Palliative Care Doctor

Treat pain, breathlessness and fear in people with serious illness, and help them decide what happens next.

Typical pay: $265,930a year
Time to qualify: 12 to 14 yearsafter high school
Demand: Moderate
License needed: Yesregulated job

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Quick answers

How much does a palliative care doctor make in the United States?

The median pay is about $265,930 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $69,170 at the lower end to about $452,360 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.

How long does it take to become a palliative care doctor in the United States?

12 to 14 years after high school, on the usual route.

What does it cost to become a palliative care doctor?

$160,000 to $340,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.

Do you need a license to work as a palliative care doctor in the United States?

Yes. It is a regulated job, so you need a license or registration before you can work.

What is the job outlook for a palliative care doctor in the United States?

Moderate demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.

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Palliative Care Doctor salary in the United States

What you earn and what it costs to get there.

What the pay looks like

Median for the group

$265,930

Bottom tenth

$69,170

Top tenth

$452,360

There is no separate federal wage figure for palliative care. These doctors are counted inside a residual group called Physicians, All Other, a mix of specialties. In the 2025 federal wage survey that group's median is $265,930 a year, the bottom tenth earn $69,170 or less and the top tenth $452,360 or more. These figures describe the whole group, not this specialty alone, and they count only physicians paid a wage, so doctors who own their practice are largely missing.

While you are a resident and fellow

$71,052 to $79,908 a year

Duke University Hospital pay for the first to the fourth training year, 2026 to 2027

Residents and fellows are salaried hospital employees, and each hospital sets its own scale. It is real income, while your medical school loans keep growing. Nationally, the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) survey of 345 teaching hospitals puts the average first-year stipend at $68,166 as of July 1, 2025, and about $81,807 in the fifth year. Read from the AAMC's data, downloaded in a browser with Claude in Chrome on 6 November 2026, because aamc.org refuses our checker.

The top quarter of the group

$378,770 a year or more

25% of the Physicians, All Other group earn this or more

That is the whole mixed group, not palliative doctors, who are not reported separately. The work is conversation and symptom control rather than procedures, which tend to pay more.

What it costs to get there

Bachelor's degree, in-state public: Roughly $11,000 a year in tuition and fees, 4 years
Medical school, in-state public: Commonly $30,000 to $50,000 a year, 4 years
Medical school, private: Often $65,000 a year or more
Admission test, applications and interviews: $3,000 to $8,000 over the application year

Roughly, all in

$160,000 to $340,000

Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel

The low end is a community college start into a public university in your own state for the bachelor's degree, then a medical school in your own state at the cheaper end of $30,000 a year. The high end is four full years of undergraduate study plus a private medical school at $65,000 a year or more, with $3,000 to $8,000 for the admission test, applications and interviews. Residency and the palliative care fellowship are paid jobs rather than tuition. Most graduates borrow and finish with large debts, but this is one field where federal loan forgiveness genuinely applies, because hospices, academic hospitals and Veterans Affairs are usually nonprofit or government employers.

Roughly $160,000 to $340,000 in all, and most graduates borrow. File the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) every year. This is one field where Public Service Loan Forgiveness genuinely applies, because hospices, academic hospitals and Veterans Affairs are usually nonprofit or government employers.

Where the jobs are

Hospital palliative care teams
A common employer. You are consulted by other doctors for patients already admitted.
Hospice agencies
Medical director roles overseeing care delivered at home or in a hospice house.
Cancer centers
Working alongside oncologists from the point of diagnosis, not just at the end.
Veterans Affairs
Federal salary, a pension, and a patient population with heavy palliative need.

How to become a palliative care doctor in the United States

The exact path from high school to qualified.

The path to becoming a palliative care doctor, step by step

You become a doctor first, in almost any specialty, then add a fellowship.

1
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Biology, chemistry, physics, math and as much English as you can take. Half of this job is language.
2
Bachelor's degree
4 years
Any major with the science prerequisites finished, a high GPA, and the medical college admission test.
3
Medical school
4 years
Four years to an MD (doctor of medicine) or a DO (doctor of osteopathic medicine), passing the first national licensing exams along the way.
4
Residency in a base specialty
3 to 5 years
Usually internal medicine or family medicine, but emergency medicine, anesthesiology, pediatrics, psychiatry, neurology and surgery all lead here too.
5
Hospice and palliative medicine fellowship
1 year
A one-year fellowship accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, then the subspecialty board exam.

