Pediatricians, General
What the pay figures show
- Louisiana comes first for pediatricians, general on every measure. $502,720 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $370,689 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For pediatricians, general, Louisiana's $502,720 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $370,689. Concordance across all three measures is uncommon and worth stating explicitly, because the absence of a reordering is itself the finding for this occupation.
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$210,040
People doing it
39,390
Highest paid
$502,720
LA
Best off, really
$370,689
LA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$91,470
Highest tenth
$338,500
Lowest, really
$54,879
DC
States with data
49
National average
$212,110
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
88.34%
LA, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $54,879 up to $370,689.
- Only 39,390 people do this job in the whole country. It is a small field, so the pay figures rest on fewer reports.
- This job is not published everywhere — 49 jurisdictions have a figure, with $210,040 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Louisiana tops the ones that are.
- The nominal spread for pediatricians, general approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $54,879 to $370,689, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in pediatricians, general is 39,390. ⚠️ At this headcount the state-level medians rest on comparatively thin samples, and year-to-year movement in any one state reflects sampling as much as wages.
- 49 jurisdictions carry a published median for pediatricians, general. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Pediatricians, General
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $91,470 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $210,040 |
| Top tenth earn over | $338,500 |
| This salary | $210,040 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Pediatricians, General
The national median for this job
$210,040around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $91,470 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $210,040 |
| Top tenth | $338,500 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Pediatricians, General, state by state
The national median for this job
49states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | District of Columbia · $79,240 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Louisiana · $502,720 |
| Spread | $423,480 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $173,360 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $178,400 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| LA | $502,720 | $327,485 | $370,689 |
| ID | $297,680 | $198,800 | $217,445 |
| SD | $257,610 | $188,178 | $213,608 |
| IA | $262,440 | $181,988 | $205,018 |
| MT | $273,260 | $184,346 | $204,275 |
| WI | $269,790 | $182,462 | $195,991 |
| ND | $234,950 | $169,979 | $191,911 |
| AK | $267,390 | $194,599 | $191,317 |
| NH | $273,410 | $198,518 | $188,446 |
| OK | $236,780 | $164,348 | $186,155 |
| OH | $217,970 | $156,877 | $170,867 |
| MO | $223,910 | $156,467 | $170,514 |
| ME | $245,920 | $164,562 | $169,483 |
| AZ | $233,950 | $167,199 | $165,372 |
| PA | $226,440 | $160,763 | $164,885 |
| AL | $209,490 | $147,557 | $164,007 |
| SC | $217,120 | $151,190 | $162,261 |
| KS | $209,840 | $144,754 | $160,900 |
| NM | $202,390 | $142,101 | $157,216 |
| MN | $226,660 | $152,735 | $155,192 |
| UT | $210,360 | $147,196 | $154,940 |
| MI | $204,690 | $143,933 | $152,821 |
| VT | $215,350 | $147,250 | $152,377 |
| DE | $219,190 | $149,720 | $150,847 |
| RI | $218,080 | $152,967 | $150,837 |
| MS | $183,650 | $129,537 | $148,395 |
| CT | $216,830 | $149,478 | $144,160 |
| TN | $176,210 | $131,706 | $142,361 |
| MA | $221,170 | $153,517 | $141,832 |
| OR | $224,690 | $146,341 | $139,744 |
| KY | $175,690 | $125,319 | $138,523 |
| IL | $196,760 | $136,917 | $138,503 |
| IN | $177,300 | $127,250 | $138,039 |
| NC | $183,550 | $129,908 | $137,995 |
| NE | $175,990 | $124,251 | $137,482 |
| CO | $196,440 | $138,338 | $136,452 |
| NY | $212,150 | $145,831 | $135,498 |
| VA | $195,940 | $135,394 | $134,388 |
| TX | $173,360 | $129,758 | $133,530 |
| AR | $160,440 | $115,449 | $133,455 |
| FL | $182,010 | $135,670 | $131,143 |
| NJ | $201,560 | $139,427 | $128,052 |
| CA | $214,140 | $143,518 | $127,480 |
| WV | $158,470 | $113,211 | $126,110 |
| HI | $197,090 | $132,957 | $122,418 |
| MD | $181,640 | $126,601 | $121,773 |
| WA | $169,540 | $127,147 | $117,119 |
| GA | $149,990 | $106,898 | $110,548 |
| DC | $79,240 | $60,808 | $54,879 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of pediatricians, general earn less than the figures here and half earn more, and experience, employer and city move an individual a long way from the middle. Nationally the middle earns $210,040.
- Take-home figures for pediatricians, general assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In Louisiana, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $327,485.
- Levelling out prices for pediatricians, general is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — the District of Columbia sits at the bottom on $54,879.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for pediatricians, general, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $210,040, with half of workers below it; dispersion within a state routinely exceeds the dispersion between states, driven by tenure, employer size, sector and metropolitan area. An individual's position in the distribution is not predictable from geography alone.
- Take-home calculations for pediatricians, general assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $327,485, in Louisiana. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- The price deflation applied to pediatricians, general uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is the District of Columbia at $54,879. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — the District of Columbia anchors the bottom at $54,879 — and the two source series are dated independently.