Where the rubber meets the road: How much does the average medical transcriptionist
really make?
You'll see numbers on the Internet which are all over the map about how much a person can make doing medical transcription and/or medical editing. Much of it is inflated...especially when it comes to the newly graduated transcriptionist. I heard a very wise gentleman say one time "Never build your lifestyle around money you don't have." In other words, don't begin to inflate your lifestyle based on projections you read or are told about as to the high end of the wage scale for transcription.
The thing I stress about transcription as a career is that it is about as secure as jobs get these days (there will always be doctors, hospitals, clinics and sick people and information that needs to be documented), it offers more flexibility than most jobs you can do, and you can work at home, which is a huge plus. The income will be steady, but it won't be tremendous when you are first starting out. Many of the national companies pay the new transcriptionist at a lower rate than a "veteran." This is unfortunate, but it's no different than any other job I've ever done. You have to prove yourself to get the wage increase.
Of course your typing speed is a significant factor in how much you can make. If you have blazingly fast fingers, you'll earn more. But if those blazing fingers are not matched with a skilled and trained brain, you can type fast but you will not type well...and it will not be long before your accuracy scores will show that you need to slow down. But if you are an average typist (or even slower than average) there are ways to boost your speed. Text expansion programs are one way. Your school or company may already have a built in program, and you can use this or other software (most of the expansion software programs are written to be able to be used in most any setting regardless of the proprietory software you are using for your job). See my page on "production aids"for more information about that.
Another big factor in how much you can make is whether you are doing "straight typing" (that is, actually typing the report yourself) or medical editing. The industry has decided that medical editing work is not worth near as much as straight typing. There are logical sounding reasons behind this conclusion, but for the medical transcriptionist, especially the veteran transcriptionist, that means a cut in salary from what you could make with straight typing. Straight typing jobs are getting hard and harder to find, although you may find some jobs where you are doing a little of both. See my page on "medical editing" for more information about that.
How is a transcriptionist paid?
Well, that depends on if you are self-employed (or an independent contractor [often called an "IC"] ) or working for someone else. Below are some different ways a transcriptionist can be paid.
HOURLY WAGE: If you go to work in a clinic or hospital more than likely you will be paid by the hour like any other employee. When you first start as a new employee you may be paid less just because you are new, or because you are new to the company AND new to transcription. More than likely you will start at no lower than about $8-9 per hour. A decent hourly wage for an experienced transcriptionist is $12/hr or more.
SALARIED: I've not seen too many transcription jobs that are salaried (paid a flat amount per month), so I don't think you will run into this situation.
PAID BY THE LINE: This is the most common form of payment for work performed in the transcription world, so I'll go into more detail here. Again, things will be different depending on whether you are self-employed or an employee of someone else.
A. Working for yourself, i.e., self-employed or independent contractor: If you are getting your own clients and working for yourself you have to take into consideration that you will be paying your own income tax, Social Security(FICA) and Medicare tax. You will discover that your Social Security tax is actually 1-1/2 times what it would be if you were an employee of someone else. This at first sounds unfair, but remember that as an employee your employer matches your Social Security, but as a self-employed person YOU are the only one putting money into your Social Security account, so the government asks you to put in 1-1/2 times the amount (instead of double the amount with you and your employer's part) so that you don't fall too far behind in your account at retirement. Plus if you want medical/dental/life insurance you will have to buy these yourself.
And you will have additional expenses of your own equipment and software, gas (if you have to pick up and deliver your work), supplies like paper, printer ink and maintenance. You may not have some of these expenses if your employer allows you to send your work in using software like PCAnywhere, or something like FTP Today, or even send your work in via e-mail.
As a self-employed person you can deduct many of these expenses, but you still need to keep these costs in mind as you figure how much to charge your client. Many self-employed transcriptionists I know are charging anywhere from 15 to 30 cents per 65-character line. You will need to get yourself a program for character counting so you can bill your client accurately (and by the way, the line counter in Microsoft Word is not accurate enough for billing purposes).
B. Working for someone else as an employee: Most transcription companies, small to large, pay by the 65-character line. They have a program which figures this up for you. As a newbie transcriptionist you may be paid much less per line than the veteran. What I've seen for a newbie is about 6 cents per line for straight transcription. Average is about 8 cents per line for the veteran. If you can get more than 8 cents per line, that's a good wage in today's economy.
At 8 cents per line, what can you realistically make?
Many per-line companies have a minimum number of lines you must do per day, per week or per pay period. And they may combine this minimum line count with a minimum number of hours you must work in a pay period. This can vary widely, and depends if you are full time or part time. A general number for a full-time employee seems to be about a minimum of 12,000 lines in a 2-week pay period and 36 to 40 hours per week. Some companies may let you get those lines and hours in any way you want...for instance maybe you want to work 12-hour days on the weekend and only a little during the week days, or another combination that fits YOUR schedule. But with the client's (the clinic or hospital) requirement for rapid turnaround, sometimes you have to fit more to THEIR schedule than the other way around. Don't be shy about telling your potential employer up front what days and hours you would prefer to work. They will often choose a client to meet your requirements rather than the other way around.
