How much should a group practice owner pay themselves?
Price the two jobs you actually do, then add the third thing you own. Pay yourself market rate for your own clinical hours (what you would pay a senior clinician for those sessions), market rate for your management hours (what a practice manager would cost), and take ownership distributions from whatever margin remains after both. Surveys tell you what other owners take home; this formula tells you what your practice supports.
The three-part paycheck
Part 1, your clinical seat: you occupy a clinician seat like anyone on your roster. Price your own sessions at what you would pay a senior clinician to deliver them. If you see twelve clinical hours a week, that part of your pay is those hours at that rate, no discount for being the owner.
Part 2, your management seat: the scheduling, hiring, payroll, and firefighting hours are a second job, and it has a market price: what a practice manager would cost you for the same hours. Owners who price this at zero are not being frugal, they are hiding a salary the practice owes.
Part 3, ownership: only after both jobs are paid at market does the remainder become real margin, and distributions from it are the return on owning the thing, not compensation for working in it. If nothing is left after parts 1 and 2, the practice has a margin problem, and underpaying yourself was hiding it.
The Martyr Tax
Take the market value of both jobs (parts 1 and 2) and subtract what you actually paid yourself last month. A positive number is your Martyr Tax: the subsidy you personally donate to your own practice every month. It is the number the field’s martyr-culture jokes are hiding, and it is why survey answers mislead: an owner taking home a survey-respectable figure can still be paying a five-figure annual Martyr Tax. Compute yours in two minutes →
Why the survey numbers scatter so widely
Published owner-income figures run from under six figures to several times that, and they scatter because they average over different practice sizes, payer mixes, and, mostly, different amounts of unpaid owner labor. A take-home number with no formula behind it cannot tell you whether it came from a healthy margin or from an owner quietly working two unpaid jobs. The formula above is the same arithmetic either way, at three clinicians or fifteen.
A note on salary versus distribution
How the three parts get PAID (W-2 salary versus owner distributions, and what counts as reasonable compensation for an S-corp) is a tax-structure question with real rules attached. The formula tells you the economics; your CPA owns the tax mechanics, and the two conversations go better in that order.
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