Interventional Cardiology — Specialty Profile

Exploratory, not prescriptive. This profile blends hard data (pay, match rates, burnout, demographics — each sourced and dated) with generalizations and synthesized online 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: 2026-07-25.

Also called: IC, interventional, the cath lab. A further fellowship you enter years down the line rather than a residency you match into from medical school.

Sub-subspecialty of Cardiology, a further fellowship after the Cardiovascular Disease fellowship (itself a subspecialty of Internal Medicine).

Organ system: the heart and coronary/structural circulation.

The 30-second version

Interventional cardiology is the catheter-based, procedure-heavy arm of cardiology, the physicians who thread wires into coronary arteries, prop open blockages with stents, and get called in at 3 a.m. to reopen the artery of someone actively having a heart attack. It sits near the top of cardiology pay and near the top of all of medicine, though it is not the highest-paid corner of its own field in either practice setting, and it is one of the most physically and temporally demanding lifestyles in cardiology. The trade is stark: elite procedural mastery and top-tier compensation in exchange for brutal STEMI call, chronic radiation exposure, and a well-documented orthopedic toll from years standing under a heavy lead apron. It also asks for the longest runway in this whole corner of medicine, because you don't match into it out of med school; you build to it over roughly seven years of training after your MD or DO.

Quick dashboard (details and sources below)
Training after med school IM residency (3) + Cardiology fellowship (3) + Interventional fellowship (1, +optional structural yr) = 7+ yrs after med school
Total from college start ~15 years (4 undergrad + 4 med school + 3 IM + 3 cardiology + 1 interventional)
Competitiveness (as a cardiology sub-subspecialty) Currently under-subscribed at the fellowship step — an applicant's market; the real gate is getting into cardiology fellowship first ⟳
Typical full-time pay $788,083 health-system-employed · $625,000 private practice (MedAxiom 2025 report, 2024 data, 232 programs / 6,830 providers) ⟳
Pay range (structure) Second-highest in both cohorts, behind invasive cardiology in private practice ($826,280) and electrophysiology in employed groups ($804,129). No publisher gives an IC percentile ladder ⟳
Lifestyle Heavy — ~63 clinical hrs/week, unpredictable emergent call, long static procedures
Burnout ~69% report burnout affecting their lives (IC-specific survey, 2023) ⟳
% women ~14.5% — among the lowest of any subspecialty in internal medicine ⟳
DO / IMG accessibility Very IMG-open (~59% of filled IC positions are IMGs); ~14% DO ⟳

What they actually do

Interventional cardiologists diagnose and treat heart disease using catheters, thin tubes threaded through an artery (usually in the wrist or groin) up into the heart, instead of open surgery. The bread and butter is the coronary catheterization and PCI (percutaneous coronary intervention): finding the blockage on an angiogram and opening it with a balloon and a stent. The signature moment of the field is the STEMI, an ST-elevation myocardial infarction or full-blown heart attack, where a coronary artery is completely blocked and heart muscle is dying by the minute. The interventionalist's job is to get that artery open fast, which is why "time is muscle" is the field's mantra and why the call is so unforgiving.

Increasingly the field is also structural heart work: replacing a diseased aortic valve through a catheter (TAVR, or transcatheter aortic valve replacement), clipping a leaky mitral valve (MitraClip), and closing holes and appendages in the heart (PFO/ASD closure, left atrial appendage closure). Some interventionalists further sub-focus on chronic total occlusions (CTO), the hardest and longest coronary cases, or on peripheral and endovascular work in the arteries of the legs. Underneath all of it is a deep base in general cardiology: these are internists first, cardiologists second, and proceduralists on top of that.

Representative procedures: diagnostic left and right heart catheterization · coronary angiography · PCI (balloon angioplasty + coronary stenting) · primary PCI for acute STEMI · intravascular imaging (IVUS/OCT) and physiology (FFR) · TAVR and other structural/valve interventions · chronic total occlusion PCI · left atrial appendage and septal defect closure · peripheral/endovascular intervention · placement of temporary mechanical circulatory support (e.g., intra-aortic balloon pump, Impella).

A day in the life: Much of it is scheduled: clinic, reading studies, and a cath-lab list of planned diagnostic and elective PCI cases, gowned in lead, standing for hours, often twisted toward the monitors. Complex structural or CTO cases can run for hours at a stretch. But the defining feature is what you don't schedule: a STEMI activation can pull you in at any hour, and when it fires, everything else stops and you drive in to open the artery. When you're on call, the pager owns your night.

