The family doctor for children, from newborn checkups to teenagers. Eleven years of training, and the lowest pay of any doctor on this list.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$210,040
Part-time or academic
$91,470
Practice owner or high volume
$338,500
The national median is $210,040 a year, with the bottom tenth near $91,470. That is real money, but it is near the bottom of physician pay. The survey counts employed pediatricians, and those in private partnerships are not counted at all.
$65,000 to $80,000
Salary across the 3 years of pediatrics residency
Paid hospital work, but it is a third of what you will eventually earn while about $200,000 of medical school debt accrues interest.
Mostly checkups, not procedures
And a large share of patients on public insurance
American medicine pays more for procedures than for talking to families, and children are more likely than adults to be covered by public insurance that reimburses less. That is the whole explanation for the gap.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is community college credits, an in state public university and a public medical school, with the admission test and application fees included. The high end is four full years of public university tuition and a private medical school at around sixty five thousand dollars a year, plus the certifying exam fee and the cost of keeping certification current afterwards. Residency is paid work, so the three years after medical school cost you nothing in tuition. Around two hundred thousand dollars in federal loans is typical, and that is a heavier load on a pediatrician's pay than on most other specialties, which is why loan forgiveness for nonprofit and underserved area work matters so much in this field.
Medical graduates who borrow typically owe around $200,000, and on a pediatrician's income that is a heavier load than for other specialties. Two things help: Public Service Loan Forgiveness after 10 years at a nonprofit hospital or clinic, and federal loan repayment for working in an underserved area.
Loan repayment programs
Federal and state programs repay large amounts of medical debt for pediatricians working in shortage areas.
Malpractice insurance paid
Covered by the employer, and premiums are lower than in surgical specialties.
Federal and military jobs
Veterans health, the Indian Health Service and military hospitals hire pediatricians with federal pay scales and pensions.
Part-time is normal
Pediatrics has one of the highest rates of part-time practice in medicine, and employers are used to it.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Eleven years after high school. Shorter than most specialties, and the residency is only 3 years.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Biology, chemistry and physics, with the grades to get into a college where you can hold a high grade point average.
Bachelor's degree
4 years
Any major, as long as you finish the pre-medical science courses and sit the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT).
Medical school
4 years
Two years of classroom science, two years of hospital rotations, ending in a Doctor of Medicine (MD) or a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO).
Pediatrics residency
3 years
Three years across clinic, inpatient wards, newborn nursery, intensive care and the emergency department. Paid, supervised, increasingly independent.
License and board certification
During and after residency
A state medical license to practice, then the American Board of Pediatrics certifying exam.
Biology
Growth and development is the core of this specialty. A two-year-old is not a small adult.
Chemistry
Required for every pre-medical track and heavily tested at admission.
Psychology
Behavior, development and mental health take up more of a pediatric clinic than most people expect.
Spanish
A large share of American pediatric patients live in Spanish-speaking households.
Every state licenses physicians through its own medical board, and you hold a license in each state where you practice. The exams are national: the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) sequence during medical school and residency, then certification by the American Board of Pediatrics. Certification is not a license to practice, but most hospitals and insurers require it, and it has to be maintained over a career rather than earned once.
Public medical schools
Much cheaper for residents of that state, and many favor in-state applicants heavily.
Private medical schools
No state preference and much higher tuition.
Osteopathic schools
Award a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO) degree and train in the same residency programs.
Residency matching
Pediatrics spots are assigned by the national computer match. You rank programs, they rank you, and the algorithm decides.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Neonatology
Three more years running newborn intensive care. The highest paid pediatric subspecialty by a wide margin.
Pediatric cardiology
Three more years on children's heart disease, from fetal scans onward.
Pediatric emergency medicine
Shift work at a children's hospital emergency department, with shift-based pay.
Developmental and behavioral pediatrics
Autism, attention disorders and learning problems. Huge waiting lists and far too few specialists.
Liking children, obviously
But also liking anxious parents, because you treat both at once.
Volunteering with kids before you apply
Coaching, camp, tutoring, hospital volunteering. It reads as genuine on an application.
Advocacy work
Pediatrics is the most politically engaged specialty. Vaccines, gun safety, nutrition and poverty are all part of the job.
Patience with repetition
You will explain the same fever advice several thousand times in a career.
Not every pediatrician runs a clinic. Pediatric hospitalists work only with admitted children, in blocks of shifts rather than a weekday schedule, and hand over completely when the block ends. There is no inbox of messages waiting and no business to run. The trade is that you work nights and weekends in rotation, and you lose the long relationships with families that draw many people to this specialty in the first place.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Clinic from 8am, with visits every 15 to 20 minutes. Newborn weight checks, two-month vaccines, ear infections, asthma, a teenager who wants to talk without a parent in the room, and well-child visits where the real work is reassurance. Between patients you take calls from worried families, refill prescriptions, fill in school and sports forms, and chase referrals. Charting spills into the evening more often than anyone admits.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
The American Academy of Pediatrics represents roughly 67,000 pediatricians, which makes it one of the largest medical specialty organizations in the country and an unusually loud one in public policy.
Almost every drug a pediatrician prescribes is calculated from the child's weight, and the same medicine can be a tenfold different dose between a newborn and a teenager. The arithmetic has to be right every time.
Pediatrics has one of the shortest residencies in medicine. That is why the total path is 11 years when surgical specialties run to 15 or more.
A well-child visit is mostly history, development, safety and reassurance. Pediatricians spend more of their day in conversation than almost any other kind of doctor, which is also why the specialty is paid less.
Last checked September 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.