Every spring the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes what employers pay workers in about 830 occupations, nationally and in every state. Seventeen of those occupations are physician and surgeon specialties. The figures are free, large and consistent from state to state, which makes them useful. They also leave out a large share of physicians, which matters when you read them.
Where the numbers come from
The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey asks a sample of about 1.1 million workplaces how many people they employ in each occupation and what they pay them. BLS runs it with state workforce agencies. The May 2025 estimates, published May 15, 2026, pool three years of responses and use a model to fill in workplaces that did not respond. A single year’s change in one state can therefore be noise.
Who is counted
Only employees. The survey does not cover the self-employed, or owners and partners in unincorporated businesses. Physicians who own their practice, or are partners in one, are outside it. So are many physicians paid through their own professional corporation. That is why BLS counts 107,510 employed family medicine physicians and 38,760 employed anesthesiologists in May 2025, well below the number of physicians practising in those specialties.
The occupations follow the federal Standard Occupational Classification. Physicians whose specialty has no code of its own are in “Physicians, all other” (29-1229). The federal occupation guide files hospitalists there too, so many hospitalists are likely counted in that group rather than in general internal medicine.
What is counted as pay
Wages include base pay and incentive pay, such as productivity bonuses and commissions. They exclude overtime, shift differentials, non-production bonuses such as signing bonuses, severance, and the employer’s cost of benefits. A physician’s total compensation, with retirement contributions and benefits, is higher than the wage BLS reports.
Why some states show “$239,200 or more”
When most reported wages for an occupation in a state fall in the survey’s top wage band, BLS does not publish an exact mean. It reports only that the figure is at least $239,200 a year. In the May 2025 state tables this happens most for emergency medicine (15 states) and anesthesiology (13). National figures for these specialties are published in full: the 90th percentile for anesthesiologists was $557,130. Some states have no estimate at all, usually because too few employers reported the occupation.
How to use them
- Compare within a specialty. The state tables show how employed pay in one specialty differs by state, from one source and one method.
- Look at the spread, not only the average. In family medicine, half of employed physicians earned between $162,420 and $334,270 in May 2025, and the mean ($255,820) sat above the median ($244,180).
- Translate pay into productivity. Divide a wage by a contract’s rate per wRVU to see the workload it implies. At $50 per wRVU, the family medicine mean equals about 5,100 wRVUs a year. The pay pages do this at any rate you enter.
- Don’t treat them as an offer benchmark. Private compensation surveys use different samples, include owners, and report total compensation. Federal figures are a public, consistent baseline, not a price for a specific job.
See the numbers
Our physician pay pages show the May 2025 figures for every specialty, with state tables for family medicine, internal medicine, emergency medicine, psychiatry and anesthesiology. The RVU calculator counts the wRVUs for the codes you bill.
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025: national and state estimates for SOC 29-1211 to 29-1249. https://www.bls.gov/oes/ (data retrieved through the BLS public API, 2026-11-01)
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. OEWS technical notes, May 2025. https://www.bls.gov/oes/2025/may/oes_tec.htm
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Standard Occupational Classification, 2018 (29-1216, 29-1229). https://www.bls.gov/soc/2018/ ; O*NET-SOC 29-1229.02, Hospitalists. https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/29-1229.02
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