Medical salaries
What physicians earn by specialty, state and metro — built from public wage surveys, visa filings and Medicare data, with a grade on every figure saying how much to trust it.
Regional
Start nationwide, drill into a state, then a metro. Every specialty ranked highest to lowest.
By specialtySpecialty
Pick a specialty and see where it pays most — nationally, by state, and by metro where the data supports it.
Over timeHistory
How pay has moved since 2010, in real dollars. Nominal series mostly show inflation; these do not.
National medians
All settings, 2025. Highest first.
| Specialty | P25 | Median | P75 | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cardiology | $312,000 | $499,000 | $607,000 | A |
| Surgery (general and other) | $205,000 | $425,000 | $531,000 | A |
| Radiology | $257,000 | $418,000 | $495,000 | A |
| Anesthesiology | $264,000 | $408,000 | $493,000 | A |
| Orthopedic Surgery | $237,000 | $392,000 | $562,000 | C |
| Dermatology | $182,000 | $342,000 | $455,000 | B |
| Emergency Medicine | $199,000 | $336,000 | $430,000 | A |
| Pathology | $203,000 | $308,000 | $368,000 | A |
| Ophthalmology | $187,000 | $307,000 | $431,000 | A |
| Obstetrics & Gynecology | $197,000 | $296,000 | $367,000 | A |
| Psychiatry | $180,000 | $280,000 | $351,000 | A |
| Physicians, all other | $144,000 | $276,000 | $391,000 | A |
| Neurology | $193,000 | $271,000 | $361,000 | B |
| Internal Medicine | $163,000 | $261,000 | $353,000 | A |
| Family Medicine | $178,000 | $243,000 | $317,000 | A |
| Pediatrics | $157,000 | $215,000 | $270,000 | A |
| Physician Assistant | $119,000 | $136,000 | $161,000 | A |
| Nurse Practitioner | $118,000 | $132,000 | $155,000 | A |
By state
How these figures are built
Four public sources, weighted by how much each can be trusted. Bureau of Labor Statistics wage surveys by metro area; public payroll disclosures, which list the exact pay of every physician employed by a state university or public hospital; Department of Labor H-1B filings, which record the salary actually offered for every visa hire; and Medicare payment data, which is revenue rather than pay and is used only where nothing better exists.
Public payroll is the anchor. It is the only source that is complete and exact for the people it covers. It reports academic and public-hospital pay, so private-practice figures are extrapolated from it through a per-specialty multiplier — and that multiplier is derived from data (H-1B offers at physician groups versus hospitals, payroll versus hospital offers) wherever there are enough rows, rather than assumed.
The BLS caps what it publishes at $239,200. Anything above prints as a symbol, so for most physician specialties the official "median" is a floor. Where the figure shown equals $239,200 with a C grade, that is what happened: real pay is higher and the other sources were too thin to say by how much.
Grades. A: two independent sources within 15%. B: one solid source, or two within 30%. C: a single source, a capped figure, or a Medicare-derived guess. Quote an A freely, a B with the range, and a C as a floor.
Practice setting is an assumption, not a measurement. Hospital employment is the baseline; the private-group figures apply a per-specialty multiplier (1.9× for orthopedics down to 1.0× for emergency medicine), and academic is set at 0.85×. We tried to derive these from visa filings and could not: those cover employed positions only, so a physician who owns a practice never appears in them. Treat the private-group and academic columns as the shape of the difference rather than a figure.
What this cannot tell you. Anyone's individual income. These are ranges for a specialty in a place, from surveys and filings that each miss something: BLS excludes practice owners, H-1B skews to hospital hires, Medicare ignores everyone who does not treat the old. They agree often enough to be useful and disagree often enough to need the grade.
Built from 2025 BLS data, 8,302 H-1B filings.