Occupation / job
General Internal Medicine Physicians
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
$256,560 puts General Internal Medicine Physicians among the highest medians BLS publishes, roughly 413% above the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint. Pay at this level always has a gate in front of it: a residency, a bar exam, a clearance, or a decade.
67,150 people are employed in this work. Big enough for a real market in every major metro, small enough that experience in General Internal Medicine Physicians is still a distinguishing thing to have.
Clinical practice suits people who can decide under uncertainty with a patient in front of them, and who are steady about the documentation, the shifts and the liability that come attached.
No verified preparation time is on file for General Internal Medicine Physicians. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
The top quarter of General Internal Medicine Physicians earns 3.0x the bottom quarter — under $124,470 against over $374,850, a spread of $250,380. Distributions this stretched are usually two different jobs sharing one label, and any average across them means little.
The 25th percentile is $124,470, $74,450 above the $50,020 typical American job. When even the floor is this high, the thing to investigate is the entry requirement rather than the pay.
Avoid it if the length and cost of the training would be unbearable if you changed your mind halfway.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 67,150 figure counts people already working as General Internal Medicine Physicians, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
From $124,470 to $374,850 is 3.0x — the shape of a field where a minority captures most of the money. The midpoint of $256,560 is arithmetic, not a forecast, and treating it as one is the standard mistake here.
Put in money rather than ratios: $124,470 at the 25th percentile, $256,560 at the midpoint, $374,850 at the 75th. $250,380 separates the quarter of General Internal Medicine Physicians at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Getting to $374,850, the 75th percentile, is worth $118,290 a year more than the $256,560 midpoint and $250,380 more than the $124,470 a quarter of General Internal Medicine Physicians settle for.
The fall from $256,560 to the $124,470 bottom quarter is $132,090; the climb to the $374,850 top quarter is $118,290. Slightly more of the range lies below the midpoint than above it, so the downside is the bigger movement here.
On a 2,080-hour year the midpoint for General Internal Medicine Physicians is $123.34 an hour. The quarters sit at $59.84 and $180.21, and the all-occupation midpoint at $24.04.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $256,560 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $256,560 because we have no verified record of unpaid hours or out-of-pocket costs for this work, and we would rather convert honestly than adjust invented ones.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else