Cardiologists 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 Cardiologists ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $230,100. 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

With 18,020 jobs nationally, Cardiologists make up 0.01% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: New York alone holds 2,260 of those jobs, the top three states hold 29.5%, and the deepest concentration sits in New Mexico (location quotient 3.10, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

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 $432,490. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 37 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Texas posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $168,780, and New York the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Cardiologists stands number 580 by employment and number 5 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 0.2% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 0 of the 1 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 2,820 jobs, 15.6% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

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, $273,070 a year, against $389,860 in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $239,200 or more works out to $19,933 a month before taxes, $9,200 per biweekly paycheck, and $4,600 a week. 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, $230,100, is the firmest anchor for an early-career offer. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

Related occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Medical Records Specialists, Speech-Language Pathologists, Emergency Medical Technicians, Health Technologists and Technicians, All Other, Physician Assistants, Occupational Therapists. The full directory is on the Careers hub.