How to Price Your Time as a Physician Annotator

When you apply to annotate medical data on GetData, one field always slows doctors down: your hourly rate. There is no rate card to copy, and most physicians have never priced their own time outside a hospital pay scale. This guide walks through a simple way to set a rate you can defend, and to know when to raise it.

Why the rate is yours to set

Annotation pay across the industry comes in three shapes: hourly, per case, or a fixed fee per project. On GetData you enter an hourly rate (in EUR, USD or RSD) when you register, and every project arrives with its scope, case volume and budget before you accept it. Your rate is what we use to match you to projects whose budget fits, so a realistic number gets you better matches than a guess.

Step 1: Start from what an hour of your time already earns

Your clinical income is the natural floor. Take your annual pre-tax clinical income and divide it by the hours you actually work in a year, including on-call and admin. That is your effective clinical hourly rate. Annotation is focused, remote and flexible, but it still takes the same expertise, so pricing far below this number rarely makes sense for a specialist.

Step 2: Add the costs a salary normally covers

As an independent annotator you usually cover things your employer used to:

Tax and social contributions on freelance income, which are often higher than on a salary.
Unpaid time: reading project guidelines, calibration rounds, onboarding to a new tool and answering reviewer questions.
Equipment: a good monitor matters for imaging work, and some projects ask for a diagnostic-grade display.
Admin: invoicing, bookkeeping and currency conversion.

A common way to account for these is to add a margin of 20 to 40 percent on top of your effective clinical rate. Check the tax side with a local accountant, because the rules differ a lot between countries.

Step 3: Adjust for scarcity and difficulty

Not every hour of annotation is worth the same. Move your rate up or down based on:

Specialty: subspecialty reads (neuroradiology, dermatopathology, paediatric cardiology) are harder to source than general tasks.
Task type: pixel-level 3D segmentation and adjudication of disagreements take more judgement than bounding boxes or image-level classification.
Seniority: projects often pair residents doing first-pass labels with specialists reviewing them, and pay the reviewer role more.
Languages: clinical text projects in less common languages have few qualified annotators.
Track record: once you have delivered a few hundred or a few thousand consistent cases, you have evidence to charge more.

A worked example

The figures below are illustrative only, to show the method. Plug in your own numbers.

Annual clinical income: EUR 90,000
Hours worked per year: 2,000
Effective clinical rate: 90,000 / 2,000 = EUR 45 per hour
Plus 30% for tax, unpaid time and equipment: about EUR 59 per hour
Specialist reviewer on a 3D segmentation project: round up to EUR 65 per hour

Converting per-case work into an hourly rate

Some projects are scoped per case. To compare them with your hourly rate, time yourself on a sample. If a chest CT nodule segmentation takes you 12 minutes once you are familiar with the guideline, you can do about five an hour. A per-case price is fair for you if five cases pay at least your hourly rate. The first cases are always slower, so judge your speed after the calibration round, not before.

Mistakes to avoid

Underpricing to get picked. Projects are matched on expertise first. A rate far below your level can signal inexperience rather than value.
Forgetting the unpaid hours. Guideline reading and calibration can add 10 to 20 percent to a small project.
Committing to more hours than you have. Reliability matters more than speed. Set your weekly availability honestly so the volume you take on fits around clinical work.
Never revisiting the number. Your rate should move as your track record grows.

When to raise your rate

Review your rate after each project, and update it when:

you have delivered a project on time with consistent quality,
your licence has been verified and you have finished several projects in your specialty,
you are regularly asked to review or adjudicate other annotators' work, or
you are turning down projects because you are fully booked.

You can change your hourly rate at any time from your account page.

Get started

New to the work? Read what a medical data annotator does, then apply as an annotator. It takes a few minutes: tell us your specialty, the modalities you read, your languages, availability and hourly rate. To see what projects look like in your field, start from the medical annotation jobs overview or go straight to radiology, pathology, cardiology, ophthalmology or clinical text annotation.