Physician Contract Glossary · Ownership & Partnership
Retention Provisions
Retention provisions are terms designed to keep you at the practice, such as vesting schedules, stay bonuses, and forgivable advances.
Retention provisions are the mechanisms that make leaving costly: multi-year vesting on bonuses and retirement, forgivable loans that unwind if you leave early, deferred compensation that requires tenure, and stay bonuses tied to dates. Individually they look like benefits. Together they form a web that can make an early exit expensive, which is exactly their purpose.
Map every retention mechanism and what each one costs you if you leave at year one, two, or three. The combined drag of vesting plus forgivable advances is the real exit cost, and it is easy to underestimate.
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