Emergency Medical Services — Specialty Profile

Exploratory, not prescriptive. This profile blends hard data (pay, match rates, burnout, demographics, each sourced and dated) with generalizations and synthesized opinion about culture and "who fits." It's here to help you get curious and go find out for yourself, not to tell you who to become. Numbers marked ⟳ verify change every year; check the linked source before you quote one. Last reviewed: 2026-08-04.

Also called: EMS, prehospital medicine, EMS medical direction. A 1-year ACGME-accredited fellowship open to physicians certified by any ABMS member board. Organ system: none. The subject is the space between a 911 call and a hospital door.

Subspecialty fellowship of Emergency Medicine, though eligibility is broader.

The 30-second version

Emergency medical services is the specialty where most of your patients are treated by someone else, following instructions you wrote. An EMS medical director holds primary responsibility for the quality of medical care across an entire prehospital system, with authority to write and enforce the protocols that paramedics and emergency medical technicians follow on every call. That is population-scale medicine practiced through other people's hands, and it is a genuinely different kind of physician work from anything else in this atlas. The subspecialty is young: the first fellowships were ACGME-accredited in February 2013 and the first certification examination followed that October. It is also small: the board runs the certification examination only in odd-numbered years. The 2025 examination pass rate was 74%, which is low for a subspecialty board and says something about how varied the training still is. The trade at the center: real authority over how tens of thousands of people receive emergency care, in a role that is usually part of a job rather than a job.

Quick dashboard (details and sources below)


Training after med school	4 years typically (3 yr emergency medicine residency + 1 yr EMS fellowship)
Total from college start	~12 years via emergency medicine, longer through other primary specialties
Training chain	Med school (4) → any ABMS primary residency, usually EM (3) → 1-yr ACGME EMS fellowship → ABEM certificate
Competitiveness	Low. 83 programs offered 144 positions in the 2026 NRMP match and filled 115 (79.9%), leaving 23 programs short ⟳
Typical full-time pay	Usually your clinical salary plus a stipend. Parent EM runs ~$375,000–$420,000 ⟳
Pay vs. parent (general EM)	Roughly comparable, with the mix shifting from shifts toward administration ⟳
Lifestyle	Administrative and field work layered on clinical shifts; better than pure EM ⟳
Burnout	No subspecialty figure; parent emergency medicine ranks highest in medicine on both instruments, 49.8% against a 41.9% all-physician average (AMA 2025) ⟳
% women	28.8% of EMS fellows (ACGME, AY2024-25); parent EM ~28–30% practicing, 43.7% of residents ⟳
DO / IMG accessibility	Good, at both gates: parent EM took 37.9% DO and 13.5% IMG of positions filled in the 2026 Main Match, and the EMS fellowship itself matched 33.0% DO and 12.2% IMG in the 2026 appointment year ⟳

What they actually do

Offline medical direction is the largest part of the work and the least visible. Writing, revising, and enforcing the protocols and standing orders that govern what prehospital clinicians may do, designing the system, running quality assurance, and training providers. Every decision a paramedic makes on a call was pre-authorized by a document a physician wrote.¹

Online medical direction is the real-time version: taking radio or phone calls from the field to authorize a treatment, a transport decision, or a termination of resuscitation. It is a small share of the hours and a large share of the difficult moments.

Quality and system design is where the population-level impact sits. Deciding which patients go to which hospital, how cardiac arrest is managed before arrival, whether a system carries blood products, and how response is structured. These choices change survival rates across a region.

Disaster and mass casualty planning is a defined part of the subspecialty. Incident command, triage systems, surge capacity, and the coordination that only becomes visible when something goes wrong.

Field response is the part that draws people in. Many EMS physicians respond to scenes directly, in a vehicle with their own equipment, for major incidents, entrapments, and cases where physician-level intervention changes the outcome.

Specialized operations run alongside: tactical medicine with law enforcement, air medical direction, wilderness and mass gathering events, and community paramedicine programs that send prehospital clinicians to people who do not need an emergency department.

The rest of the practice: research, EMS education and fellowship teaching, legislative and regulatory work at state level, and the credentialing and discipline of prehospital providers.

Representative work: protocol and standing order development · offline medical direction and quality assurance · online medical direction for field consultations · termination of resuscitation decisions · prehospital cardiac arrest system design · destination and specialty-center routing policy · disaster and mass casualty planning and incident command · tactical and law enforcement support medicine · air medical program direction · mass gathering medicine · community paramedicine program design · EMS provider education and credentialing · state and regional regulatory work.¹²

A day in the life: for most, a mixed week. Clinical emergency department shifts, plus administrative days of protocol review, case review, meetings with agency leadership, and provider education. Field response and disaster exercises come in bursts. The administrative half looks like operations and public health more than it looks like clinical medicine.

