Essential business and financial blueprints for Locum Tenens professionals. Covers 1099 taxes, malpractice tail insurance, and contract negotiation.
Locum tenens physicians rotate through facilities, states, and clinical environments on a schedule that would exhaust most people. Unlike employed physicians who maintain a permanent office and established supply chain, locums carry their personal clinical tools from assignment to assignment — and supplement their practice with resources that help them navigate the unique financial and…
Most locum physicians set their rate by asking a colleague what they charge, accepting whatever the first agency offers, or anchoring to their former employed salary converted to an hourly figure. None of these methods account for what 1099 income actually costs to earn. This guide builds a rate from the ground up — starting…
Most physicians entering locum tenens for the first time approach the first contract the same way they approached employment agreements — read it, sign it, and move on. That instinct is worth correcting early. Locum tenens contracts are negotiable at multiple levels, and the physicians who understand how agency economics work consistently earn more than…
Locum tenens — Latin for “to hold the place” — is temporary physician coverage that fills gaps at hospitals, clinics, and health systems across the country. For physicians, it means working as an independent contractor on an assignment-by-assignment basis, with control over schedule, location, and specialty focus that permanent employment rarely allows. The U.S. locum…
Most locum tenens contracts are written by agency or facility legal teams whose job is to protect the agency or facility — not you. That is not a criticism; it is just how contracts work. The problem is that physicians are trained to read clinical data, not contract language, and the clauses that carry the…
Locum tenens physicians operating as 1099 independent contractors have access to a significant range of business deductions that employed physicians cannot claim. The tradeoff for that flexibility is self-employment tax, multi-state filing complexity, and the need to document everything correctly. This guide covers the core deductions available to 1099 locum physicians in 2026 — what…
Locum tenens physicians who work across multiple states in a single year face a tax filing obligation that most employed physicians never encounter — and that most generic tax guides do not adequately address. Every state where you physically perform clinical work creates a potential state income tax obligation, regardless of where you live, where…
One of the most significant financial advantages available to locum tenens physicians is the ability to contribute substantially more to tax-advantaged retirement accounts than their employed counterparts. As a 1099 independent contractor, you are both the employee and the employer — which means you can make contributions from both sides of that relationship, dramatically increasing…
Choosing a locum tenens agency is one of the most consequential decisions in your locum career — and most physicians make it with almost no framework for evaluation. Agencies are not interchangeable. They differ in margin structure, specialty focus, contract terms, credentialing speed, and how they treat physicians when an assignment goes wrong. This guide…
The housing and meal stipend is one of the most financially significant components of a locum tenens compensation package — and one of the most misunderstood. When structured correctly and supported by the right facts, stipends are tax-free, which can add tens of thousands of dollars in effective annual compensation relative to an equivalent taxable…