Average Physician Salary in 2026 (and Why Nobody Can Agree On the Number)

Average physician salary is the number everyone quotes, and almost no one defines, since it can mean: 

• A base wage
• A full compensation package
• Or an hourly rate depending on who’s doing the asking

Some sources dress it up as physician compensation instead, as if a fancier noun made the number any less slippery.

It runs on a different logic than a job posting’s headline figure, and a far less forgiving one. The confusion that shows up during a salary negotiation almost always started long before anyone opened a compensation survey.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median at $275,930 across 754,760 physicians nationally. Doximity’s 2025 survey data puts average total compensation at $438,269 for the same year.

That $162,339 spread is more than double a first-year resident’s entire annual stipend, sitting quietly in the gap between two “average” figures. The real question isn’t which number is right, it’s which one actually applies to your specialty, your state, and your practice setting.

This piece moves through five areas, in order, the same way a compensation committee would size up an offer.

• Gender
• Experience
• Practice setting
• Specialty
• State

So the figure you walk away with is the one that actually applies to you.

TLDR: same profession, four different paychecks

Here’s the condensed version, pulled from every section below.

How much do doctors make in 2026?

The median wage above is the floor, not the ceiling. 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ mean annual wage lands close behind it, at $277,260, a sign that federal wage data doesn’t skew heavily even at the top of this particular dataset.

Medscape’s 2026 Physician Compensation Report, based on 2025 earnings, lands in the middle of the benchmarks already on the table, at $386,000 in average total compensation.

Total compensation surveys like Medscape’s and Doximity’s count more than wages, folding in productivity bonuses, incentive pay, and profit-sharing on top of base salary. 

That’s why an average doctor salary search built on wage data alone misses more than half the actual pay picture, not because one side is wrong.

Why do physician salary reports disagree with each other?

Physician salary reports disagree for reasons that are almost insultingly boring once you dig into them. 

Each source polls a different population, counts a different stack of pay components, and slaps a different data year on the label like it’s still fresh. 

Do that four times over and you get a $162,339 spread between the lowest and highest widely cited 2026 average physician salary figures, which is a lot of money to pin on “methodology” and walk away. 

Line up the four most-cited 2026 benchmarks side by side, including MedPAC and SullivanCotter’s physician compensation data.

Source	Reported figure	What it measures	Population	Data year
BLS OEWS	$275,930 median / $277,260 mean	Wage-and-salary employees only	754,760 physicians	May 2025
MedPAC/SullivanCotter	$352,000 median	Total cash compensation	115,610 physicians	2023
Medscape	$386,000 average	Total compensation, self-reported survey	Broad physician panel	2025 earnings
Doximity	$438,269 average	Total compensation, claims-linked survey	Broad physician panel	2025 earnings

BLS lands lowest because its OEWS methodology counts only wage-and-salary employees, which quietly writes off every self-employed physician and practice owner in the country. 

Medscape and Doximity climb higher because total compensation counts the bonuses and incentive pay that actually show up in a real paycheck, not just the number printed on a base salary line.

What is the difference between salary and total compensation?

Base salary is the boring, dependable half of physician pay, the amount that shows up regardless of how many patients walk through the door. Total compensation is the half that actually gets interesting, since it piles several extra ingredients on top of that base. 

• Productivity bonuses
• Incentive payments
• Signing bonuses
• Profit-sharing

For a physician on a heavy productivity plan, that pile can add up to six figures, which is not a rounding error by anyone’s definition. Getting this split right is the fastest way to stop comparing two numbers that were never built to sit next to each other.

Most physicians don’t get paid through one tidy method, whatever a job posting implies. 

The American Medical Association 2024 Benchmark Survey dug into how physicians actually get paid and found three patterns that show up again and again. 

• 70.5% receive some form of salary
• 55.0% receive a productivity component
• 60.8% are paid through more than one method combined

Productivity components are usually tied to work relative value units, or wRVUs, a slightly clinical way of measuring how much effort and skill went into each billed service. 

A physician salary quoted without naming the compensation method behind it is only telling half the pay story, and the interesting half is usually the one left out.

