Physician / Doctor
Also known as: Doctor, MD, Medical Doctor
Diagnose and treat injury and illness, order and interpret tests, and counsel patients on their health.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for physician / doctors.
About 1 in 122 reaches this level
About 862,800 physicians and surgeons in the US (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 29-1210 + 29-1240, 2025). Neurosurgery is one of the most selective specialties and the best paid, averaging ~$830K (Doximity 2026 Physician Compensation Report: $829,161). The federal Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) puts the neurosurgery workforce at about 7,060 full-time equivalents in 2022, a figure that may include some surgeons still in training (Bhimani et al., J Neurosurg 2025): about 0.82% of all physicians. Entry reflects the AAMC mean PGY-1 resident stipend (~$68K).
Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.
How to Become One
This career typically requires a doctoral/professional degree. Here are the top colleges for it:
Cost to Qualify
Four years of medical school tuition and fees, on top of a four-year bachelor's: about $159,000 at a public school in your own state and $282,000 at a private one, with public out-of-state in between at roughly $261,000. Living costs are not included. Residency afterwards (3-7 years) is a paid job, not a bill. AAMC's lowest reported tuition is $0 - a few schools now charge none - which is why its average ($61,626 private resident) sits below its median ($68,176). Cost-to-salaryEntry ratio is 3.1x against the $68,000 entry salary we list for physicians (a resident's pay, not an attending's) - well above the 2.0 line, and expected for medicine. These totals hold first-year tuition flat across four years. Tuition rose 2.0-2.4% year over year in the latest round, so a student starting in 2026 should expect roughly 5-6% more than the figure shown.
Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page.
AI Risk Assessment
Doctors are protected by things AI cannot get around: a medical license, legal responsibility for diagnoses, physical exams and procedures, and the trust between doctor and patient. Radiology, the specialty most often named as the one AI would wipe out, is the clearest test. In 2016 the AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton said radiologists would soon be obsolete. Ten years later, Fortune reports that the number of active US radiologists has grown by about 10%, average radiologist pay reached $571,000 in 2025 (up 9% in a year), and a recruiting platform counted 7,469 open radiology job postings in May 2026. One reason AI has not replaced them: Medicare and Medicaid only pay for a scan if a licensed physician does the final read.
Where AI has been tested on real medical decisions, the gains so far are real but modest. In a randomized trial published in Nature Medicine in June 2026, 16 primary care clinics in Kenya (9,691 patients) gave clinicians an AI assistant inside their medical records. Their notes and diagnoses got better and the tool was safe, but patients were no more likely to recover within 14 days. The clinicians were clinical officers, not doctors, but the result is typical of what we see: AI helps the person making the call rather than replacing them.
Demand is the bigger force. BLS projects physician and surgeon jobs to grow 4% from 2025 to 2035, about as fast as the average for all jobs, with about 22,100 openings a year, driven by an aging population and more chronic illness. The federal government's health workforce planners (HRSA) go further and project a shortage of 141,160 physicians in 2038, with shortages in 30 of the 35 specialties they model. That is why this is a 2 and not higher: AI will change how doctors spend their day, especially on paperwork and reading images, but with too few doctors, time saved goes into seeing more patients rather than into cutting jobs. It is not a 1 because a real share of the work is reading, writing and reasoning over information, which is where AI is improving fastest.
What would change this score. If hospitals start hiring fewer doctors in image-heavy specialties like radiology and pathology because AI reads the scans, or residency positions in those specialties shrink, it goes to 3. If AI tools stay assistants that a licensed doctor must sign off on, it stays at 2.
Sources
Ratings reflect a 10-year outlook based on 2025-2026 research, weighted toward entry-level impact. Individual outcomes will vary.
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