Which Specialties Are Physicians Most and Least Satisfied? Here’s What the Data Shows

What specialties are physicians most and least satisfied with their jobs?

As part of our effort to build the world’s largest dataset on physician compensation and workload in medicine, we’re sharing various career insights — such as how physicians feel about supervising APPs, what the gender pay gap looks like in emergency medicine, and how satisfaction differs for men and women across specialties. See the full list of previous data stories below.

Last week, we highlighted geographic regions in the U.S. where physicians report the highest job satisfaction. Now, we’re turning our attention to specialties — which is of course one of the most defining choices in a physician’s career.

Choosing a specialty shapes everything: salary, training length, call schedules, patient mix, and ultimately, wellbeing. With burnout widespread across the medical profession, understanding how satisfaction varies by specialty is especially important. And with residency Match fast approaching in mid-September, medical students are already weighing which paths may lead to fulfilling careers.

To measure satisfaction, we asked physicians on Offcall to rate their jobs on a simple 1–5 scale. We then aggregated results by primary specialty to see where physicians tend to feel the happiest. The results reveal some clear standouts.

What the Physician Job Satisfaction Data Shows

Physicians in Hospice & Palliative Care, Neurosurgery, and Ophthalmology reported the highest job satisfaction with mean ratings of 4.00, 3.88, and 3.85. On the other hand, Allergy & Immunology physicians reported the lowest job satisfaction with a mean of 3.00, followed by Pathology, General Surgery and OB/GYN at 3.18, 3.21 and 3.21 respectively.

See the full list of specialties in the chart below.

What This Physician Job Satisfaction Data Means

At first glance, the numerical differences might seem small. But across thousands of responses, these patterns point to real differences in day-to-day experience.