Pediatricians, General Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Pediatricians, General worker at that point in the distribution, so $239,200 or more at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 42,960, or 0.03% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 6,960 jobs; the top three states sum to 36.6% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Massachusetts posts a location quotient of 2.93, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

BLS top-codes or suppresses part of this occupation's national ladder, so the published center is the median of $210,130 and the mean of $222,340. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 48 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 48 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is New Mexico at $237,950; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Pediatricians, General stands number 414 by employment and number 23 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 114% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 15 of the 41 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $210,130, 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 5,340 jobs, 12.4% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 110 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $172,310 a year, against $258,240 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

As a household number, $210,130 a year is $17,511 a month gross, $8,082 every two weeks, $4,041 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, $159,510, is the firmest anchor for an early-career offer. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $17,511 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

Related occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations

Sibling occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations: Nuclear Medicine Technologists, Recreational Therapists, Audiologists, Orthopedic Surgeons, Except Pediatric, Ophthalmologists, Except Pediatric, Physicians, Pathologists. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.