--- title: Surgeon Salary and Physician Salary: How Much Doctors Make description: The latest physician salary data shows that it pays to be an orthopedist, a surgeon or a cardiologist. Find out more doctor salary data here canonical: https://time.com/4419844/orthopedic-surgeon-salary/ author: Alexandra Sifferlin article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-07-25T14:12:14.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:04:26.558Z article:section: Health og:title: Here's How Much Money Doctors Make og:description: The latest physician salary data shows that it pays to be an orthopedist, a surgeon or a cardiologist. Find out more doctor salary data here og:url: https://time.com/4419844/orthopedic-surgeon-salary/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5745fd9e53c0fe18/698778965f570f47e0b148f6/health-gloves.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: TIME.com stock photos Health First Aid Kit Gloves og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Here's How Much Money Doctors Make twitter:description: The latest physician salary data shows that it pays to be an orthopedist, a surgeon or a cardiologist. Find out more doctor salary data here twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5745fd9e53c0fe18/698778965f570f47e0b148f6/health-gloves.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Surgeon Salary: Here's How Much Doctors Make > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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Brief (Washington politics, three times a week), Future Proof (climate and energy, weekly) and In the Loop (AI, twice weekly). All are free at time.com/newsletters and together reach more than 1.1 million engaged readers. #### Which TIME newsletter should I subscribe to? It depends on what you follow. For a daily briefing, The Brief. For health, Health Matters. For Washington politics, D.C. Brief. For AI and technology, In the Loop. For climate and energy as a business story, Future Proof. For culture recommendations, Worth Your Time. For how TIME's journalism gets made, Inside TIME. Readers can select any combination at time.com/newsletters. #### Are TIME's newsletters free? Yes. All seven TIME newsletters are free to join at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes TIME's newsletters? TIME journalists write them. Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ## Video: Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola [Watch (HLS stream): Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/G194AmTC.m3u8) (2:32)  _Published 2014-08-13. Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola_ by [Alexandra Sifferlin](https://time.com/author/alexandra-sifferlin/) ## Alexandra Sifferlin Jul 25, 2016 2:12 PM UTC  Elizabeth Renstrom for TIME by [Alexandra Sifferlin](https://time.com/author/alexandra-sifferlin/) ## Alexandra Sifferlin Jul 25, 2016 2:12 PM UTC Doctors still earn high wages, but there are distinct gaps based on speciality—and, unfortunately, gender. A [survey](http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/compensation/2016/public/overview#page=1) released by Medscape of 19,200 doctors in about 26 medical specialties reveals that orthopedists are the top earners in the medical field, at an average annual salary of $443,000\. That group is followed by cardiologists at $410,000 and dermatologists at $381,000\. The lowest earners were pediatricians with an annual salary of $204,000, followed by endocrinologists at $206,000 and family physicians at $207,000. A few medical specialties saw hikes in their pay, including significant increases for rheumatologists and internists. “Over 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day, driving demand for internists, and their compensation, higher,” said Travis Singleton, senior vice president of national physician search firm Merritt Hawkins, in the Medscape report. Doctors in the allergy and pulmonology specialties had signifiant drops in income, for reasons that are unclear. Medical providers in the north central United States and in the Southeast had the highest salaries, regionally speaking, and physicians in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic had the lowest. One of the reasons for this could be that government policies have recently focused on getting more doctors into rural and low-income communities, which could result in higher wages for doctors in these areas. The three top earning states in the report were North Dakota, New Hampshire and Nebraska. Unfortunately, as in many professional fields, [male physicians earn more than female doctors](http://time.com/4398888/doctors-gender-wage-gap/). Male primary care doctors earned $225,000 a year compared to female primary care doctors, who earned $192,000\. Female specialists also earned about $100,000 less than male doctors in the same speciality. The report authors note that women’s salaries did increase more between the years 2012 to 2016 compared to men’s. Still, female doctors make 24% less overall than male docs. Other recent studies have found that white male doctors [earn more than black doctors and women](http://time.com/4360062/black-doctors-medicine/). ## Transcript This Ebola outbreak is unprecedented. This is definitely a marathon and not a sprint. The bugs have evolved. The outbreak has gotten bigger. We are only as strong as the weakest link, and we have learned from Ebola that West Africa was a very weak link. [ MUSIC ] There's small clinics, these are like one room places where sick people might go in their house with maybe an auxiliary nurse as some one who has a little bit of medical training, but defiantly not the same standards that we would have here in the US. We're facing 3 main threats. The first is the threat of new organisms. It was coming and spreading in different places. The second is drug- resistant bacteria, and the third are intentionally created organisms. What we do in an outbreak response is continuously see how can we make it better. The exercises we've gone through both, re- evaluating our own protocols but also understanding what the public and governmental responses are has really helped us understand. How to take care of these patients in the larger context of our healthcare systems. And, those who are in the building, I would urge you to come down to either the ops team room, or the, When designing a unit that is designed to accept patients with serious communicable diseases, like Ebola, there are ways to design a unit so that it's function. Functional. Any hospital that can isolate a patient in a single patient room with a bathroom and can follow our infection control recommendations is capable of safely caring for a patient with Ebola. And we've tried to encourage every single hospital in the country to have an antibiotic stewardship program to improve antibiotic prescribing practices. There is a concern about fatigue as we go on that, the CDC other groups have sort of ramping up now to try to surge resources into the area. What we're also realizing is, we need to be able to maintain that surge for many months to keep the pressure on to completely control the outbreak. Time will tell in the next few weeks if we can start to see those numbers going in the right direction. Fewer new cases each day or each week. The single most important thing to understand about protecting Americans from Ebola is that can best be done by stopping it at the source in Africa. Its normal to be scared of something as deadly as Ebola and for the general public I really hope we can never let our fear undermine our compassion. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4419844/orthopedic-surgeon-salary/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4419844/orthopedic-surgeon-salary/"},"headline":"Surgeon Salary: Here's How Much Doctors Make","datePublished":"2016-07-25T14:12:14.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T08:04:26.558Z","description":"It pays to be in medicine. 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