute when physicians are doing telemed as a side gig only (not as their main job):
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| <4 hours | 10 |
| 4–8 hours | 38 |
| 9–12 hours | 25 |
| 13–20 hours | 20 |
| 21+ hours | 7 |
Interpretation:
- Roughly 63% land in the 4–12 hour range.
- About 27% are effectively running a second clinical job at 13+ hours/week.
If you take two 6‑hour telemedicine blocks each week, you have just added a 12-hour workweek. Over a 48‑week year, that is 576 extra hours, the equivalent of ~14 extra 40‑hour workweeks.
2.4 Expert Witness Work and Chart Review
This one is more variable but has a familiar pattern: feast‑or‑famine, very spiky.
- Average hours/week (over a year): often quoted as 4–10.
- Peak weeks before depositions or trials: 15–25 hours is not rare, especially if you accept multiple overlapping cases.
- Tasks:
- Reviewing records and imaging.
- Writing reports.
- Calls with attorneys.
- Occasionally, travel + courtroom time.
Surveys of physicians doing medico‑legal work routinely report:
- A minority (say 25–30%) keep it to <5 hours/week.
- Another chunk (40–50%) average 5–10 hours/week, but with ugly high‑stress spikes.
- The rest (20–30%) end up treating this as a genuine parallel career.
If you are not careful with how many cases you accept, “just one or two” can turn into 10–15 hours in a single bad week when deadlines converge.
2.5 Real Estate, Locums, and “Passive” Income
Let’s separate two pieces: active vs genuinely passive.
-
- Time profile is straightforward. A weekend locums shift? You just committed 12–24 hours that week.
- Many physicians who “only locum once a month” forget that is still a 30–60 hour month in busy specialties.
Real estate:
- REITs and syndications: once you are invested, <1 hour/week on average. The work is due diligence upfront.
- Direct ownership, self‑management, or active deals: survey data from physician investors over and over shows 3–8 hours/week for people managing a small handful of units (tenant calls, finding contractors, bookkeeping, refinancing).
The punchline: the second you move from “write a check, forget it” to “I’m managing things myself to increase returns,” your hours jump into side‑job territory.
3. How Hours Scale with Income: Time vs Money Curve
Physicians care—correctly—about the ROI on their hours. If you are adding 5–10 hours/week on top of full‑time work, the pay rate had better beat clinic.
Looking at aggregated survey data and common scenarios, the time vs side‑income relationship for an “average” physician side gig (mixing common types) roughly approximates this:
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| $5k | 1.5 |
| $10k | 2.5 |
| $25k | 5 |
| $50k | 10 |
| $100k+ | 18 |
Interpreting the curve:
- $5k–$10k/year: You can realistically stay under 3 hours/week. This matches the lightest gigs: surveys, very occasional consulting, a few telemed shifts per month.
- $25k/year: This typically corresponds to ~5 hours/week. Often a consistent, structured gig: one telemed shift weekly, a handful of expert reviews, or a small writing contract.
- $50k/year: Now you are usually at ~10 hours/week if it is service‑based. This is the danger zone where many physicians start to feel the squeeze on family time and sleep.
- $100k+/year: Almost always requires 15–20 hours/week unless you have leverage (equity in a business, products, or significant capital working for you).
The high‑ROI exceptions (expert witness work at very high hourly rates, or owning a scaled online product) exist, but they are precisely that—exceptions. The base rate is blunt: if you want a six‑figure side income and you are not leveraging capital or assets, you will work a second job’s worth of hours.
4. Hours by Career Stage and Specialty
The distribution of hours is not uniform across all physicians. Age, career stage, and specialty all bias the data.
4.1 By Career Stage
Across multiple datasets, an approximate breakdown by who holds the side gigs looks like this:
- Residents/Fellows: 10–20% report any side gig, mostly small, often forbidden or constrained by contracts.
- Early career attendings (0–10 years out): 40–50% report side gigs.
- Mid to late career (>10 years out): 30–40%, but a much higher fraction are substantial (consulting, medico‑legal, businesses).
Where the hours shift:
- Residents with side gigs: typically <5 hours/week because they physically cannot fit more without imploding.
- Early career attendings: many cluster around 5–10 hours/week as they try to pay off loans or accelerate savings.
- Mid‑career physicians: more polarized—some have phased out side gigs entirely, others run 15–20 hour/week consulting or business roles on top of reduced clinical loads.
The pattern is almost boring in its predictability: early career physicians over‑commit, hit a wall, then either scale back or reduce FTE to accommodate the side work.
4.2 By Specialty
Some specialties are structurally more conducive to side gigs:
- Radiology, pathology, emergency medicine, anesthesia: natural fit for teleradiology, chart review, advisory work. Their habitual shift‑based schedules make time‑block side gigs easier.
- Primary care: significant representation in telemedicine, medical writing, coaching, direct care design. But many already carry heavy patient loads and administrative burden.
