By Dr. Josh Daily, WCI ColumnistOver the last couple of years, I’ve noticed a new kind of question cropping up from fourth-year medical students in the personal finance class I co-direct. Just before Match Day, they’ll approach me, spreadsheet in hand, and ask:
“Should I rank the program that offers a retirement match higher?”
It’s a good question—and not one I ever considered when I was applying to residency. Back then, an employer retirement match for residents or fellows was practically unheard of. But in recent years, a slow but noticeable shift has occurred. I don’t know of any national data that tracks how many residency and fellowship programs now offer a retirement match, but anecdotally, the number seems to be growing. Still, these programs remain in the clear minority.
As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about financial wellness in medicine, I wanted to understand the real value of a residency retirement match. So, I ran the numbers.
The Financial Power of an Early Match
Let’s suppose your residency offers a 10% employer match on your salary. That might not sound like much—after all, PGY-1s earn around $67,000 a year—but small contributions made early can grow massively over time.
Assume a resident earns $67,000 annually and receives a 10% employer match throughout training. What’s that worth by retirement?
Using current AAMC resident and fellow salary data and conservative assumptions, I modeled the future value of those employer contributions by age 67. All figures are adjusted for inflation and presented in 2025 dollars, using real (after-inflation) investment return rates of 3%, 5%, and 7%. I looked at three-, five-, and seven-year training paths. The results are shown in the figure below:
As you can see:
- A three-year residency match will grow to $132,375 with a 5% real return by retirement.
- A five-year residency/fellowship match will grow to $219,869.
- A seven-year training path would yield $305,752.
- At a 7% real return, the value of a seven-year match exceeds $600,000.
- If the resident also contributes 10% of their salary and receives the full match, the combined total could exceed $1.2 million.
That’s a serious head start on retirement savings—especially for money you didn’t even have to earn yourself.
More information here:
Financial Benefits During Residency That Are Vastly Underrated and Overrated
How Personal Finance Influenced My Residency Rank List
Use Roth Contributions to Maximize Value
Most residents are in the lowest tax bracket they’ll ever see in their careers. That’s why employer-sponsored Roth retirement plans (like Roth 403(b)s or Roth 401(k)s) are especially valuable during training.
If you have access to a Roth plan and your institution offers a match, this is the perfect time to take advantage. Not only do you get the match, but your own contributions grow tax-free for decades. Even if you can only contribute a few thousand dollars a year, the long-term impact is profound.
Think of it this way: a dollar saved in a Roth account during residency could be worth far more than a dollar saved later as an attending.
Should You Choose a Residency Based on a Retirement Match?
Now for the big question: Should a retirement match affect how you rank programs?
My take: all else being equal, yes, go with the program that offers a match. But of course, all else is rarely equal.
As a fellowship program director myself, I would strongly encourage students to keep the bigger picture in mind. The quality of training, alignment with your long-term goals, culture, and location (especially proximity to family or a support system) matter far more in the long run. A strong program that sets you up for a fulfilling and well-compensated career will more than make up for any missed employer match during residency.
That said, the match does matter. And it’s not just about the money. Offering a retirement match signals that a program views its trainees as true employees, that they're worthy of the same benefits offered to attendings and staff.
More information here:
From Fourth Year to the Real World: Transitioning from Med School to Residency
From Fourth Year to the Real World: An $80,000 Wedding Causes a Downward Spiral
Beyond the Dollars: Behavioral Benefits Matter, Too
Importantly, the impact of offering a match extends beyond the dollars saved. It encourages earlier participation in retirement savings, reinforces long-term investing habits, and allows residents to gain market experience while the stakes are relatively low. These early lessons—compounding, dollar-cost averaging, staying the course—are powerful. And though these behavioral benefits aren’t captured in the financial modeling above, they likely enhance the overall value of retirement match programs considerably.
The Bottom Line
I hope we one day reach a point where all residents and fellows are offered the same retirement benefits as their supervising physicians. The cost to institutions is relatively modest, but the long-term benefit to trainees is enormous.
Until then, if you’re a med student reviewing your rank list—or a resident advising those coming up behind you—know that a retirement match during training is more than just a perk. It's far more valuable than a better call room, free meals, or premium parking. That said, it should still take a back seat to the quality of education, mentorship, and clinical experience a program offers.
In the hierarchy of residency benefits, a retirement match is one of the few no-strings-attached investments your future self will thank you for—again and again.
What do you think? Were you offered a retirement match in residency? How did it affect where you went for training? How much could it have affected your financial journey?
Can you run these for 3% or 5% match? From talking with residents and attendings, 10% match seems very high.
