Making Sense of a Signing Bonus in a Physician Employment Contract

Some years back, the Boston Red Sox gave Trey Ball (great baseball name) a $2.75m signing bonus. That same year, the team gave Forrestt Allday (another great name!) $10,000 for his signature. How much is yours worth?

A signing bonus in a physician’s employment contract is an enticement for the doctor to sign the contract. Not all hospitals and private practices offer them, but – in my experience – they are fairly common in initial offers and very common following negotiation.
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Business Contracts for Physicians

I’ve had the pleasure several times of advising physicians whose job search had gone so well that they were sitting on two (or more) relatively attractive offers from a hospital, clinic, or practice. Perhaps one from a major hospital and the other from a small private practice. Or one from a teaching hospital and one without a university affiliation. Maybe one offered better benefits but the other allowed moonlighting. Or maybe the two jobs were essentially indistinguishable. Regardless, these doctors fell into two camps.

In the first camp were the doctors who had a clear preference for one job over the other. One job offered a higher salary, friendlier colleagues, a better location, more of a chance for long-term success. They felt that the choice was clear. In the other camp were the doctors who really, really, really just could not decide.

Yet all the doctors had something in common: They all felt that they had a moral obligation to decline one of the offers, post-haste. They felt that doing otherwise would be unfair.

There’s a different way to think about this.
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