Psychiatrist Salary: One Real Distribution, One Blind Spot

The median psychiatrist salary in the May 2025 federal wage data is $281,870 per year — Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, SOC 29-1223, the psychiatrists occupation itself.

The middle half of the occupation earns between $154,150 at the 25th percentile and $362,740 at the 75th, and the full published span runs from $84,060 at the 10th percentile to $446,520 at the 90th — $135.51 an hour at the median, across 27,980 wage-and-salary jobs.

Like marriage and family therapists — and unlike most other roles on this site — psychiatry needs no proxy caveat: the occupation BLS surveys here is the job title this page is about.

How rare that is worth seeing side by side.

There is no BLS occupation called therapist; counselors are pooled with substance use and behavioral disorder counselors into one combined category; clinical social workers are split across two occupations; and psychiatric nurse practitioners disappear into the all-specialties nurse practitioner series — its $132,300 median covers every NP, not PMHNPs.

The psychologist number has the same pooled shape: clinical and counseling psychologists are surveyed as one combined occupation, so its $100,580 median covers two professions, not clinical psychology alone.

Marriage and family therapists, at $66,940, are the other exception — one licence, one occupation, one table.

Against those published figures, the psychiatrist median is roughly 2.8 times the psychologist figure and 2.1 times the all-NP figure.

Psychiatry and marriage and family therapy are the only two roles on this site whose federal series is exactly the job title — no blend, no pooled population, no proxy.

One property of this release deserves its own paragraph, because it is the thing salary pages usually cannot tell you about a six-figure distribution.

BLS marks capped values in OEWS tables with a footnote marker, and the May 2025 release carries no such marker on any cell — the data of record states that directly.

The $446,520 at the 90th percentile is therefore a measurement, not a stand-in for a number BLS declined to print.

The same rule cuts the other way: the release stops at the 90th percentile, so any source claiming to know what psychiatrists earn beyond that — the top few percent, the ceiling, the max — is inventing it.

The distribution is also the widest in the field, and its shape matters when you read it.

The 90th percentile is 5.3 times the 10th; the same ratio is 2.5 for the combined counselor occupation, 2.8 for marriage and family therapists, and 3.3 for clinical and counseling psychologists, all in the same release.

The spread below the median is wider than the spread above it — the median sits $127,720 above the 25th percentile but only $80,870 below the 75th.

And the 10th percentile of $84,060 sits below the counselor occupation's 90th percentile of $97,590, so the bottom of psychiatry's range overlaps the top of master's-level pay.

What the data does not do is split any of this by career stage, hours, or employment type: everyone reported under SOC 29-1223 sits in the same distribution.

The percentiles are positions in one population, not an entry-to-seniority ladder — the 25th percentile is not an entry-level salary.

What the number does not count is at least as important as what it does.

In BLS's own words, the survey covers wage and salary workers in nonfarm establishments and does not include the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms, household workers, or unpaid family workers.

A psychiatrist who owns a practice — a common structure in this specialty — is outside the series entirely, and so is anyone paid as an independent contractor; the 27,980 figure counts jobs, not people.

That is also the backdrop for the two best-known private surveys, which sit above the federal median: Medscape's Psychiatrist Compensation Report 2026 put average total compensation at $331,000 for 2025 — down roughly 3 percent from 2024 — and Doximity's 2026 report put psychiatry at $350,786.

Both are modeled or self-reported averages of practising physicians with methods different from each other and from an employer survey of employees.

Neither is the salary, and neither should be blended with the federal figure or with each other.

The industry split says more about day-to-day options than the single national median does.

Offices of physicians are the largest employer, a $299,670 median across 8,680 jobs.

Offices of mental health practitioners other than physicians pay a $217,380 median — the lowest BLS publishes for the occupation, an $82,290 gap between two kinds of office practice.

Inside hospitals, psychiatric and substance abuse hospitals sit above general medical and surgical ones, $294,890 against $223,880 — the opposite of the generic hospitals-pay-more rule, which fails occupation by occupation in this field.

Individual and family services land between the extremes at $285,900 across 760 jobs.

The $314,350 median at residential mental health and substance abuse facilities is the highest published figure but rests on roughly 330 jobs — a small cell worth reading exactly as reported and building nothing on.

Geography is the deliberate omission.

BLS publishes a 29-1223 median for 46 of the 51 jurisdictions and no estimate at all for Alabama, Massachusetts, Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming — in this release a missing cell means BLS did not publish, small sample or confidentiality, never a zero.

State pages for the 46 published jurisdictions will be added from this same release as they are written.

Until then this page carries no state table and no ranking of highest-paying states, because a list assembled before the per-state pages exist would be exactly the kind of figure this site exists to refuse.

Finally, the number arrives late in a long path.

A psychiatrist is a physician: medical school, then a psychiatry residency the ACGME requires to be 48 months in length, then a licence from a state medical board, with ABPN board certification voluntary on top of it.

The training path, scope, and subspecialties are on what a psychiatrist does; how employers in your area actually structure the role shows up in the psychiatrist job listings.

For the clinician handling much of the same medication-management caseload without the medical-school route, see what a psychiatric nurse practitioner is.

This page is career information, not legal, clinical, or medical advice, and it is not guidance for anyone seeking treatment. Wage figures are BLS OEWS May 2025, employees only; confirm anything you rely on with the relevant state medical board, the certifying board, or the employer.