High school courses that help you become a palliative care doctor

Biology and chemistry
Required for every pre-medical track.
English and writing
You will run the hardest conversations in the hospital. Precise plain language is the skill.
Psychology
Grief, anxiety and family dynamics are daily work, not side issues.
A second language
Interpreters help, but families talk more freely to a doctor who speaks with them directly.

Time and money, at a glance

Years after high school: 12 to 14
Admission: Medical school is the hard gate. The fellowship itself is far less competitive than most
Total cost: $160,000 to $340,000 depending on public or private
Paid while training?: Yes, from the first day of residency

License first, subspecialty second

You need a license from the medical board of every state you work in. The national exam sequence, the United States Medical Licensing Examination, is taken in three steps during medical school and residency, and osteopathic students may sit an equivalent instead. Passing it is not a license by itself. Hospice and palliative medicine sits on top as a subspecialty certification, offered through the board of whichever specialty you trained in.

It is an unusually open door

Almost no other subspecialty accepts fellows from so many base specialties. Internists, family doctors, emergency physicians, anesthesiologists, pediatricians, psychiatrists, neurologists, surgeons, obstetricians and radiation oncologists can all enter the same one-year fellowship. That means you do not have to pick this at 22. Plenty of people come to it after a decade doing something else.

What helps you get ahead as a palliative care doctor

Things you don't need, but that help.

Ways the job branches

Pediatric palliative care
Children with life-limiting conditions and their families. Small, specialized and emotionally the hardest version of the work.
Hospice medical director
Clinical leadership of an agency, including eligibility decisions and staff supervision.
Academic and research work
Teaching communication skills, running trials on symptom control, building a hospital program.
Ethics consultation
Many palliative doctors end up on hospital ethics committees, because they already do this reasoning daily.

Nice-to-haves

Volunteering at a hospice
The single best way to find out whether you can do this work. Start in high school or college.
Communication training
Structured courses in breaking bad news and running family meetings exist, and they measurably help.
Comfort with silence
Not a course. The willingness to sit quietly with someone is the core of the job.
Your own support system
A therapist, a team debrief habit, something outside medicine. Burnout in this field is real and known.

What being a palliative care doctor is really like

Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.

What a palliative care doctor does day to day

Morning rounds with a team: a nurse, a social worker, a chaplain and you. Review overnight consults, then walk the hospital seeing patients other doctors have asked you about. Adjust pain and breathlessness medication. Sit down with a family for 45 minutes and work out what the person in the bed would actually want. Write the notes, call the hospice agency, arrange the discharge. You will have two or three conversations a day that most people never have once.

The honest pros and cons of being a palliative care doctor

The good

Deeply meaningful work that patients and families remember
Mostly weekday hours with far less night call than other specialties
Teams are genuinely multidisciplinary, so you are never alone with a case
Work in hospitals, hospices, cancer centers and patients' homes

The hard parts

Twelve years of training, and no official pay figure for the specialty alone
Constant exposure to death, including children in some jobs
Other doctors sometimes call you too late, which is frustrating
Burnout and compassion fatigue are real occupational risks

Work life

Typical hours: 40 to 50 a week, some phone call
Remote work: Some telehealth family meetings
Physical demand: Low
Unionized: No, though some resident physicians are

Similar paths

Things nobody tells you about being a palliative care doctor

Things people don't tell you.

Palliative care is not the same as hospice

Medicare pays for hospice when two doctors certify that a person is expected to live 6 months or less and the person chooses comfort care over treatment to cure. Palliative care can start on the day of diagnosis and run alongside chemotherapy, surgery or dialysis. Every hospice patient gets palliative care, but most palliative patients are not on hospice.

It is a young specialty

Ten specialty boards agreed in 2006 to certify hospice and palliative medicine, and the first board exam was given in 2008. Many of the doctors who built the field are still working.

Ten boards, one exam

Each of those ten boards, from internal medicine to surgery and psychiatry, issues the certificate to its own doctors, so a pediatrician and an anesthesiologist can hold the same subspecialty.

How a palliative care doctor compares

Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.

More health careers in the US

Doctors first, then the rest of the field. See every career in health.

Where these numbers come from

Last checked November 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.