Medtech Sales Reps Are Second Best Paid in Healthcare

The website MedReps.com, which bills itself as "The Career Resource for Medical Sales Professionals," has released its fourth Annual Salary Survey, which polled about 3000 members of the medical sales community. Respondents shared information on their base salaries and commissions, what type of products they represent, their level of experience, what type of company they work for, and more.

The survey was broken down into five reports reflecting different segments of the industry. Those five are Biotech Sales, Medical Equipment Sales, Pharmaceutical Sales, Medical and Surgical Device Sales, and Medical Sales. Additionally, Pharmaceutical Sales was broken down into Pharma and Specialty Pharma.

Since this was a salary report, we'll cut to the chase. The highest median base and total salaries were reported in biotech with $105,000 and $155,000 respectively. Biotech also notched the highest average base with $105,703, but a few high fliers brought home the highest average total honors, at $158,411, for the Medical/Surgical device segment.

There was a tie for lowest median base salary at $65,000 between Medical/Surgical Devices and Capital Equipment, but Med/Surg pulled ahead in the average numbers to leave Capital Equipment with last place in average base salary.

Only the healthcare IT / software segment was better paid than medtech sales.

Regular Pharma did the worst in both average and median total salaries at $111,476 and $105,000 respectively. But Specialty Pharma reps did about 13 percent better. So what's the difference? According to MedReps, "Specialty pharma reps typically represent drugs that are used to treat less-common diseases than those treated by traditional drug reps. Specialty reps usually call on specialist physicians, while traditional drug reps more frequently call on primary care physicians."

The reports slice and dice the numbers a number of different ways, from type of company worked for to percentage of time spent in travel, along with more traditional metrics like job title and years of experience.

Medtech sales reps with 11-20 years of experience commanded the highest pay--with average compensation totalling exceeding $200,000 when base income it tallied along with bonuses and commissions.

Stephen Levy is a contributor to Qmed and MPMN.