Psychiatrists 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 Psychiatrists ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $141,290. 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 24,800 Psychiatrists jobs in May 2024, which is 0.02% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Rhode Island, where the location quotient is 3.56, meaning the occupation holds 3.56 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 4,350 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 39.6% 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 $269,120. The state table below is the more useful negotiating document: it shows how far the same job title travels across the 47 states with published estimates.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 4,350 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Delaware would lead at $236,740. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Psychiatrists stands number 514 by employment and number 11 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 0.3% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 0 of the 16 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 3,680 jobs, 14.8% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 105 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, Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $213,470 a year, against $358,950 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, 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

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, $141,290, 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Athletic Trainers, Radiologists, Surgeons, All Other, Surgical Assistants, Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Therapists, All Other. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.