Medical professionals earn the most and get the least time to build wealth

Australia’s highest earners are not bankers or executives. They are doctors and dentists. They have more resources than most, and every means to invest well. But by the time they can afford to do it properly, they have less runway than almost anyone else.

Five of Australia’s ten highest-earning professions belong to medicine. But many of the country’s best-paid clinicians do not start earning at scale until well into their thirties, after a decade or more of study and training.

This leaves them with one of the shortest wealth-building windows of any profession, and it closes at exactly the point when their financial lives get complicated.

The finding comes from new research on medical professional wealth management, commissioned by NAB Private Wealth and conducted by CoreData, which combined quantitative surveys of high-income medical professionals aged 45 and over with in-depth qualitative interviews.

The study covers AHPRA-registered medical and dental practitioners, excluding GPs, a group NAB puts at 53,000 nationally.

The complexity underneath

For advisers, this is a client segment that sells itself, yet advisers rarely discuss the complexity underneath it.

Around three in five of these professionals own a private practice, which means their peak earning years often arrive at the same time as the biggest financial decisions of their career: setting up a practice, hiring staff, buying equipment. Personal wealth building has to compete with business investment, often in the same narrow decade.

Michael Saadie, NAB Private Wealth executive, on the financial reality behind medicine’s top earners:

“At a headline level, medical professionals earn well. Underneath that, their financial lives are more complex, but also full of opportunity when supported properly.”

A compressed window

Time is the other constraint. Close to 80 per cent of the professionals surveyed work more than 40 hours a week, which leaves little room for the kind of ongoing engagement that good financial planning needs. And retirement, for this group, rarely means a clean exit.

Sixty per cent intend to keep working past the traditional retirement age, often shifting into teaching, advisory or scaled-back clinical roles rather than stopping outright.

For advisers, the consequences are concrete. A client who plans to keep working part-time into their seventies needs a different income and structuring strategy to one heading for a hard stop at 65.

Succession planning for a practice, similarly, is not a single transaction. It touches staff, patients and often years of goodwill built into the business, and it works better with a long lead time than a rushed one.

Succession takes longer than most expect

Perth dentist Andrew Brostek is a case in point. He began thinking about succession in 2014, nearly a decade before he retired in 2023.

“I realised how complex it could be. Selling the practice wasn’t just a financial decision. Ongoing patient care and supporting our team of dentists and hygienists were also front of mind,” Brostek says.

Burnout as a planning variable

Burnout is the other variable advisers should be building into these plans, not treating as a side issue. Long hours and business ownership stack on top of clinical work, and the research flags wellbeing as a recurring theme in how these professionals think about their financial future.

The medical professional wealth management opportunity

Saadie puts the opportunity plainly: “With the right advice and structures in place, they are in a strong position to turn peak earnings into lasting confidence and choice.”

For advisers building a medical professional wealth management practice, the client segment falls into an unusual spot: high income, high complexity, and a compressed decision-making window that rewards advice given early rather than advice given at the point of crisis.