Those are different numbers, and the gap between them is where your real deal lives.
What the gap is made of
None of this is anyone behaving badly. It is what a contract does in practice rather than on paper.
- Insurance write-offs. In a mostly PPO office, 15% to 20% of gross production never existed as money.
- The collection rate. Even a well-run office collects 96% to 99% of adjusted production. An average one, 91% to 94%.
- Your lab share. Depending on where it comes off, it is either shared with the practice or entirely yours.
- Timing. Work done in December gets paid across January and February, so a calendar-year comparison never quite lines up.
The calculation
Take twelve months. Add up what you actually produced, at your office's full fees. Add up what you were actually paid across those months, gross, before your own taxes.
Effective percentage = total paid ÷ total produced.
That is it. A 32% contract in a PPO-heavy office with a 50/50 lab split taken after the percentage routinely lands somewhere around 25% to 27%.
Why it is the only number worth comparing
Two reasons.
Offers are not comparable on headline percentage. A 30% offer at a fee-for-service office with low write-offs and lab taken before the split can beat a 35% offer at a heavy PPO office with lab taken after. You would never see that from the two numbers on the page.
It tells you whether a conversation is worth having. If your effective percentage is roughly what the structure implies, your contract is working as written and the conversation to have is about the contract, not about the arithmetic. If it is well below what the structure implies, something is wrong in the detail and there is a specific question to ask.
The part that stops most people
You need a year of your own production next to a year of your own pay. Your office has half of that and will hand it over a month at a time if you ask. The other half, what you actually did, only exists if you wrote it down.
That is the whole reason the number stays invisible for most of a career. Not secrecy, just the absence of a record.
cuspd exists to be that record: log each day you work, enter what the office reported and paid, and the effective percentage is calculated for you month by month and across the year. See it on a real associate's year, no account or card needed.