Physician compensation benchmark comparisons go wrong exactly at this split, and it’s an easy trap to fall into. A base-salary offer of $310,000 can quietly beat a total-compensation figure of $360,000 once RVU thresholds and benefits get counted properly, or it can fall just as short.

Which physician specialties pay the most and least?

A physician salary by specialty breakdown is the most useful cut of this data, since specialty controls for the single biggest source of variation in physician pay. 

Doximity’s 2025 data show family medicine physicians averaging $325,040 against $829,161 for neurosurgeons, the widest specialty gap in its 2026 report, and neurosurgeons take the highest paid doctors title in every specialty-level survey that breaks the field out separately. 

Specialty or category	Reported figure	What it measures	Source	Data year
Family medicine	$255,820 average annual wage	Wage-and-salary employees	BLS OEWS	2025
Family medicine	$325,040 average total compensation	Survey-based total comp	Doximity	2025
Primary care (composite)	$298,000 average total compensation	Survey-based total comp	Medscape	2025
Anesthesiology	$360,570 average annual wage	Wage-and-salary employees	BLS OEWS	2025
Cardiology	$454,940 average annual wage	Wage-and-salary employees	BLS OEWS	2025
All specialists (composite)	$417,000 average total compensation	Survey-based total comp	Medscape	2025
Neurosurgery	$829,161 average total compensation	Survey-based total comp	Doximity	2025

Highest-paid specialties

Cardiology reports a $454,940 average annual wage in BLS’s 2025 specialty-level breakdown, comfortably above the physician-wide median. 

Neurosurgery’s position at the very top, shown in the table and chart above, isn’t a fluke of one survey year. Both figures reflect real 2025 data, not an older number dressed up as current.

Mid-range specialties

Anesthesiology sits solidly in the middle of the field at a $360,570 average annual wage, per BLS, comfortably above primary care without cracking the very top. 

A doctor salary by specialty view like this one typically combines steady demand with less reliance on RVU-heavy procedure volume.

Lowest-paid specialties

Family medicine anchors the lower end of the specialty range across every source in the table above. 

Primary care composites from MedPAC and SullivanCotter and from Medscape land in the same $296,000 to $298,000 band, which shows this isn’t one survey’s quirk. 

Specialists as a group average $417,000 in that same Medscape data, a gap the next section covers directly.

How much do primary care physicians make compared to specialists?

A primary care physician salary search keeps turning up numbers in the high $200,000s, regardless of which of the four major sources you check, and that consistency is about the only comfort on offer here. 

The specialist physician salary premium over primary care holds across every one of them too, typically running 30% to 40% higher. 

Medscape puts primary care at $298,000 against $417,000 for specialists as a group, a 40% gap. Doximity’s data show an even wider split, with specialists overall reporting 90.1% higher pay than primary care physicians in the same 2025 dataset.

The gap narrows once total compensation, not base salary, gets compared properly, since primary care physicians on productivity plans can claw back some ground through wRVU bonuses and value-based care incentives. It never fully closes, though.

MedPAC and SullivanCotter’s data, drawn from over 115,000 physicians, shows the same pattern in cash compensation too, not just survey-based total comp, a consistency too strong across sources to blame on a fluke.

For a physician weighing primary care against a procedural specialty, the pay gap is real, but it’s not the whole equation. 

Primary care typically means shorter training and steadier hours, while procedural specialties trade a longer runway for a higher ceiling. The right call depends more on lifestyle priorities than on the salary chart alone.

How does physician salary change by state?

Physician salary by state and metro area varies widely, but nobody has actually built a clean, apples-to-apples 50-state ranking of total compensation, however confidently some lists pretend otherwise. 

Metro area	Nominal average compensation	Source	Note
Durham-Chapel Hill, NC	$381,424	Doximity, 2025	Lower end of Doximity’s metro range
Oklahoma City, OK	$495,617	Doximity, 2025	Higher end of Doximity’s metro range, holds value after cost-of-living adjustment

Nominal pay by state tells only part of the story, since a big number in an expensive metro can buy less than a smaller one somewhere cheaper. 

Doximity’s cost-of-living-adjusted 2025 data show high-nominal markets like Los Angeles and Boston sliding to the bottom tier once adjusted, while Oklahoma City, Rochester in Minnesota, and Louisville hold their value.

