Physicians, Pathologists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($83,930) to the 90th ($239,200 or more). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 11,800 Physicians, Pathologists jobs in May 2024, which is 0.01% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Missouri, where the location quotient is 2.95, meaning the occupation holds 2.95 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 2,180 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 35.8% 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 $266,020. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 34 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 34 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Alabama at $238,020; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Physicians, Pathologists stands number 666 by employment and number 10 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 0.1% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 0 of the 7 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 900 jobs, 7.6% 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, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $232,490 a year, against $255,360 in Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA. 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

As a household number, $239,200 or more a year is $19,933 a month gross, $9,200 every two weeks, $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, $165,940, is the firmest anchor for an early-career offer. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $19,933 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: Physical Therapists, Radiologic Technologists and Technicians, Dental Hygienists, Medical Records Specialists, Speech-Language Pathologists, Emergency Medical Technicians. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.