The training path & time to completion

This is the long game. Interventional cardiology sits at the end of a chain of three separate training stages after medical school, and understanding the full ladder matters, because a premed would rarely see it laid out:

Medical school (4 yrs) → Internal Medicine residency (3 yrs) → Cardiovascular Disease (general cardiology) fellowship (3 yrs) → Interventional Cardiology fellowship (1 yr) → (optional structural / CTO / peripheral year).1

  • Step 1, Internal Medicine residency (3 yrs). You finish med school and match into IM, one of the largest and least-gatekept residencies in medicine. This earns you ABIM Internal Medicine board eligibility. Nothing about IC is decided yet.1
  • Step 2, Cardiovascular Disease fellowship (3 yrs). After IM you apply to a general cardiology fellowship. This is the true competitive bottleneck of the whole path (see below) and leads to ABIM Cardiovascular Disease certification.1
  • Step 3, Interventional Cardiology fellowship (1 ACGME-accredited yr). After the general cardiology fellowship, one dedicated year focused on coronary intervention. This leads to ABIM Interventional Cardiology certification, which requires the prior or concurrent ABIM Cardiovascular Disease certification as a prerequisite.12
  • Optional Step 4, an additional year (+1 yr). Structural heart/TAVR, chronic total occlusion, or peripheral/endovascular training is usually pursued as an extra, often non-accredited "super-fellowship" year on top of the core interventional year.1

Total after medical school: ~7 years (IM 3 + cardiology 3 + interventional 1), 8+ years with the optional structural/CTO/peripheral year. From the first day of college that's roughly 15 years. That is a long stretch of resident-and-fellow pay and deferred earnings, a point that matters a great deal for the FLI reader (see below).1

  • Board: the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), Interventional Cardiology, layered on top of ABIM Internal Medicine and ABIM Cardiovascular Disease certifications.2

How competitive is it?

Here's the counterintuitive part, and it's exactly the kind of hidden context a premed would never pick up from a ranking list: as a fellowship step, interventional cardiology is currently under-subscribed, an applicant's market, even though it's one of the highest-paid fields in medicine.

IC only entered the NRMP's Specialties Matching Service (SMS) for the first time in the 2025 appointment year (Match Day December 2024); before that, positions were filled outside the formal Match.34 Since then:

  • 2025 (first-ever cycle): 326 positions offered and 272 filled, an 83.4% fill rate, with ~94% of applicants matching (291 applicants, 272 matched).4 ⟳
  • 2026: 307 positions offered and 236 filled, a 76.9% fill rate, with 71 positions unfilled across 49 programs and only 247 total applicants.5 ⟳
  • There were more positions than applicants (307 vs 247 in 2026). SCAI leaders put it bluntly: there are considerably more fellowship slots than candidates, and the fill rate fell year over year, meaning the trainee pipeline is shrinking, not growing.56

Crucially, the competitive gate is one step earlier: getting into a general cardiovascular disease fellowship, which filled 100.0% in the 2026 SMS. Cardiology fellowship is genuinely competitive; the interventional year on top of it currently is not.5

SCAI attributes the IC underfill to workforce and lifestyle factors rather than any failure of the Match: radiation exposure, orthopedic strain from wearing lead, demanding call, burnout, and career-longevity concerns, per its 2023 occupational-health survey.6 The honest read: unlike most procedural sub-subspecialties, IC is reachable at the fellowship step right now, but the very reasons it's reachable are real signals about the job you'd be signing up for.

Compensation — the robust version

IC is one of the best-paid fields in all of medicine, and one survey measures it directly. MedAxiom, the cardiovascular arm of the American College of Cardiology, breaks compensation out by cardiology subspecialty and by practice cohort, which neither Medscape nor Doximity does. Both of those stop at "cardiology" as one bucket, so their headline numbers describe the field a general cardiologist works in rather than the one an interventionalist does. MedAxiom is the anchor here and everything else on this page is read against it.789

National number. MedAxiom's 2025 survey, its 13th annual, covers 2024 earnings across 232 programs and 6,830 cardiovascular providers. It puts interventional cardiology at $788,083 in integrated groups, meaning health-system-employed, and $625,000 in private practice.7 ⟳

Read the gap rather than averaging it. The two cohorts are different jobs with different economics: the employed figure is cash compensation from a system that captures the facility revenue, and the private figure excludes ancillary and ownership income that never shows up as salary. Neither number is "the" IC salary, and there is no defensible way to blend them into one.

