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This is the longest, least exciting page on the site. It exists because we think you deserve to know exactly where every number on every program page came from — and because "trust us" isn't a methodology.
If a value looks wrong, we want to hear about it. Every program page has a link to tell us, and we answer.
Our data comes from public accreditation records, institutions' own published salary and benefits pages, national statistics agencies, and reviews from people who trained at the programs. Every value keeps its source and date. Reviews are anonymous, screened before publishing, and deletable by their authors. We cover ACGME-accredited programs only — some fellowships are accredited elsewhere and aren't here yet.
Residency Consult tracks 13,800+ residency and fellowship programs accredited by the ACGME (the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education). That's nearly the entire universe of US residency training — but it is not the entire universe of fellowships.
Some subspecialty fellowships are accredited outside the ACGME and are therefore not on this site yet: many neurosurgery subspecialty fellowships (CAST-accredited), advanced GI and minimally invasive surgery fellowships (Fellowship Council), transplant surgery fellowships (ASTS), and others. If you searched for a fellowship and found nothing, this is probably why — it isn't missing data, it's outside our current corpus. Expanding beyond ACGME is something we're considering for a future season.
Program structure and identity — accreditation status, program IDs, sponsoring institutions, locations — comes from the ACGME's public listings. We refresh our program-to-sponsor mapping from the ACGME's published sponsor rosters so each program is tied to the institution that actually employs its residents.
Salaries and benefits come primarily from the sponsoring institution's own GME pages: published stipend schedules, housestaff benefit summaries, and union contracts. One institution's published salary ladder covers every program it sponsors, which is why you'll see the same academic-year scale across a hospital's programs — that's how residents are actually paid. Where an institution doesn't publish centrally, we research individual program pages. Starting this fall, we're also confirming values directly with program coordinators.
Match statistics on specialty pages come from the NRMP's published Match results, updated annually after each Match.
Location data — cost of living, rents, walkability — comes from the BEA Regional Price Parities, HUD Small Area Fair Market Rent data, and Walk Score, joined by each program's ZIP code. Hospital data comes from the CMS Provider of Services file.
Reviews come from people who train (or trained) at the programs. More on those below.
Accreditation, program IDs, sponsoring institutions, structure
Salary schedules, benefits summaries, union contracts
Program-specific details institutions don't publish centrally
Match results and specialty fill rates
Cost of living, rents, walkability by ZIP
Hospital characteristics
First-hand accounts, anonymous publicly
Nothing writes directly to a program page. Every collected value first lands in a staging queue carrying its source URL, the extraction evidence, and — for salaries — the academic year it applies to. From there it's reviewed before publishing: most values by a human, and the highest-confidence class (values from an institution's own published schedule that pass validation checks) through an automated policy with strict rules — the value must match the current academic year, come from an authoritative source, and pass plausibility checks against peer values. Anything that fails a check waits for human review.
Every published value keeps its provenance: what source it came from, by what method, and when. Salary values are labeled with their academic year (e.g., AY 2026–27), and a newer year can't be silently overwritten by an older one. When we can't find a value, the page says "not yet found" — we don't estimate, and we never treat silence on a source as a "no."
What the salary would be worth in a typical residency location. We take a year of the program's local one-bedroom rent off the salary (the HUD Small Area Fair Market Rent for its ZIP, FY2027), adjust what's left for local prices (BEA Regional Price Parities 2024; 100 is the national average), then add back a year of typical rent: $1,570 a month, the median across the programs we list, re-set with each new rent year. The figure is before any separate housing stipend. One known limitation: the price index already includes housing, so local housing costs count twice to a small degree; an index without housing is a later refinement. No figure is shown when the salary is under $30,000, when rent is missing or would take the whole salary, or for military-sponsored programs, whose pay is set by rank plus tax-free allowances for housing (BAH) and food (BAS). Nominal salary stays the default everywhere.
Rent is the HUD Small Area Fair Market Rent for the program's ZIP (FY2027) — a 40th-percentile gross rent including utilities, not a median. We use HUD's own thresholds: under 30% affordable, 30–50% cost-burdened, over 50% severely cost-burdened. For military-sponsored programs we show no figure: their pay includes a tax-free housing allowance (BAH) that varies by location, so the ratio would not be comparable.
Residents and fellows in military programs are paid as uniformed officers: basic pay by rank and years of service, plus tax-free allowances for housing (BAH) and food (BAS). Housing pay depends on location and family status, so we show no salary figure for these programs and list them after the ranked programs in salary sorts. Each program page links the official military pay tables and BAH rates.
Residencies compare only against residencies, fellowships only against fellowships — and a comparison appears only when we have enough data to make the average meaningful (at least 5 programs and at least 30% of the specialty reporting). If a comparison doesn't appear, that's why.
No weighting, no decay, no adjustments.
Anyone with a confirmed email can write one review per program: a single overall rating, whether you'd choose the program again, and your experience in your own words.
Reviews are anonymous publicly. Your name and email never appear anywhere on the site.
Every review is screened before it publishes. Reviews pass an automated screen and a human look. We don't allow personal attacks, identifying details about individuals, and content that isn't a genuine account — and we leave honest criticism alone. A negative review that's fair stays up.
You stay in control. You can edit or delete your review at any time from your account. Programs cannot pay to remove reviews — no one can, except the author.
We won't pretend to have data we don't. Today, honestly:
Reviews are the newest part of the site — most programs don't have one yet. Salary and benefits coverage is deepest at large academic sponsors that publish centrally, and thinner at community programs that don't. Some values still trace to our original public-listing seed while we replace them with primary-source retrieval, academic-year labels attached. And non-ACGME fellowships aren't covered at all (see above).
If you know where to find something we're missing — a stipend page, a benefits PDF, a correction — send it. We update fast, and it genuinely helps the next class.
No one, except us. The data here has one customer: applicants.
— Christian
Residency Consult · Updated September 2026