On call: the clinical half carries emergency medicine's shift burden. The EMS half carries its own on-call for online medical direction and for major incidents, which arrive without warning.

The training path & time to completion

Medical school (4 yrs) → primary residency, most commonly emergency medicine (3 yrs) → 1-year ACGME-accredited EMS fellowship → ABEM subspecialty certification.²³

The fellowship is one year and ACGME-accredited. The first EMS fellowships were accredited in February 2013.³
The subspecialty is young. ABEM offered the first EMS certification examination in October 2013.³
Eligibility is broader than emergency medicine. ABEM requires certification by an ABMS member board rather than emergency medicine specifically, with a separate provision for AOBEM-certified physicians who completed an ACGME EMS fellowship, open through 1 July 2027.²
There are more than 80 accredited programs, most taking one or two fellows.⁴ ⟳
The examination runs only in odd-numbered years, with the next scheduled for 2027, which is a direct reflection of how few candidates there are.² ⟳
The 2025 pass rate was 74%, notably low for a subspecialty certification examination.² ⟳
Total from the start of college: about 12 years through emergency medicine.

What the pass rate suggests. A 74% pass rate on a subspecialty examination taken by fellowship-trained physicians is worth noticing. It indicates either a genuinely broad body of knowledge, real variation in what programs teach, or both. Anyone choosing a fellowship should ask directly about board preparation and recent pass rates at that program.

How competitive is it?

The fellowship is widely available, with more than 80 accredited programs.⁴ ⟳
A meaningful share go unfilled. For the 2026 appointment year, 83 programs offered 144 positions and filled 115, or 79.9%, against 125 applicants. Twenty-three of the 83 programs finished with at least one empty seat, and 115 of the 125 applicants matched.⁵ ⟳
And it is not new. In 2019–20, 28% of programs had at least one unfilled position and 15% filled none at all. The share left with an empty seat has run between 27.7% and 39.5% in every cycle from 2022 to 2026.⁶⁵ ⟳
The upstream residency is unusually accessible right now, and among the more open fields: emergency medicine took 37.9% DO and 13.5% IMG of the positions it filled in the 2026 Main Match, the highest DO share of any large specialty.⁷ ⟳
The board examines only in odd-numbered years, with the next sitting in 2027. ABEM publishes the schedule and gives no reason for it; that a field this small does not need an annual examination is the obvious inference and is the page's, not the board's.² ⟳

The honest read. Both doors are open. The scarcity in this field is on the employment side, because a region has a limited number of EMS medical director roles and many of them are filled by physicians without the fellowship, since the certificate is recent and the job predates it by decades.

Board: ABEM subspecialty certification in emergency medical services, requiring an ACGME-accredited fellowship and certification by an ABMS member board.²

Compensation — the robust version

Like clinical informatics, this subspecialty modifies an existing career rather than creating a separate one, and the compensation structure follows from that.

The parent anchor, and the two figures in it measure different things. Emergency medicine runs roughly $375,000–$420,000 in total compensation on the national surveys, while ACEP's own clinical compensation data shows a 25th percentile near $248,000, a median near $330,000, and a 75th percentile near $432,000. The ACEP median sits below the total-compensation floor because it is median clinical pay rather than a total package; read ACEP for the structure of the spread and the national surveys for headline magnitude.⁷ ⟳

The usual structure is clinical salary plus a directorship stipend. Most EMS physicians keep working emergency department shifts and add medical direction as a contracted or salaried portion of their time. The stipend varies enormously by agency size and funding, and small-agency medical direction is sometimes compensated at a level that is nominal relative to the responsibility carried. ⟳

The responsibility and the pay are frequently mismatched, which is the field's most common complaint. Holding primary responsibility for medical care across a system, with authority to enforce policy and accountability when something goes wrong, is a substantial legal and professional exposure, and the stipend attached to it often does not reflect that.¹ Ask specifically about malpractice coverage for medical direction activities, because it is not automatically included in a clinical policy.

The full-time roles exist. Large municipal systems, state EMS offices, air medical companies, and major fire departments employ physicians substantially or entirely in this role. Those positions are few, competitive, and generally salaried at or somewhat below full-time clinical emergency medicine.