Where IC sits within cardiology, and the site had this wrong. In MedAxiom's 2024 data, interventional is second in both cohorts.7 ⟳

Private practice Integrated (employed)
Invasive (non-interventional) $826,280 $764,200
Interventional $625,000 $788,083
Electrophysiology $623,134 $804,129
General / non-invasive $525,000 $662,870
Advanced heart failure not reported $652,000

Invasive cardiology leads private practice by roughly $200,000 over interventional. Electrophysiology leads the employed cohort. This page previously said interventional sits "at the very top of cardiology pay," which is wrong under either cohort, and the ordering is genuinely unstable year to year: in the prior edition invasive led both cohorts for the first time in more than a decade, and in this one electrophysiology overtook it among employed physicians. Any ranking claim about cardiology pay needs a date stamped on it.

What this page can no longer tell you. There is no IC percentile ladder. The 25th/median/75th figures this page used to print, and the modeled regional medians beside them, came from republishers that attributed them to MGMA without being able to link to MGMA, whose per-specialty tables are paywalled. They are gone, along with a Marit Health average and an aggregator's academic-versus-private bands. MedAxiom publishes cohort medians and not a distribution, so the honest answer about the spread is that nobody publishes one.10 ⟳

Integrated vs. private is a widening gap. In the same survey, integrated cardiology overall passed $700,000 while private practice sat at $588,479, the largest gap in more than five years, and it is pushing consolidation into health systems. Read the private-practice figures knowing that ancillary and ownership upside sits outside them.79 ⟳

How you're actually paid. IC compensation is heavily productivity-linked, and structural procedures carry far higher per-case RVUs than a coronary stent, which is why structural-heavy schedules are so productive. The premium usually surfaces as a higher base or a larger partnership draw rather than as a straight multiplier. Productivity and incentive bonuses average about $63,000/yr for cardiology broadly.11 ⟳

What interventionalists themselves report, and how far to trust it. No survey publishes IC starting salaries, so the only visible source is physicians discussing their own numbers in public. On Student Doctor Network in 2022, four interventional cardiologists described their starting packages: $550,000 base plus a $25,000 signing bonus (Arizona), $510,000 base plus $20,000 (Florida), $410,000 plus production at $67/wRVU in a metro market, and a Texas position at $65.75/wRVU. In a 2020 thread, one described a hospital-employed non-metro package at $600,000–$800,000. On call pay, a private-practice interventionalist reported $1,000 per night, and several noted that employed contracts fold call into base with no separate stipend at all.12 ⟳

Those are observations rather than a distribution. Six people posting over four years is not a sample, the reports are now three to six years old, and self-reported pay skews toward high earners, private practice, and partners rather than employees, with people regularly mixing up base salary, total compensation, and collections. What the reports are useful for is the shape: starting bases sit well below MedAxiom's mid-career medians, which is what you would expect and it comes before you read $788,083 as a first-year number.

The "STEMI tax." Part of IC's premium is compensation for middle-of-the-night emergency call rather than a pure clinical premium. The call-pay figures above are the whole of the public evidence for it, and they are anecdotes.12 ⟳

The trend that colors all of it. Cardiology comp keeps rising and IC/invasive are among the fastest-climbing subspecialties, but per-physician wRVU productivity has plateaued, new-patient-visit share hit a five-year low, and systems are leaning harder on advanced-practice providers.9 Structural heart/TAVR is the main growth engine and a top recruiting differentiator. And 2026 CPT/reimbursement changes are set to shift how IC procedures are coded and paid, and worth watching since so much of IC comp is RVU-based.13 ⟳

Lifestyle & the trade

The single most-cited feature of IC lifestyle, and the one that most separates it from general (non-invasive) cardiology, is the call. STEMI activations are time-critical, since time is muscle, so cath-lab call can pull you in at any hour, nights, weekends, and holidays, and the activation clock does not care about your sleep.14 Emergent cases regularly blow up planned clinic and family time, so schedule control is low and predictable weeks are not really a feature of the job.14

The hours are long even before the pager fires: in the large multi-society survey, IC attendings averaged ~63 clinical hours a week and fellows ~67, among the higher figures in medicine.14 And the work itself is physically static and demanding: complex cases can run for hours, standing still, gowned in heavy lead, often twisted toward the monitors. The occupational-hazard layer below is effectively part of the daily lifestyle, because the lead apron and the radiation are with you every working day.1415

Lifestyle rating: 2/5. High intensity, long hours, and low control over when the emergent work lands. Structural/valve-focused practice can carry a somewhat more schedulable case profile than pure STEMI-call coronary work, which is one reason some interventionalists drift that way over a career.16