Some rankings blend BLS employee wages, survey submissions, and Doximity metro data into a single list, producing numbers that look precise but compare different things (precision and accuracy are not the same skill, however tidy the spreadsheet looks). 

The honest answer is that state-level physician pay is directional at best, not gospel. Before trusting any doctor salary by state list, check whether it adjusts for cost of living, and which underlying survey actually supplied the number.

How does practice setting affect physician pay?

Practice setting swings physician pay by well over $150,000 a year from $311,502 average compensation in government settings to $480,961 in single-specialty group practice. 

A physician salary by practice setting comparison is really a comparison of who carries the business risk, the employer or the physician.

Employed physician salary figures, the kind most residency graduates see first, typically sit closer to the middle of that range.

Hospital employment

Hospital-employed physicians usually receive a predictable base salary with a productivity or quality bonus layered on top, the compensation equivalent of a security blanket. 

This setting removes most of the overhead risk a practice owner carries, in exchange for less upside when patient volume runs high. It remains the most common path for physicians in their first years out of training.

Group practice

Single-specialty group practice reports the highest average compensation among Doximity’s 2025 practice settings, the reward for staying in your lane. 

Multi-specialty groups typically land a step below that, since revenue and overhead spread across a wider mix of services. 

Group practice compensation usually blends a base salary with a collections-based or RVU-based bonus.

Solo practice

Solo practice carries the widest income range of any setting, no contest, because pay depends directly on what the practice bills, what it actually collects, and what overhead consumes before payroll. 

A busy practice with a strong revenue cycle process can outearn a comparable hospital-employed position. One with weak collections or a high denial rate can fall well behind it on the exact same patient volume, a gap the benchmarking section below deals with directly.

Academic medicine

Academic medicine generally reports the lowest average compensation among major practice settings, government positions aside, which surprises exactly nobody. 

Academic physicians typically trade some salary for research time and teaching responsibilities, with a schedule that’s often more predictable than private practice. For many physicians early in an academic track, that trade is deliberate, not a compromise.

How much do physicians make per hour?

Divide physician pay by the hours it actually takes to earn it, and the number gets a lot less impressive. 

At $277,260 a year against a reported 57.8-hour workweek, that works out to roughly $92 an hour, before on-call time, administrative work, and unpaid documentation even get added to the clock.

The American Medical Association’s 2024 Benchmark Survey found that direct patient care eats up only 27.2 of those 57.8 weekly hours, with the rest disappearing into charting and administration. 

Run the same salary through a tidy 40-hour week instead, and physician hourly wage estimates inflate by roughly 45%, which is a generous way of saying they’re wrong.

The honest answer to how much do physicians make per hour lands closer to $90 than the $130-plus figure that naive math produces. 

That $40-an-hour gap isn’t a rounding error. It’s the whole difference between a locum tenens rate quoted per hour worked and a salary that gets diluted across every hour actually spent working. 

Confusing the two is how a physician ends up comparing apples to a much shinier orange.

How does physician pay grow with experience?

Nowhere does physician pay move faster than the moment a resident becomes an attending. The Association of American Medical Colleges puts the average PGY-1 resident stipend at $68,166 in its 2025 survey, a number that looks almost unfair next to what comes right after it.

AMN Healthcare’s 2026 recruiting report puts the average starting physician salary for new attendings at $419,000, and 87% of them walk in with a signing bonus on top of that.

That’s a $351,000 jump in one step, the single biggest pay increase most physicians will ever see in their entire career, residency included. 

Physician salary by experience keeps climbing after that point, but the curve flattens fast, inching up mostly through partnership tracks and RVU growth rather than another cliff-edge leap. 

Skip the career-stage label on either number, and a resident stipend gets compared to an attending salary as if they were the same kind of paycheck, which they very much are not.

Is there a real gender pay gap among physicians?

Controlling for specialty, hours, and location doesn’t make the physician gender pay gap disappear, it just makes the number harder to argue with. 

Doximity’s 2025 data put the model-adjusted gap at 26%, or roughly $122,276 a year, after those controls are applied. The raw numbers look even starker. 