One genuine advantage over the parent field. Emergency medicine has the highest burnout of any specialty on both instruments that measure it, and the AMA's 2025 survey puts it at 49.8% against a 41.9% all-physician average. The drivers are substantially shift work, nights, and holidays that never end.⁷ Shifting part of a career into administrative and system work is one of the few structured exits from full-time shift medicine that does not require leaving the specialty. Several people in this field describe that as the main reason they did the fellowship.

Limited-data caveat: no MGMA, Doximity, or Medscape line isolating EMS was located, and directorship stipends are private contracts rather than survey data. Model your primary specialty's compensation and negotiate the medical direction component, including malpractice coverage, as a separate item. ⟳

Lifestyle

Better than full-time emergency medicine, and for many people that is the point.
The administrative half is daytime and predictable, which offsets the shift work.
Fewer clinical shifts means fewer nights, weekends, and holidays over a career.
Field response is unpredictable and arrives without regard for the calendar.
Disaster work is episodic and intense, and when it comes it displaces everything else.
Geographic flexibility is good. Every region has an EMS system, though the well-funded full-time roles cluster in large metropolitan areas.
The political load is real. Medical direction means working with fire departments, private ambulance companies, hospitals, and elected officials, all of whom have interests.

Lifestyle rating: 3.5/5. A genuine improvement on the parent specialty's schedule, deducted for unpredictable incident response and for the political and administrative demands that come with authority.

Wellbeing — the part to take seriously

No EMS-specific burnout figure was located. The parent anchor matters more than usual here: emergency medicine is consistently the highest-burnout specialty in American medicine.⁷ ⟳

The partial exit from shift work is this subspecialty's most underrated wellbeing feature. A career that mixes clinical shifts with system work is more sustainable into a physician's fifties than one that does not, and people in the field say so plainly.

The responsibility without presence is the distinctive psychological weight. When a protocol you wrote is followed and the patient dies, you were not there and it was still partly your decision. Reviewing those cases is a routine part of the job and it does not get easier.

The termination-of-resuscitation call is the field's hardest recurring moment. Telling a paramedic by radio to stop working a cardiac arrest, based on a description from someone you cannot see, in front of a family you will never meet, is a specific kind of decision that few physicians make.

The prehospital workforce is in crisis and the medical director watches it closely. Paramedic and EMT recruitment, retention, pay, and mental health are severe and worsening problems in much of the country, and the physician responsible for clinical quality in a system inherits the consequences of a staffing shortage they cannot fix.

The compensating satisfaction is scale and measurability. Changing a cardiac arrest protocol across a county moves a survival curve, and unlike most of medicine you can see the number change. Practitioners describe that as unlike anything available in individual clinical practice.

Who's in the field (demographics)

The trainee figures exist and the practicing-workforce ones do not. EMS has its own row in both the NRMP's subspecialty match tables and the ACGME databook, so the fellows can be counted. What nobody publishes is a picture of the practicing EMS-boarded physicians, because the certificate is recent, the population is small, and its holders are distributed across several primary specialties. ⟳

Women: 30 of the 104 EMS fellows in academic year 2024-25, 28.8%, which is almost exactly the parent field's practicing share.⁸ Parent emergency medicine runs roughly 28–30% of practicing physicians and 43.7% of residents, one of the less gender-balanced non-surgical specialties.⁷ ⟳
DO: 38 of the 115 EMS fellows who matched for the 2026 appointment year, 33.0%, which NRMP lists among the highest DO shares of any subspecialty and which is close to the parent field's 37.9%.⁷⁵ ⟳
IMG: 14 of the same 115, 12.2%: 13 US-citizen international graduates (11.3%) and one non-US citizen (0.9%). Parent emergency medicine ran 13.5%.⁷⁵ ⟳
Fellows in training: 104 across 88 accredited programs in academic year 2024-25.⁸ ⟳
Programs: more than 80, with a certification examination held only in odd-numbered years.²⁴ ⟳
Underrepresented in medicine: no subspecialty figure. Prehospital response times, system funding, and bystander CPR rates vary sharply by neighborhood income and race, and these are precisely the variables an EMS medical director influences. The disparities in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival are among the starkest in American medicine and they are addressable at the system level. ⟳

Culture, personality & the online stereotypes

Who gravitates here: emergency physicians who were already riding along, teaching paramedics, or running the protocol committee before anyone paid them for it. The field draws operationally minded people who like systems, logistics, and the prehospital environment, and who are comfortable with authority over clinicians they do not directly supervise. There is a strong overlap with fire service, military, and law enforcement culture. As always, plenty of people in the field do not fit any single mold.

