This Is the City Where Doctors Make the Most Money

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 20, 10:30AM EST

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This Is the City Where Doctors Make the Most Money — © Christopher Furlong / Getty Images

There is a reason many parents want their children to be doctors, lawyers or accountants. According to the highest paying occupations list from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost all the positions are taken by people in these professions. And the list is dominated by doctors across several branches of medicine. Psychiatrists top the list, followed by obstetricians and surgeons.

The time it takes to become a doctor is as long or longer than any other profession. After college, an aspiring doctor can spend three years in medical school, one or two years as a resident and one or two years longer in a fellowship.

Doximity recently published the fifth edition of its Physician Compensation Report, covering data for 2021 from a survey of 160,000 physicians. According to the report: “Our findings show that average pay for doctors increased by 3.8% this year, which is up from an increase of 1.5% last year. Like last year, the increase did not outpace the rate of inflation. In 2021, the 12-month headline inflation rate was 6.2%.”

The study also showed compensation by practice type, and these figures varied substantially. The average annual pay for neurosurgeons was $773,201 followed by thoracic surgeons at $684,663 and orthopedic surgeons at $633,629.
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The lowest-paid doctors were those who practice pediatric infectious diseases at $201,844.

The difference by gender was extreme at $122,000 a year on average.

The city with the highest-paid doctors was Charlotte, North Carolina, at $462,706. St. Louis followed at $452,219. The lowest paying city was Baltimore at $330,917, just below Providence at $346,092.

These are the 10 cities where doctors make the most money:

Charlotte, N.C. ($462,760)
Louis, Mo. ($452,219)
Buffalo, N.Y. ($426,440)
Jacksonville, Fla. ($425,706)
Orlando, Fla. ($425,634)
Minneapolis, Minn. ($424,059)
Milwaukee, Wis. ($422,735)
Phoenix, Ariz. ($419,359)
Dallas, Texas ($415,487)
Los Angeles, Calif. ($414,925)

Click here to see which are 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.