Since Go Locum began in 2021, we’ve become something of a half-way house for doctors who want to change things up in their career with a locum gap year.
If you’re reading this article, I dare say you’re already well aware of the perks of taking a gap year, which include the freedom to live and travel more, to save up a nice nest-egg for a house deposit, to find extra time for exam study or CV-building, or to simply re-evaluate your career options altogether.
At the same time, we’ve noticed a few patterns over the years we’ve been doing this, and have identified a few traps that doctors in a gap year can fall into that can lead to a less than ideal experience.
With careful planning and research though, these pitfalls can be easily avoided, as long as you know what to look out for.
Here are our best tips for having a successful locum gap year:
Plan for variations in income
Locuming affords the capacity to earn wages that are 2-4x base pay on a per-hour basis. However, it’s also important to consider the seasonal variation of locum work, and the general volatility of the industry as a whole.
This can mean that while you might comfortably earn $25,000 in one particular month as an RMO or junior registrar, there could be other periods where you would earn much less than this due to low availability of work. These variations in income can be stressful if you’re not prepared for them, and it’s good practice to manage your savings with this in mind.
The primary situation you should aim to avoid is being essentially forced into taking roles that aren’t right for you (for example, a role that is not a good skill set match) due to cashflow reasons. This is especially true for candidates who have higher fixed costs such as a mortgage or dependents. In some of these situations, it is worth considering whether locuming at this stage is the right option for you and/or your family, and whether the stability of a fixed salary is a better choice.
Gap year locums who have lower fixed costs and/or higher cash savings on hand often have a more fulfilling year and paradoxically tend to earn more income due to their ability to patiently wait for the right vacancy to become available.
As a general rule, fluctuations in vacancies tend to affect junior doctors more than they do senior doctors, and for some mid-career and above doctors, low employment options will almost never be a consideration. Of course if you’d like to discuss your personal locum prospects in general, we’d be more than happy to have that discussion and share relevant historical data with you.
Get the right people around you
For many people, taking a gap year will mean a jump in income. It may also mean that your tax situation will be slightly more complex due to the different locum employment arrangements out there (such as direct ABN invoicing with GST, and so on).
With more income and more tax complexity comes more opportunities for a brilliant accountant to optimise your tax situation, and naturally, more ways for a beginner to get into a big tax hole. Having a trustworthy person on-side to help navigate these changes is essential, and if you’re in the market for an excellent accountant, I have no problems recommending mine if you get in touch.
It’s also important to have an agent that you can trust. This means them being reliable, proactive on your behalf, responsive, respectful of your privacy, and trustworthy. Red flags include repeatedly disregarding your preferences or coercing you into taking roles that aren’t a good fit in an attempt to make a quick buck.
For large agencies, in general it’s better to rely on the reputation of the individual agent rather than an entire recruitment company, as your mileage will vary even within the same company walls. Ideally you should be getting a warm referral from someone who has had a positive experience with that same agent. On that point - be wary of receiving financially-incentivised referrals, especially from untrustworthy sources who obviously develop a conflict of interest in that transaction.
Be prepared to cast the net wide
As a general rule, the more constraints you put on the types of roles you’re willing to work, the less flexibility and therefore bargaining power you will have over the course of your gap year.
Common constraints include specific specialities, geographic locations, only wanting daytime hours, specific hospitals and so on, and having too many will exert downward pressure on your earning potential and likely the satisfaction of your overall locum experience. As a junior it is possible to get to a point where your pool of potential jobs is so small due to your constraints that it is hard to find any work at all.
I fully appreciate the painful irony of saying that a few paragraphs after saying “make sure your agent respects your preferences”. We will never coerce you into taking a role that you don’t want to do, but we do acknowledge that people who are more open-minded end up with a lot more options and earning potential on their gap years than those who aren’t.
Accordingly, for the best experience, we generally recommend that all locums have a generally broad experience base, and have at least two full years of clinical experience under their belt (PGY3+) before taking on a gap year. This gives you a diverse enough clinical experience to be useful in a range of situations.
Dr Nathan Cappelluti casting the net wide on his locum gap year in 2024.
Roll with the punches
For people who are coming from fixed employment, the locum world can feel very chaotic. In particular, we find that people transitioning from a permanent role to their first locum job sometimes find that change of pace challenging, especially if there is a break between the two jobs. I can empathise with this as I went through it myself - I simply hated the feeling of being at home and the uncertainty of not knowing when I would be working next.
I now recognise that a) not being to feel comfortable doing nothing was likely tied in with how burnt out I was, and b) a break from work is a fantastic opportunity to travel, see family, do an advanced course, play the piano, exercise and eat right, and look after myself. Ultimately, this is one of the big reasons people choose to locum in the first place. If you find yourself unemployed for a period, we recommend finding ways to lean into it.
Another area that can be hard to grasp when you first get started is that vacancies come and go quite quickly in this world. Some of the best locum vacancies will fill within one hour of being advertised, and will often arise in a non-chronological order. This is a thematic nightmare for the meticulous planners among us.
Reassuringly though, just because there might not be any open vacancies that are a good fit for the timeframe you want to work in right now, that doesn’t mean there won’t be new vacancies popping up at any time between now and then.
People resign and go on sick or maternity leave all the time. As long as your agent is on the ball and watching for them, and your credentials are ready to go, you should be able to find them.
Locums who keep their options open and re-evaluate their plans as they go have the best overall experience. This includes booking long overseas holidays a long time in advance. Naturally it’s a common practice to book as early as possible to keep costs down, but we recommend that locums at least consider booking their trips slightly later in the context of a gap year. This maximises your flexibility and availability for good roles which is often comfortably worth the extra costs associated with booking flights with less notice.
Have your ducks in a row by October 1
For locums taking a gap year from January to December (as is most common), you should ideally have all of your credentials, reference checks, ID documents and so on ready to go by October 1st of the preceding year. This is typically around the time that vacancies for the next clinical year start being advertised.
Given the start of the clinical calendar year is the quietest time for most locum markets, if you have high intent to be booked at the start of the year you really need to be exposed to as many potential job opportunities as possible to maximise your autonomy. Unfortunately, the later you leave it past this date, the more unpredictable finding work in this timeframe will be.
For locums joining the workforce at other times, a general rule of being credentialed 3 months before your planned locum start date will similarly give you the highest likelihood for walking straight into a suitable role.
Plan with your relationships in mind
As awesome as the flexibility and good pay of locum work is, the erratic changes to plans and repeated travel away from home can take its toll on your relationships with the people around you, especially romantic partners and family members.
As a pillar of good practice, we recommend openly discussing the contents of this article with your partner and ensuring they are on board with what the locum lifestyle might involve. This includes but is not limited to:
- The frequency and duration of trips away from home
- The plans around potential variations in income, including backup options in the case of significant overhead costs such as a mortgage
- Acknowledging the associated uncertainty of working as locum doctor
- Strategies to ensure you get quality time together (for example, your partner joining on the occasional locum trip when circumstances allow)
- How to best support each other through periods of time apart
Read the gap year guide
There’s quite a lot more to say on this topic that extend well beyond the scope of this article - things like expected income ranges, tips for finding the best roles and how to get booked at your preferred hospitals and so on.
We’ve included this information into a comprehensive 2025 Gap Year Guide PDF that we keep a bit closer to our chest so it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. If you’d like to receive a copy, or discuss your options for having a gap year of your own, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Sincerely,
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Locum doctor, founder of Go Locum and labradoodle enthusiast