The stereotypes. Community perception rather than fact, each with a kernel and an unfair edge:

"They just want the lights and siren." The affectionate jab, and the field's own members make it first.
"An unpaid job with a board certificate." Closer to true than it should be for small-agency medical direction.
"Protocol writing is not medicine." Unfair, and it misses that the protocol is the treatment for everyone the system touches.
"You are a fire department employee with an MD." Reflects the genuine political complexity of the role.

What people say online (synthesized and paraphrased, not quotes): across trainee and physician forums, and EMS forums, this fellowship reads as the one people do because they already love the work. The dominant recurring theme is that the fellowship formalizes something many EM physicians were doing anyway, and that its market value is uncertain because plenty of medical directors have no certificate. A second is compensation, discussed with frequent warnings about stipends that do not match the liability. A third is the exit from full-time shift work, raised as a genuine long-term career argument. A fourth is the sheer enjoyment of field response. The tone is enthusiastic and clear-eyed about the money.

Voices from the field. Paraphrased from published sources, with links to the originals:

ABEM requires certification by an ABMS member board and completion of an ACGME-accredited EMS fellowship, offers the certification examination in odd-numbered years, and reports a 74% pass rate for the 2025 examination.²
ACEP's guidelines for medical direction of prehospital EMS support designating a physician medical director with primary responsibility for the quality of medical care throughout the system, with full authority to develop and enforce patient care policies and to modify system design.¹

Why people choose it / why people leave

Why choose it: authority over how an entire region receives emergency care · measurable population-level outcomes, which most of clinical medicine cannot offer · field response and operational work · a structured route out of full-time shift medicine · a genuine ABEM subspecialty certificate · disaster, tactical, and air medical work · eligibility from any ABMS board.

Why leave or avoid it: stipends that frequently do not match the responsibility · liability for care you did not deliver and did not witness · agency politics with fire departments, private companies, and elected officials · a prehospital workforce crisis you cannot solve · a certificate that many working medical directors do not hold, which limits its market value · a 74% board pass rate suggesting uneven preparation.

Best fit if: you were already the EMS person in your department · systems and logistics genuinely interest you · you want population-level impact you can measure · field response appeals · you want a long-term alternative to full-time shifts.

Not for you if: you need direct patient contact to feel useful · agency politics would exhaust you · you want the fellowship to raise your income · carrying responsibility for care you cannot see would keep you up.

The FLI angle — Emergency medical services for first-gen, low-income & immigrant students

Where it fits FLI realities well:

Emergency medicine is among the most accessible specialties in medicine, at 37.9% DO and 13.5% IMG of the positions it filled in the 2026 Main Match, the highest DO share of any large specialty.⁷ The EMS fellowship after it matched 33.0% DO, nearly the parent field's rate.⁵ Both doors are genuinely available.
Many people arrive here through prior prehospital work. Physicians who were EMTs or paramedics before medical school are common in this field, and that background is an asset rather than something to explain. If you worked on an ambulance to pay for college, this specialty values it.
PSLF fits reasonably, since academic departments, municipal systems, and state offices are qualifying employers, though private emergency medicine groups are not.
The disparities are addressable from this chair. Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival, response times, and bystander CPR rates vary sharply by neighborhood income and race. A medical director sets the policies that move those numbers, which is unusually direct leverage on health inequity.

Risks to name honestly:

The fellowship may not pay for itself. A year of fellowship salary followed by a stipend that varies from substantial to nominal is the realistic range. If you carry large debt without family support, this is a year with an uncertain return, and you should get specific stipend figures from graduates before committing.
The certificate's market value is still being established. Many working EMS medical directors have no fellowship and no board certificate, because the job existed for decades before the subspecialty did.³ You will sometimes be competing for roles against people who do not need the credential you paid a year for.
Emergency medicine has the highest burnout in medicine, and the parent specialty's job market has been volatile.⁷ Model the base career honestly, because that is what you are mostly doing.
The liability is real and separate. Medical direction exposure is not automatically covered by a clinical malpractice policy. Confirm coverage in writing.

Bottom line for FLI: two open doors, a specialty that treats prehospital experience as a credential rather than a detour, and genuine leverage over one of the starkest inequities in American healthcare. What it does not reliably offer is money, and the fellowship year has an uncertain financial return in a field where many practitioners never took it. Do it because the work is what you want, and negotiate the stipend and the malpractice coverage in writing.