If you are part time, some companies may ask for as little as 4,000 lines in a 2-week pay period and often 20 to 24 hours per week.
I worked for a regional transcription company one time who had a minimum of 800 lines per day but paid hourly. Another company wanted X-number of minutes per day instead of X-number of lines per day. Another clinic assigned you certain physicians and you worked until you had completed that day's work, however long or short that was. So you can see that the combination of hours, lines, pay are many.
A fairly high amount for a day for most transcriptionists would be 100 minutes a day (although there are super transcriptionists who can do double that in a day!!...which is not me. :o)
How long it take to do X-lines or X-minutes?
You can figure that on average the ratio is this: for every minute of dictation, it takes 4 minutes to type it, or a 1:4 ratio. If you are a very rapid typist, or have easy clients, or do the same client so you get used to them, that ratio can go lower, but don't ever figure that the ratio will be 1:1. It won't.
So let's figure some $$ for 100 minutes of dictation. By our ratio above this should take you about 400 minutes to type. That's about 6-1/2 hours (assuming everything works well and you don't need to stop to look a lot of things up or have many interruptions).
I've found that the ratio of minutes to lines is about 1:10. In other words, 1 minute of dictation equals about 10 lines. So 100 minutes of dictation would be about 1,000 lines. This is just an estimate, and it tends to be a little on the low side of what the line-counting programs will come up with, but I would rather estimate low and be pleasantly surprised when I got my check rather than the other way around!
If you are paid 8 cents per line, that means you would earn .08 x 1000 or $80.00 gross for those 1,000 lines. If you did 12,000 lines in a 2-week pay period your earnings would be .08 x 12,000 or $966.40 gross for basically half a month, or double that for the month for approximately $1932.80 for 4 weeks.
If you are paid every 2 weeks, that's 26 pay periods in a year x $966.40 per 2 weeks = $25,126.40 gross annually. I won't try to calculate what your net would be, since I wouldn't have any way of knowing what your filing category is (with dependents, etc.).
So approximately $25,000 gross annually would be what you could expect for full time after you have typed for a while.
If we figure that at 6 cents per line for the newbie, that works out to about $720.00 for a 2-week period x 26 pay periods = $18,720 gross annually. But of course you shouldn't have to stay at 6 cents per line for too long before getting an increase. Note: These figures are for actual typing, not medical editing which has it's own rates. See below.
What about the pay for medical editing?
Unfortunately most of the national companies have switched over to voice recognition/automated speech recognition (ASR) and have turned typing transcriptionists into medical editors who do little typing and mostly proofing of text on their computer screen. Unfortunately, the national companies are where the majority of MT jobs are. And also unfortunately the national companies have decided that medical editing does not take as much skill, and that you can produce many more lines in your shift than straight typing, so they are usually offering 50% to 60% of the per-line wage for regular typing.
I go into more detail about my own experience as a medical editor on my page "Medical Editing" (click on that above) but suffice it to say I don't agree that it takes less skill and deserves less money. The Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (formerly American Association of Medical Transcriptionists) agrees with me. See what their official stand is on my page "Medical Editing."
But for the time being the national companies are paying about 60% of the straight typing line amount of 8 cents per line on average So at 60% that figures out to be 4.8 cents per line for medical editing. The companies claim that you can do about 30% more lines editing than typing. I personally didn't find that to be the case. Most days my line count was well below my regular lines, and on a very good day it would be the same. But even if we figure you DID do 30% more lines, you would still be losing money. See the calculations below.
Medical editing pay calculation based on what the national companies say you will make: Let's take those original 12,000 lines in a pay period: 30% more = 3,600 more lines or 15,600 lines in a pay period. At the 60% reduced rate of 4.8 cents per line, that's 0.48 x 15,600 or $748.80 per 2-week pay period. Compare this to the $966.40 to type 12,000 lines at .08 per line.
Summing things up:
So it's really hard to say what your take-home pay will really be since you could be doing all typing, all editing or a combination of both. You could be a blazingly fast typist with discipline of iron, or an average typist who lets herself be interrupted throughout the day. But hopefully the information above will give SOME idea of what you can earn.
I still highly recommend transcription as a career for anyone, but especially for single moms, people who have been injured on their previous job and forced to find a new, less physically demanding career, etc., women whose circumstances have suddenly changed (through divorce, death, etc.) and find they need to go back to work after many years out of the work force or maybe going to work for the first time. Please do look into some of the schools I recommend (see my page on my top 3 choices) and then look into transcription as a real career option.
