Physics coverage sized to your program — not to a salary line.

A full-time therapeutic medical physicist is one of the most expensive hires in the department. The AAPM's 2024 professional survey puts the median board-certified salary near $245,000 — and once you load benefits, payroll taxes and overhead, a single seat runs $300,000–$350,000 a year (more for a chief physicist). A single-linac center, a rural program, or a department covering a leave doesn't have $300,000 of physics work to give one person.

Meanwhile the shortage is real. ASTRO and AAPM have both described the physics workforce as critically short, roughly a tenth of posted positions sit unfilled, and a quarter of AAPM's membership will be past 65 by 2030. Centers aren't choosing between a cheap physicist and an expensive one. They're choosing between coverage and no coverage.

What fractional coverage actually changes

You pay for the hours the program consumes — weekly chart checks, patient-specific QA, second-checks, annual and monthly machine QA, survey preparation — instead of carrying a full seat year-round. The physics gets done by a board-certified physicist, the program stays survey-ready, and the cost lands as a monthly engagement rather than a permanent salary line.