How we use contributed data

Only what you type into a contribution form: specialty, subspecialty, career stage, state, metro area, employer type, base salary, total compensation, $/wRVU rate and threshold, signing bonus, bonus structure, clinical FTE, years in practice, and the benefit fields on the form.

We do not scrape your employer, look you up in a compensation database, or infer your pay from anything else you do here.

• Showing you where your figures sit against published Bureau of Labor Statistics data for your specialty.
• Aggregate benchmarks shown to other physicians — but only once at least 30 physicians have contributed to the same cut. Below that, your figures are stored and no benchmark is shown to anyone.
• Understanding which comparisons physicians actually look for, so we build the useful ones.

A “75th percentile” calculated from eight submissions is a fabricated number wearing a statistic’s clothing. So there is a hard floor: no figure of any kind — not a median, not a rounded number, not a range, not a hedge like “around” — is displayed for a cell with fewer than 30 contributors. Percentiles are not computed below the floor at all, so there is no internal version of a number we decline to show you.

Where a benchmark is shown, the number of contributors is shown next to it, never hidden behind a hover.

NPI-verified and unverified submissions are counted and displayed separately, and never averaged into one figure. Pooling them would erase the only quality signal the data has.

The floor and the separation are enforced in code, and every benchmark surface shows which side of the floor it is on.

• We never sell it, license it, or share it with any data broker, insurer, or hospital system. We never give it to a recruiter or employer — not as a figure, not as a range, not in aggregate. Your compensation is not part of career visibility (below).
• We will never build an employer-facing product on it. Physicians contribute to find out whether they are underpaid; an employer would pay to learn the lowest offer a physician would accept. Same data, opposite sides. This dataset is not part of career visibility, and reversing this commitment would require asking every contributor again — a new consent, not an edited policy.
• We never display your individual figures to anyone. Aggregates only, and only above the floor.
• We never use it to market a financial product to you. We do not sell any. Free for every member. No ads, commissions, referrals, or data sales.

Many physician employment agreements make the terms themselves confidential — compensation, bonus structure, non-compete language. Read your own agreement’s confidentiality section before you enter contract terms here. We cannot tell you what your agreement permits, and this is a real risk to you rather than a formality. If you are unsure, entering nothing is a reasonable choice, and the benchmark works without you.

Everything you contributed is at Settings → Your contributed data. Two separate actions, because they mean different things:

• Withdraw — the record stops counting in every benchmark immediately. It stays yours to view and export, and you can put it back.
• Erase — the record is deleted. It will not appear in your own export afterwards, and it cannot be restored.

“Immediately” is literal. Withdrawal is applied in the same database query that builds every benchmark, not by a nightly job — so there is no window in which you have withdrawn and a benchmark still contains you. Deleting your account removes your contributions from benchmarks by the same mechanism, and erases the records with the rest of your account at the end of the 90-day retention window described in the privacy policy.

Career visibility is a separate setting, off by default, that lets you say whether recruiters or employers may contact you through Attending Financial. It carries your specialty, practice state, career stage and the preferences you enter on that page. It never carries a compensation figure, a contract term, or anything you contributed to this dataset. Nobody can see it yet; the setting exists so that the first time anyone is reachable here, it is because they said so.

Each of these is a rule in code rather than an intention, and a reader who wants to check has something to point at:

• The 30-contributor floor is one guard function every display path calls, covered by tests in the repository. Two smaller floors exist and are named where they apply: the verified offer board shows a cell at 5 or more contributors, and program directors see cohort totals only at 5 or more residents. No other aggregate exists.
• The withdrawal, account-deletion, and internal-test-account exclusions are part of the query that builds an aggregate, not filters a caller has to remember.
• Consent is versioned, and a contribution records the version you were actually shown — so revising the wording later cannot re-govern an agreement you already made.
• Your compensation records are append-only: a new figure is a new record with its own effective date, so we cannot silently overwrite your history.