How do work RVU productivity targets compare across medical specialties?

Work RVUs are the standard productivity benchmark for physician compensation because they normalize for the wide differences in visit and procedure complexity across specialties. The 99213 office visit, a 30-minute new patient consult, and a routine surgical procedure are not the same unit of work, and wRVUs make them comparable. National benchmark surveys (MGMA Provider Compensation, AMGA, SullivanCotter) report median and percentile wRVU production by specialty, and the spread is wide. Primary care specialties (family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics) generally target median wRVU production in the roughly 4,500 to 5,500 range per FTE physician per year, with top-quartile producers above 6,000. Higher-volume procedural primary care subspecialties and many surgical specialties run materially higher; cardiology, orthopedics, gastroenterology, and dermatology typically target meaningfully higher wRVU thresholds tied to procedure mix. Specific numbers should always come from the most recent specialty-specific survey data, not generic ranges; benchmarks shift annually as CMS reweights codes and as practice patterns evolve. For practical use in your practice, wRVUs serve three purposes. First, compensation design. wRVU-based compensation pays providers a dollar-per-wRVU rate above a base or a threshold, which aligns earnings with production while normalizing for the complexity-mix problem that flat per-visit comp does not solve. The compensation rate ($/wRVU) is typically set with reference to specialty-median total compensation divided by specialty-median wRVU production. Second, capacity planning. Total practice wRVU capacity equals FTE physicians multiplied by per-provider wRVU production; revenue capacity equals total wRVUs multiplied by your blended collected dollars per wRVU. Third, productivity diagnosis. If a provider is at median visit count but below median wRVUs, the issue is usually documentation and coding (under-coding 99213s that should be 99214s, missing modifier 25 opportunities, not capturing chronic care management billables) rather than time on schedule. Use wRVU benchmarks to identify which providers are productive but undercoding and which are over-scheduled but appropriately coded; the interventions are completely different.