Fun facts

The subspecialty is barely a decade old. The first fellowships were accredited in February 2013 and the first board examination followed in October of the same year.³
The certification examination is offered only in odd-numbered years, the next in 2027, so a fellow finishing in an even year waits.²
The 2025 pass rate was 74%, low for a subspecialty examination taken by fellowship-trained physicians.²
It is not restricted to emergency physicians. Eligibility requires certification by any ABMS member board.²
Most of an EMS physician's patients are treated entirely by someone else, following a document the physician wrote.
The job is much older than the credential, which is why many working EMS medical directors hold no subspecialty certificate at all.

Sources

The medical director role. American College of Emergency Physicians guidelines for medical direction of prehospital EMS support designating a physician as EMS medical director with primary responsibility for ensuring quality medical care throughout the system, with full authority to develop and enforce patient care policies and procedures, modify system design, and regularly evaluate operations; direct or online medical direction involves real-time communication with field providers, while indirect or offline medical direction covers protocol and guideline development, provider training, system design and evaluation, and quality assurance and improvement. Maine EMS Medical Director Guidebook (https://www.maine.gov/ems/sites/maine.gov.ems/files/inline-files/MedicalDirectorGuidebook.pdf) and the EMSC Innovation and Improvement Center Medical Direction Toolkit (https://emscimprovement.center/education-and-resources/toolkits/medical-direction-toolbox/), accessed 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Certification. American Board of Emergency Medicine, Emergency Medical Services — candidates must be certified by an ABMS member board and complete an ACGME-accredited EMS fellowship, with a provision for AOBEM-certified physicians who have completed an ACGME-accredited EMS fellowship open through 1 July 2027; the certification examination is offered in odd-numbered years, with the next in 2027; the pass rate for the 2025 EMS certification examination was 74%. https://www.abem.org/subspecialty-get-certified/emergency-medical-services/ (accessed 2026). ABEM states the schedule ("Offered in odd-numbered years") and gives no reason for it. Corrected 2026-08-17: three places on this page stated the small candidate pool as the cause of the biennial schedule, as fact. The schedule is verified and the reason is not published, so the causal reading now appears once, marked as this page's inference. ⟳ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²
Subspecialty history. The first EMS fellowships were accredited by the ACGME in February 2013 and the first EMS certification examination was offered in October 2013. National Association of EMS Physicians, EMS subspecialty (https://naemsp.org/ems-subspecialty/), accessed 2026. (The EMRA Fellowship Guide, cited in an earlier draft, was retired between drafting and publication and no longer resolves.). ⟳ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Program count and scope. More than 80 ACGME-accredited EMS fellowships exist, most taking one or two fellows per year, with current listings maintained by ACGME, the National Association of EMS Physicians, and EMRA Match; programs consistently cover offline and online medical direction, protocol development, quality improvement, disaster and mass casualty planning, tactical and air medical operations, mass gathering medicine, and field response. NAEMSP fellowship programs (https://naemsp.org/fellowship-programs/), ACGME program requirements for EMS (https://www.acgme.org/globalassets/pfassets/programrequirements/2025-reformatted-requirements/112_emergencymedicalservices_2025_reformatted.pdf), and representative program descriptions from the University of Iowa (https://emergencymedicine.medicine.uiowa.edu/education/fellowships/ems/about-program) and the University of New Mexico (https://hsc.unm.edu/medicine/departments/emergency-medicine/education/fellowships/ems/), accessed 2026. ⟳ ↩ ↩² ↩³
Match data. National Resident Matching Program, Results and Data: Specialties Matching Service 2026 Appointment Year, February 2026, Table 1A — emergency medical services: 83 programs, 144 positions offered, 115 filled (79.9%), 125 applicants of whom 115 matched, 23 programs left with at least one unfilled position, which is 27.7% of the 83. NRMP counts a program as unfilled if it finished with any empty seat, the same definition the 2019–20 reporting in ⁶ uses for its 28%; NRMP publishes no counterpart to that source's separate "filled none at all" figure, so the 15% has no 2026 equivalent here. Positions offered and fill by appointment year: 111 and 73.0% (2022), 115 and 72.2% (2023), 127 and 67.7% (2024), 129 and 76.0% (2025), 144 and 79.9% (2026). Programs