Also, Medscape’s 2025 survey has male physicians averaging $429,000 against $327,000 for female physicians, though that unadjusted figure doesn’t account for differences in specialty mix or hours worked.

A single survey year isn’t where this pattern starts or stops. Health Affairs tracked physicians from 2014 through 2019 and found a 24.6% adjusted gap that, projected across a simulated 40-year career, adds up to a $2.04 million difference. 

Unlike a one-year survey snapshot, that number comes from peer-reviewed longitudinal data, which is exactly why it keeps showing up in compensation research.

None of this guarantees that every female physician earns less than every male colleague in the same role, since individual negotiation still plays a role within any specialty. 

What it does mean is that no compensation offer should be judged in isolation from what colleagues in the same specialty, location, and practice setting are actually paid. 

Asking for that comparison data, instead of assuming a first offer already reflects market rate, is a reasonable step for any physician, regardless of gender.

Why does physician pay keep climbing while productivity falls?

Something doesn’t add up in the way physician pay usually gets explained. MGMA’s 2026 report tracked compensation rising across all 23 specialties it covers, even as work RVUs fell in 16 of them and patient encounters fell in every single one. 

That combination directly undercuts the assumption that physician pay is purely productivity-driven. Reimbursement pressure, staffing shortages, and rising overhead look like the real drivers here, pushing compensation up even where output is flat or declining. For physician-owned practices, payer contract terms also shape the reimbursement economics behind those rates.

Payers feel the same pressure from their side of the table. Zelis and Datos Insights’ 2026 survey found 69% of providers naming declining or inadequate reimbursement rates as a top challenge, with 72% pointing to administrative complexity right alongside it. 

Meanwhile Doximity’s inflation-adjusted 2025 compensation figure, $332,976, sits roughly 3% below its 2017 baseline once CPI gets factored in, which means real purchasing power hasn’t actually kept pace with the nominal numbers making headlines.

Physician salary 2026 headlines announcing steady growth are telling the truth and missing the point at the same time. The nominal number really is climbing. But the number that buys groceries and pays down student loans is holding a lot closer to flat, and that gap is worth remembering before anyone compares this year’s raise to what a raise actually bought a decade ago.

How do you benchmark a physician salary offer?

A physician salary benchmark falls apart the moment specialty, geography, employment type, or compensation definition stop matching on both sides of the comparison. 

Skip that check, and a $386,000 total-compensation average gets compared to a $275,930 wage figure like they’re the same thing. 

The result isn’t a benchmark, it’s an apples-to-oranges mismatch wearing a spreadsheet. Five checks fix that problem, and they’re worth running before accepting or countering any offer. 

For anyone joining or owning a small medical practice instead of a hospital system, step five is the one that actually decides the paycheck, because a solo or small-group physician’s real pay was never the same thing as the practice’s billed charges. 

What lands in payroll is billed charges minus adjustments, minus denials, minus overhead, filtered through the practice’s revenue cycle first.

Collect $1 million in charges and a well-run revenue cycle might convert 85% to 95% of it into actual cash, while a poorly managed one bleeds 20% or more to denials and slow follow-up before the physician-owner ever sees a dollar. 

The fee schedule doesn’t decide take-home pay for anyone with equity in the practice, the collection rate does. 

The paycheck part no salary benchmark can show you

Every benchmark in this article measures what a physician is paid. It says nothing about what a specific practice actually collects, and that number is what a revenue cycle department controls.

MedHeave’s revenue cycle management works as an embedded revenue department for medical practices, handling the full claim lifecycle from charge capture through final payment so more of what’s billed turns into what’s collected. 

For a physician-owner or partner, that collection rate is the difference between a salary benchmark and an actual paycheck.

• Denial management targeting an 80%+ overturn rate
• AR follow-up and patient billing to maximize collections
• Clean claims submitted within 24-48 hours at a 90%+ first-pass rate
• Credentialing focused on faster billing and revenue readiness
• Weekly and monthly reporting from charges to collected revenue

Curious how much of your practice’s billed revenue is actually reaching payroll? Contact MedHeave’s team to find out.

Frequently asked questions about physician compensation

Here are some commonly asked questions about this topic: