Are You Underpaid? The Complete Australian Salary Guide for GPs, Nurses, Allied Health, Dental, Aged Care, Diagnostics & Rehab Workers

There's a conversation happening in every tearoom, every hospital corridor, and every practice carpark across Australia. It goes something like this: "Do you think we're being paid what we're actually worth?"

The honest answer, for most healthcare workers, is no. And the uncomfortable follow-up is that most don't even know the number they should be negotiating toward.

That's the problem the MediRecc Salary Calculator was built to solve.

The information gap is real

Healthcare workers are among the most educated, most regulated, and most essential professionals in the country. They are also among the least equipped when it comes to salary intelligence. Unlike finance or tech — where platforms like Levels.fyi and Glassdoor have made compensation data public and searchable — healthcare salary data in Australia remains fragmented, sector-siloed, and often deliberately vague.

The Fair Work Commission publishes award minimums. The ABS publishes average weekly earnings. SEEK publishes advertised salary ranges. But none of these tell you — a scrub nurse in Western Australia with nine years of experience working private — what you should actually be earning right now, in your role, in your state. Until now.

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The seven sectors we cover — and who they include

The MediRecc Salary Calculator was built for the full breadth of the Australian healthcare workforce. Not just doctors. Not just nurses. Everyone.

Medical and General Practice is the backbone of primary care in this country — and it employs far more than GPs. This sector covers general practitioners, practice nurses, medical receptionists, practice managers, and specialist clinic support staff. These are the people keeping Australia's 7,000-plus general practices running every day, and they are consistently among the least benchmarked when it comes to pay.

Surgical covers the perioperative workforce that makes every procedure possible. Surgical assistants, scrub nurses, anaesthetic technicians, and perioperative specialists operate in some of the most high-stakes clinical environments in healthcare. They are also among the workers experiencing the sharpest salary divide between public and private settings — a gap the calculator makes visible.

Allied Health is the broadest and most varied sector in the calculator. It covers physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, dietitians, podiatrists, and exercise physiologists. Salary variance within allied health is enormous — shaped by specialty, geography, NDIS versus private billing, and years of experience. A single national average number tells most allied health professionals almost nothing useful about their actual market position.

Diagnostic and Pathology includes radiographers, sonographers, pathology collectors, and medical imaging specialists. This is one of the fastest-moving sectors for salary correction in Australia right now. Sonographers in particular have seen significant market rate increases over the past three years as acute shortages forced employers to compete. If you work in diagnostics and you haven't checked your rate recently, you may be leaving real money on the table.

Dental spans one of the widest salary ranges of any healthcare sector — from principal dentists in metropolitan practices through to dental assistants in regional single-chair clinics. The calculator covers general dental practitioners, hygienists, dental assistants, oral health therapists, orthodontic specialists, and practice support staff. Whether you're at the clinical or administrative end of a dental practice, your salary deserves a proper benchmark.

Aged Care has been at the centre of Australia's healthcare workforce conversation since the Royal Commission, and for good reason. This sector covers registered nurses, enrolled nurses, personal care workers, diversional therapists, and facility support staff. The Fair Work Commission's 15% wage increase for aged care workers was a significant step — but it has been absorbed unevenly across providers, and many workers still don't know whether their employer has passed it on in full.

Rehabilitation is a sector under sustained demand pressure. Physio and OT-led rehab specialists, neurological rehabilitation practitioners, and community rehab support workers are being stretched thin by post-COVID chronic disease load and NDIS expansion. Yet salaries — particularly in community-based roles where NDIS price caps constrain provider budgets — have not kept pace with that demand. The calculator is especially useful here for workers deciding between community, hospital, and private clinic settings.

What the calculator actually does

You select your sector. You pick your role category. You choose your specific role. You enter your years of experience, your state or territory, and whether you're full-time, part-time, or casual.

It gives you a salary range adjusted for your actual circumstances — not a blunt national average.

The full report, unlocked when you create a free MediRecc profile, goes further. It shows you where you sit against the Fair Work award minimum for your sector, how your state compares to the national picture, and what your salary trajectory looks like at two, five, and ten years in your current role.

Why this matters more than a number

Salary transparency in healthcare is not just an HR nicety. It is a patient safety issue.

When workers know their worth, they advocate for it. When employers benchmark honestly, they retain people. The Australian Government's Health Reform Roadmap projects a shortage exceeding 100,000 healthcare workers by 2030. Salary stagnation — driven largely by information asymmetry — is accelerating that timeline. Tools that close the information gap matter.

For employers and practice managers

The calculator isn't only for clinicians negotiating their next offer. Practice managers, facility directors, and HR leads can use it to benchmark their current pay scales against live market data — before they lose good people to a competitor who did.

Whether you're running a single-chair dental practice in regional Queensland or a multi-site aged care group operating across three states, knowing where your rates sit is the first step to building a team that stays.

Try it

The calculator is free. Creating a profile is free. The report is yours to keep, share, and revisit whenever your circumstances change.

If you work anywhere across medical practice, surgery, allied health, diagnostics, dental, aged care, or rehabilitation — and you haven't checked your salary against the market in the last twelve months — now is the time.