These Are the Highest Paid Doctors in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 13, 8:30AM EST

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These Are the Highest Paid Doctors in America — © gorodenkoff / iStock via Getty Images

Many parents encourage their children to become doctors or lawyers. Why? The two professions are among the highest paid in America, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In fact, categories of physicians take up eight of the highest paying professions, according to BLS data.

The path to becoming a physician is a long one. Once a candidate has a college degree, he or she spends four years in a medical school, a year or more as a resident and often another year or more in fellowships. Fellowships can be particularly important for doctors who want to become specialists.

Being a doctor also can be expensive. Malpractice insurance can run as much as $50,000 a year. Doctors who are not employed by hospitals need staff and office space. Altogether, these costs can run into tens of thousands of dollars a year. Both expenses and income can vary by geographic location. Doctors in Manhattan often make more than physicians who work in rural settings.

Among the conclusions of the recently released “Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2021: The Recovery Begins” is that some doctor practices did not make it through the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. They continued to have their ongoing costs, but patient visits dropped. Other doctors could afford to wait out the slow period but lost a great deal of money in the process. Medscape collected data from about 18,000 doctors on their incomes (including bonuses) and expenses and how many hours they worked.
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This year, the average pay for primary care physicians was $242,000, about the same as in 2020. Specialists made an average of $346,000, also very close to last year’s number.

Plastic surgeons made the most money this year, at an average of $526,000.

This is the annual compensation for the highest paid specialties:

Plastic surgery ($526,000)
Orthopedics and orthopedic surgery ($511,000)
Cardiology (459,000)
Urology ($427,000)
Otolaryngology ($417,000)

Click here to see the 25 highest-paying jobs in America.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.