Anesthesiologists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Anesthesiologists ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $186,680. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 41,890 Anesthesiologists jobs in May 2024, which is 0.03% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in New Jersey, where the location quotient is 1.66, meaning the occupation holds 1.66 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 4,680 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 28.0% of the national total.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $239,200 or more and the mean of $336,640. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 39 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 4,680 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, South Carolina would lead at $229,870. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Anesthesiologists stands number 418 by employment and number 4 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations, the group median wage is $98,340 across 71 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 143% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 0 of the 5 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $239,200 or more, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 2,890 jobs, 6.9% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $238,920 a year, against $396,180 in San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $19,933 a month before tax, $9,200 biweekly, $4,600 weekly. The top of this ladder is top-coded by BLS (shown as $239,200+), so the full experience premium cannot be printed from the published table; the 25th percentile, $186,680, is the firmest anchor for an early-career offer. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

Related occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Veterinary Technologists and Technicians, Surgical Technologists, Dentists, General, Family Medicine Physicians, Paramedics, Diagnostic Medical Sonographers. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.