The lung doctor, called a pulmonologist in the United States. Thirteen years of training, and you often run the intensive care unit as well.
Click through it
Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$236,000
Bottom tenth
$66,260
Survey cap
$239,200
The median on this survey line is $236,000 a year. There is no separate line for lung doctors, so the figure comes from Physicians, All Other, a catch-all for specialties the survey does not name. The top tenth is not published: the survey stops reporting above $239,200, so the real high end is unknown but higher. It also counts only employed doctors, and many are self-employed or partners in a practice.
About $65,000 to $80,000
Resident and fellow salary, rising a little each year
You are a paid employee of the hospital for the whole of residency and fellowship, which is seven years for this specialty. It is real money, and it is also when the interest on your medical school loans is growing fastest.
$66,260
The tenth percentile on the catch-all physician line
Almost nobody finishes this training and earns that. The low end of a catch-all physician line picks up part-time, research and public health posts. A newly qualified lung doctor in practice starts far above it.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
This is one of the longest and most expensive routes on the site. The low end is a bachelor's degree started at community college and finished in state, then a public medical school at in state rates of roughly $40,000 a year for four years, plus the admission test, application fees and the licensing and board exams. The high end is four years at a private medical school at over $60,000 a year on top of a full price public bachelor's degree. Residency and the lung specialty fellowship are paid jobs, so they add nothing. Most graduates leave owing well into six figures, and seven years of training at a nonprofit or government hospital counts toward federal loan forgiveness.
Most graduates leave medical school owing well into six figures. File the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) every year. Residency at a nonprofit or government hospital counts toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and seven years of training gets you most of the way to the ten required.
Hospital salary
Most lung and critical care doctors are employed by a hospital or health system on a contract.
Productivity bonuses
Paid on the volume of patients seen and procedures done, on top of base salary.
Intensive care shifts
Covering the unit overnight and at weekends is paid separately and is where a lot of the extra comes from.
Procedures
Bronchoscopy and other airway procedures bill at a higher rate than clinic visits.
Rural signing bonuses
Small hospitals that cannot recruit pay lump sums and loan repayment to fill the post.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
One of the longest routes on this site. Thirteen years from high school, minimum.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Top grades in biology, chemistry, physics and math. Medicine is a numbers game long before it is a caring one, and it starts with your college admission.
Bachelor's degree
4 years
Any major, as long as you finish the science prerequisites and keep a high GPA. Sit the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test), which about 95,000 people take each year.
Medical school
4 years
Two years of science, two of clinical rotations, ending in an MD (Doctor of Medicine) or a DO (Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine). There are 174 medical schools in the country and admission is brutal.
Internal medicine residency
3 years
Paid, supervised hospital training in adult medicine. You are matched to a program by a national algorithm, not by applying job by job.
Pulmonary and critical care fellowship
2 to 3 years
Lungs, ventilators and intensive care. Two years for pulmonary alone, three for the combined pulmonary and critical care training most people do.
Biology and chemistry
Every college prerequisite for medical school is built on these two.
Physics
Gas laws and pressure are the daily physics of the lung and the ventilator.
Calculus and statistics
Statistics is on the admission test and you read research for the rest of your life.
English
The admission test has a long critical reasoning section, and explaining bad news well is a skill.
Your license to practice comes from the medical board of each state you work in. The exam behind it is national: three steps of the United States Medical Licensing Examination, taken across medical school and the first year of residency. On top of that sits specialty certification from ABIM (the American Board of Internal Medicine), first in internal medicine and then in pulmonary disease and critical care medicine. Every residency and fellowship you train in has to be accredited by ACGME (the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education), or the boards will not accept your training.
174 medical schools
The Association of American Medical Colleges represents them all, and publishes the admission requirements for each one.
Public schools in your own state
State medical schools reserve most seats for residents and charge them far less.
Osteopathic medical schools
A second route to the same license, with its own application service and growing quickly.
Fellowship programs
Pulmonary and critical care fellowships sit at large teaching hospitals, and you apply through a national match.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Critical care medicine
Running the intensive care unit. Most lung doctors in the United States train in this alongside pulmonary.
Sleep medicine
One extra year. Sleep apnea and sleep labs, with clinic hours and no night calls.
Interventional pulmonology
Advanced airway procedures and lung biopsies. Technical, procedural, and well paid.
Lung transplant and cystic fibrosis
Academic centers only, long relationships with young patients, and high stakes.
Research during college and medical school
Fellowship programs in this field care about it more than most.
Work as an emergency medical technician or hospital aide
Paid patient contact that admissions committees take seriously.
Spanish or another second language
You explain frightening things to families under pressure, often through an interpreter otherwise.
Stamina
Seven years of residency and fellowship means nights, weekends and 24-hour calls for most of your twenties.
American doctors do not apply for residency jobs one at a time. You interview at many programs, rank them in order, the programs rank you, and the National Resident Matching Program runs an algorithm that pairs everyone at once. The result arrives on a single day in March and it is binding. The research behind that algorithm won the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics. Fellowships in pulmonary and critical care run their own match on the same principle.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Two jobs in one. On clinic weeks you see 12 to 20 patients: asthma, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), lung nodules, coughs that have lasted a year, people frightened by a shadow on a scan. On unit weeks you round through an intensive care unit at seven in the morning, deciding ventilator settings, sedation and whether a patient is well enough to breathe alone. Procedures fill the afternoons and family meetings fill the gaps, including the ones about stopping treatment.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
For the physician group this job sits in, the federal survey publishes a median but stops counting at $239,200 a year. Anything above that is reported only as at or above the cap, so any precise top number you see quoted for lung doctors comes from a private survey, not from the government.
Pulmonary and critical care are trained together here, which is why the specialist who treats your asthma in clinic on Tuesday is managing ventilators in the unit on Thursday. In some other countries those are two separate careers.
The National Resident Matching Program pairs thousands of graduating doctors with training programs in a single run, using a method whose underlying research won the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics. You find out on one morning in March, and the result is binding on both sides.
About 95,000 people sit the medical admission test each year and around 52,000 apply to medical school through the central application service. Of those who get in and graduate, only a slice go on to a pulmonary and critical care fellowship.
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.