Thanks for pointing that out — great question. You’re right that a 10% employer match is on the higher end. Since there’s no national data on match rates, we used 10% as our baseline because that’s what our institution provides to faculty, and several residency programs shown to me by fourth-year medical students this year also offered 10%. Still, we recognize that is unlikely to reflect all programs.
Here’s how the results change if the match were 5% or 3%, using the same 3%, 5%, and 7% real return assumptions:
5% Match
3% return: 3-year $31,870 | 5-year $53,974 | 7-year $76,522
5% return: 3-year $66,188 | 5-year $109,935 | 7-year $152,876
7% return: 3-year $135,608 | 5-year $221,091 | 7-year $301,890
3% Match
3% return: 3-year $19,122 | 5-year $32,384 | 7-year $45,913
5% return: 3-year $39,713 | 5-year $65,961 | 7-year $91,726
7% return: 3-year $81,365 | 5-year $132,655 | 7-year $181,134
Even with smaller matches, these balances can still add up—especially for longer training or if residents contribute their own funds. And remember, these numbers include only the employer match; if residents contribute an equivalent amount, the total savings would double.
This post was not super helpful. Would have been much more interesting and useful to take a deep dive into how common or uncommon it is for programs to offer matches. How much of a match is typical? A 10% match is a hilarious number to use as most (I believe) programs offer ZERO match.
Might be a good avenue of advocacy for WCI…
I completely agree—it would be incredibly valuable to have hard data showing how many residency programs actually offer a retirement match. Unfortunately, that information just isn’t available. On the FRIEDA website, programs are only listed as “Yes” or “No” for offering a 403(b), but that doesn’t tell you whether there’s any employer match. To really find out, you’d have to comb through each program’s GME website, and in my experience, most don’t publish that information.
Like you, I initially assumed matches were exceedingly rare and that 10% would be unusually high. But as someone who teaches a personal finance course for fourth-year medical students (which nearly all of our graduating class takes), I’ve been surprised by what I’ve seen. Many students now bring detailed spreadsheets comparing programs—including whether a match is offered—and it seems that a small but growing minority (around 5–10%) of programs do. Even more surprising, among those, 10% is often the match rate. Combined with the fact that our own university provides a 10% match for faculty, that’s why I used it as the baseline for this article.
As a fellowship program director, I’ve also advocated within my institution to extend retirement matching to residents and fellows, but so far those efforts have fallen on deaf ears. I recently helped write a paper (under review at the Journal of Graduate Medical Education) modeling this issue in more depth and arguing that residents and fellows shouldn’t be treated differently from faculty in retirement benefits. Just because we haven’t offered them historically doesn’t mean it’s the right move going forward.
Hopefully, this recent trend continues—and retirement matching becomes a standard practice across residency and fellowship programs.
Amen, thanks for advocating Josh. While I don’t think this is a particularly important factor when choosing a residency program (fit, quality of education, and location are all far more important than salary or any benefit) I do like the idea of getting docs started saving for retirement as soon as possible. And besides, a match is just an increased salary. What doc wouldn’t have liked that in residency?
The fun thing about a blog that publishes daily is that if you don’t find one post to be useful to you, there’ll be something else along tomorrow. Take what you find useful, leave the rest, make your own contributions to help others, and build the community.
I do think you’re right that most programs offer no obtainable match to their residents, but I’ve never seen anyone actually attempt to figure out even an average figure.
Something very relevant is missing from this post, which is the importance of knowing the vesting period. Most vesting periods are 3 or 4 or 5 years. And, perhaps not coincidentally, even though we know the shortest residency period is 3 years it’s not quite 3 years. And that matters a lot when it comes to vesting because vesting very much cares about your start day and you last day.
Let’s say you have a 3 year residency and a nice match with a 3 year vesting period. I won’t get into cliff vs gradual vesting. Let’s say you start on July 1. Your last day of residency is almost 3 years later, June 30. Boom. You get NONE of the match money you’ve put in over the past almost 3 years. It’s very important to read the fine print/summary plan document.
Absolutely a critical point.
This is an excellent point, and you’re absolutely right that the vesting timetable is an important consideration with any retirement match. In the resident retirement plans I’ve seen, participants are typically fully vested before finishing training, but it’s definitely worth checking.
One point worth noting is that a three-year residency actually spans a little more than three years of employment. Most residents officially start around June 22 for onboarding, with clinical duties beginning July 1, so their total employment runs about three years and a week. That means a three-year vesting requirement would usually still be met by completion of training.
Of course, this varies by program, so it’s important to read the plan documents carefully to confirm the exact vesting rules. Great comment—this is a very relevant and often overlooked detail.