The Orthopedic Surgeon's Advocate^™.

Northgate™ represents orthopedic surgeons across spine, sports medicine, joint replacement, hand, foot & ankle, pediatric, trauma, and shoulder & elbow. Bespoke representation and permanent placement. Personal, from first private call to signed offer.

We represent the orthopedic surgeon.

Most firms in this category work for the hospital or the PE-backed platform. They are paid by the buyer to fill the OR block, the call schedule, the new musculoskeletal service line. Fast. We invert that. Northgate™ works for the surgeon, who is the rarer asset and the one whose career carries the longest tail.

Orthopedic surgery is a discipline of forks. Employed at an academic medical center or partner at a private group. Hospital-employed or PE-backed platform. Trauma call or no trauma call. ASC ownership or none. The decisions a senior arthroplasty surgeon makes about a robotics platform are not the decisions a sports surgeon makes about team coverage. We treat the sub-discipline and the practice model as the unit of the conversation, not the line on the certificate.

A partner leads the conversation from the first private call to the signed offer. Your name does not leave this office without your written sign-off. Not in a pitch. Not on a shortlist.

The first conversation is private. There is no obligation on either side.

The work within orthopedic surgery.

We are deliberate about the sub-discipline and the practice model behind it. The market for a spine surgeon coming out of a hospital-employed contract is different from the market for a sports surgeon evaluating a PE-backed partnership. The eight sub-disciplines below are where the bulk of our orthopedic work has lived.

Spine Surgery: Cervical, thoracolumbar, deformity, and minimally invasive. Approach training, navigation/robotics platform fluency, and call structure tend to drive the conversation.
Sports Medicine: Arthroscopy of the knee, shoulder, hip, and elbow. Team coverage relationships and PE-backed partnership economics are often the larger lever than base compensation.
Joint Replacement: Hip, knee, revision, and increasingly outpatient/ASC arthroplasty. Robotics platform, implant relationships, and ASC ownership equity decide most senior moves.
Hand & Upper Extremity: Microsurgery, peripheral nerve, congenital, and trauma. A small universe; fellowship-trained hand surgeons sit at the intersection of orthopedics and plastics.
Foot & Ankle: Total ankle, reconstruction, sports foot & ankle, and diabetic limb salvage. Volume of total ankle and academic affiliation tend to define the senior pool.
Pediatric Orthopedics: Spine, hip, sports, trauma, and limb deformity. Almost exclusively children’s hospital and academic; the universe of pediatric ortho fellowship-trained surgeons is small.
Orthopedic Trauma: Level I and II trauma centers. Call burden is the dominant recruitment variable; protected non-clinical time and call pay structure decide most conversations.
Shoulder & Elbow: Arthroplasty, sports, and complex revision. A growing senior pool as reverse shoulder volume scales; ASC strategy increasingly part of the offer.

The orthopedic surgeon we represent.

We are most useful to orthopedic surgeons who are seven to twenty years into practice, board-certified, fellowship-trained in their primary sub-discipline, and at a real inflection point. A partnership track that has reached its decision point. A new ASC opening across town. A robotics platform a hospital is committing to or walking away from. A call burden that has stopped working for the household.

The conversation tends to work less well for trainees, for general orthopedists exploring without a sub-discipline anchor, and for searches where the institution will not discuss block time and call structure before the interview.

Tenure: Seven to twenty years post-fellowship, with at least four years at the current practice. Earlier-career surgeons better served by their fellowship network.
Fellowship discipline: A primary sub-discipline that defines the case mix. Mixed-bag generalists are workable for community searches but rarely fit the program-leadership conversations.
ASC ownership posture: Whether you currently own or rent ASC time. Whether the next move requires you to leave equity. This shapes the entire offer construction.
Practice-model preference: Employed, private partnership, PE-backed, or academic. The right next role is rarely a coin flip among these. We ask early.
Reason for the conversation: A specific reason this season, not general curiosity. The reason itself usually shapes the right next role.

What we are seeing.

Orthopedic compensation has stratified more than any other surgical specialty. Spine, joint replacement, and sports at high-volume centers continue to clear well above MGMA median; PE-backed partnership economics in sports and joints can materially exceed hospital-employed comp once ASC distributions and equity are layered. Trauma, hand, and pediatric orthopedics tend to require offer construction beyond cash.

Spine, employed: Base packages clearing $850K to $1.1M at high-volume programs; full comp materially higher with wRVU and navigation/robotics block guarantees.
Sports, PE-backed partnership: Year-one comp competitive on its own; the larger lever is partnership-track equity, ASC ownership rights, and team-coverage retention.
Joint Replacement, ASC-heavy: Compensation increasingly structured around ASC distributions and arthroplasty platform commitments rather than headline base.
Trauma: Call coverage rates, protected non-clinical time, and academic appointment are the negotiated terms more often than headline base.
Hand & Pediatric: Compensation often below the surgical median; offer construction usually requires academic title, protected time, or hospital subsidy.
Outside income & consulting: Industry consulting, courseware, and device royalties on the table for senior surgeons in private and PE-backed groups.

More detail in The 2026 Compensation Notes, the firm’s annual specialty-by-specialty supplement on offers we have seen close.

Read the Orthopedic Surgery notes

The rooms we work in.

The institutions that engage Northgate™ for orthopedic surgery searches. Each has hired at this level before, knows what the seat costs when it is wrong, and comes to the firm precisely because the conversation stays quiet.

i Academic Medical Centers
ii Integrated Delivery Networks
iii Orthopedic Private Groups
iv PE-Backed Orthopedic Platforms
v Children’s Hospitals
vi Level I & II Trauma Centers
vii Specialty Orthopedic Hospitals
viii ASCs & Outpatient Joint Programs

When you are ready to make a move,
you need the right people in your corner.

Write to the firm