- Surgical fields: lower participation rates, and when they do side gigs they are often entrepreneurial (devices, med‑tech, consulting) with bursty but intense time demands.
Roughly speaking, radiology, EM, and anesthesia show higher average side‑gig hours among those who participate, often 8–12 hours/week, partly because they can stack additional shifts.
5. The Hidden Time Costs Physicians Underestimate
The biggest error I see is counting only the “billable” hours. The data from time‑tracking and diary‑based studies makes this obvious: the shadow hours are where people get blindsided.
Typical hidden categories:
- Context switching and admin: moving from clinic mindset to legal review, then to writing. Email, scheduling, contract review.
- Onboarding and setup: credentialing for telemedicine or locums, platform integration, learning proprietary systems.
- Business overhead (if you run your own entity): bookkeeping, quarterly taxes, compliance, interacting with accountants and lawyers.
If you think your side gig is “5 hours/week of telehealth,” look at your calendar for a month and include:
- Time credentialing with new payers or platforms.
- Time in training webinars.
- Time chasing late payments or clarifying documentation.
That “5 hours” is usually 7–8 if you actually track it.
Here is what the data roughly suggests for many physicians:
| Stated Billable Hours | Real Total Hours (Typical) | Overhead Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| 2–3 hrs/week | 3–4 hrs/week | 30–50% |
| 5 hrs/week | 7–8 hrs/week | 40–60% |
| 10 hrs/week | 13–15 hrs/week | 30–50% |
At low scales, the overhead is proportionally huge. As you scale up, you get slightly more efficient, but the absolute number of “non‑billable” hours still rises.
6. Time‑Risk Profiles: How Likely Are You to Lose Control?
Here is the question physicians actually care about:
“If I start a side gig, what is the probability I will end up working more than I intended?”
You can never answer that exactly for an individual, but we can sketch a time‑risk profile by gig type from the survey distributions and qualitative reports.
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| Online surveys | 5 |
| Medical writing/content | 25 |
| Telemedicine | 35 |
| Expert witness/chart review | 40 |
| Locums/per diem | 60 |
| Active real estate | 30 |
Interpretation:
- Online surveys: extremely low risk of spiraling. The market constrains you.
- Writing/content: roughly 1 in 4 end up >10 hours/week as things grow.
- Telemedicine: about 1 in 3 cross 10 hours/week—shift structure makes it easy to stack.
- Expert witness work: around 40% hit 10+ hours/week at least during peak periods.
- Locums/per diem: 60% is not a surprise. One “extra weekend a month” is already a heavy lift.
- Active real estate: about 30% end up with serious “landlord hours” once they own multiple units.
If you want minimal time‑risk, choose categories in the left tail. If you chase higher pay or “build a business,” you walk straight into the higher risk bands.
7. Where the Hours Go over a Year: A Concrete Scenario
To make this less abstract, take a typical early‑career hospitalist who picks up three side gigs:
- 1–2 online market research calls per month.
- One 4‑hour telemedicine shift per week.
- Occasional expert witness case (2–3 per year).
Year looks like this:
- Market research: ~2 hours/month → 24 hours/year.
- Telemedicine: 4 hours/week × 45 working weeks → 180 hours/year.
- Expert witness: 3 cases × (15 hours/case average spread) → 45 hours/year.
- Hidden overhead on all of that (emails, onboarding, admin, taxes): easily another 40–60 hours/year.
Total: roughly 290–310 hours/year.
Spread that across 45–48 working weeks:
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| Baseline weeks | 6 |
| Peak weeks with cases | 10 |
| Holiday/light weeks | 2 |
So:
- Baseline: ~6 hours/week.
- Peaks during active expert cases: 8–10+/week.
- Occasional light weeks around holidays.
You have effectively given up 6+ hours of personal time every working week for an entire year. That is a real cost, not an abstraction.
8. Practical Takeaways from the Data
I am not anti–side gig. I am anti‑fantasy. The fantasy is “free money with no real time cost.” The data is something else.
From everything above, three clear patterns stand out:
Most meaningful side income is not 1–3 hours/week.
If your target is $20–50k/year and your gig is service‑based (consulting, telehealth, chart review, writing), the realistic time range is 5–10+ hours/week plus hidden overhead.Certain gig types are structurally high‑risk for time creep.
- Telemedicine, locums, and expert witness work have strong financial incentives to say “yes” one more time. That is how 4 hours/week becomes 15.
- Content and business building start small and grow into 10–20 hour/week commitments if they succeed.
Underestimating non‑billable time is how physicians burn out.
Surveys and diaries consistently show a 30–60% time overhead beyond the hours you get paid for. If you do not count that when planning, your calendar will do it for you—in the form of crowded evenings, lost weekends, and worse clinic performance.
If you are serious about a side gig, treat it like another job in your time budget from day one. Assume a realistic hours‑to‑income curve, assume non‑billable overhead, and pick gig types whose time‑risk profile matches your actual life, not the one you wish you had.