and the share of them left with at least one empty seat: 70 and 32.9% (2022), 73 and 34.2% (2023), 76 and 39.5% (2024), 77 and 31.2% (2025), 83 and 27.7% (2026). https://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/SMS_Results_and_Data_Report2026.pdf (2026). Correction, 2026-08-13: this page previously described fill only through the 2019–20 figures and carried no current-cycle match data. Table 2 of the same report gives the applicant types of the 115 who matched: US MD 63 (54.8%), US DO 38 (33.0%), US-citizen IMG 13 (11.3%), non-US-citizen IMG 1 (0.9%), Canadian 0. The four columns sum to the 115 filled, which is the check that catches a misread column boundary, and NRMP's own prose bullet independently lists Emergency Medical Services at 33.0% among the subspecialties with the highest DO shares. Corrected 2026-08-17: the demographics section said no EMS-specific demographic data was located, in a page already citing Table 1A of this report. Two EMS-specific figures are in Table 2 of it. ⟳ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Fill rates. Reporting on US EMS fellowships records that in 2019–20, 28% of programs had at least one unfilled position and 15% went completely unfilled. "US Emergency Medical Services Fellows," Prehospital and Disaster Medicine, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/prehospital-and-disaster-medicine/article/abs/us-emergency-medical-services-fellows/EA13D956BFB245AA6436341145451498 (accessed 2026). ⟳ ↩ ↩²
Parent-field figures for emergency medicine: typical comp ~$375k–$420k, with ACEP clinical compensation showing a 25th percentile ~$248k, median ~$330k, and 75th percentile ~$432k; moderate and currently unusually accessible competitiveness; shift-based with a hard stop after each shift but permanent nights, weekends, and holidays; burnout consistently the highest of all specialties, 49.8% against a 41.9% all-physician average on the AMA's 2025 survey (https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/physician-health/these-9-physician-specialties-report-highest-burnout-rates); ~28–30% women practicing and 43.7% of residents; ~35% DO and ~15% IMG of the entering class. Burnout: Medscape Physician Burnout & Depression Report 2024 (n=9,226, fielded July–October 2023) puts emergency medicine at 63%, the highest of any specialty against an all-physician average of 49%. That report is paywalled and returns HTTP 402, so the row reaches this site through three independent relays that agree on the edition, the instrument, and every specialty: Healthgrades Pro (https://resources.healthgrades.com/pro/the-most-and-least-burned-out-physicians-by-specialty) and Advisory Board (https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2024/01/31/physician-burnout). Women practicing: AAMC, "Women are changing the face of medicine in America" (2022 data), https://www.aamc.org/news/women-are-changing-face-medicine-america — emergency medicine 30%. Women residents: ACGME, Data Resource Book, Academic Year 2024-2025, Table C.21, https://www.acgme.org/globalassets/pfassets/publicationsbooks/2024-2025_acgme_databook_document.pdf — emergency medicine, 297 programs, 9,752 residents, 4,265 women (43.7%). Corrected 2026-08-17: this page had carried ~37–38% women residents while this footnote cited the ACGME count of 43.7%; the body and the dashboard now use the ACGME figure. DO and IMG shares: NRMP, Results and Data: 2026 Main Residency Match, May 2026, Table 2, https://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Main_Match_Results_and_Data-2026.pdf — emergency medicine 37.9% DO and 13.5% IMG of filled positions in 2026 (3,058 filled; DO Senior 1,119 plus DO Grad 41; US IMG 319 plus non-US IMG 93), the highest DO share of any large specialty. Corrected 2026-08-17: an undated ~35% DO / ~15% IMG pair sat in the Quick dashboard, the competitiveness section, Who's in the field and the FLI section's lead bullet while this footnote already carried the current figures, and unlike the women figure the footnote never flagged the gap, so a reader had no signal. All four now carry the 2026 pair with the denominator named. See the emergency medicine profile on this site for the parent picture. ⟳ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹
EMS fellows in training. ACGME, Data Resource Book, Academic Year 2024-2025, https://www.acgme.org/globalassets/pfassets/publicationsbooks/2024-2025_acgme_databook_document.pdf — "Emergency medical services": 88 accredited programs, 104 fellows, 30 female (28.8%), 74 male (71.2%). The same book's degree table for these 104 gives 58 US MD (55.8%), 39 DO (37.5%) and 7 international graduates (6.7%), which is the standing fellow class rather than the matched cohort and runs a few points more DO-heavy than the match does. Added 2026-08-17: the demographics section and the Quick dashboard both said no subspecialty women figure existed. This book has an EMS row. ⟳ ↩ ↩²

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