Wellbeing — the part to take seriously

Burnout is high, and it's measured specifically for this field. For cross-specialty scale on a different instrument, the AMA's 2025 Organizational Biopsy puts parent cardiology at 43.5% against a 41.9% all-physician average. The field's own survey asks a harder question and gets a much higher number. From a multi-society survey of 1,159 IC attendings and 192 fellows (JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions, 2023):15

  • 69% reported burnout affecting their lives; 64% reported emotional exhaustion; 78% felt they were working excessively hard.
  • 41% of attendings had considered quitting in the past year; 32% were currently considering leaving.
  • 84% reported loneliness despite ~86% living with a partner; ~40% felt they'd achieved less than they believed possible; 44% had less enthusiasm than the year before; 30% considered themselves physically unhealthy. ⟳

The paradox the editors flagged is the same one that runs through this whole field: many IC physicians find the work deeply meaningful, citing the flow states, the teamwork, the cutting-edge tech, and the person whose heart attack you literally stop, yet the structural demands (hours, call, paperwork, prior authorization) erode wellbeing anyway. The framing from contributors was that the first step is naming burnout as systemic, not a personal failing.1517

Career longevity is the genuine, under-discussed risk. This is IC's quiet crux, and it is a leading cause of interventionalists cutting back or retiring early rather than a soft concern. From SCAI's 2023 occupational-health survey:18

  • ~60% reported orthopedic injuries. Chiefly spine damage from lead aprons that often exceed 10 lbs. Chronic neck and back pain is a leading driver of career limitation and early exit.
  • Reported cancer rates ~3× the general population, attributed to cumulative radiation exposure.
  • 17% had already reduced cath-lab time specifically to limit radiation, up sharply from prior surveys.
  • SCAI's own framing: these hazards remain "unacceptable and largely unchanged over two decades." Newer "lead-free"/suspended-shielding systems and robotic PCI aim to cut both radiation and orthopedic strain, but adoption is uneven due to cost and institutional will.1819

The honest read: this is a job your body pays for over decades, not just your calendar this week.

Who's in the field (demographics)

  • Women: ~14.5% of practicing interventional cardiologists, one of the lowest shares of any internal-medicine subspecialty, with electrophysiology lower still at ~11%.20 ⟳ The training pipeline is wider than the workforce. In academic year 2024-25, 30.2% of general cardiology fellows and 18.1% of interventional cardiology fellows were women, against 16% of practicing cardiologists.20 ⟳ A 2013–2023 ACGME trend study found a statistically significant increase in women in cardiology and IC over the decade, but cardiology "continues to remain the least represented by women" among IM subspecialties.21 (An often-cited figure puts women at ~7% of practicing US interventionalists; the best-sourced recent point estimate for the field is 14.5%, and the range reflects different years and denominators.)22 ⟳
  • IMG: IC has one of the highest IMG shares of any subspecialty. Of the 236 positions filled in the 2026 Match, ~59% went to IMGs (US-citizen IMGs ~20%, non-US-citizen IMGs ~39%), a direct consequence of the US-MD applicant shortfall.523 ⟳
  • DO: ~13.6% of filled 2026 IC positions (US-MD graduates ~26.7%).5 ⟳
  • URiM: ~8.9%, essentially flat for over a decade and slightly below general cardiology (~9.9%).20 ⟳

Culture, personality & the online stereotypes

Who gravitates here: people who love the adrenaline and the acute save, the person who genuinely wants to be the one called in for the STEMI. Decisive, action-oriented, comfortable with high stakes and fast decisions under pressure. Proud of hand skills and procedural craft, and drawn to the immediate, visible payoff of restoring blood flow: you open the artery and the patient's chest pain resolves in front of you. Many are pulled by the combination of technical challenge, tangible outcomes, and top-of-cardiology pay.16

The stereotypes. community caricatures, not facts. Each with an unfair edge, and plenty of people don't fit them:

  • "The top-paid adrenaline peak of cardiology." There's truth in the pay and the thrill, but it flattens the years of internal-medicine and general-cardiology grounding underneath, and the large amount of clinic and imaging work that isn't a code.
  • "You pay for the paycheck with your body." This one is closer to documented reality than most stereotypes, since the radiation and orthopedic toll are real, but it's a caution rather than a verdict; protective tech and sane call negotiation change the math.
  • "A young person's game." The physical demands and call are seen as hard to sustain late-career; true enough that career longevity is a live topic in the field, but many practice well into their careers, often shifting toward structural or less call-heavy work.
  • "Very male, old-cath-lab-club culture." The gender numbers are genuinely low and the "old boys' club" reputation is long-standing and openly discussed within the field, named here plainly because it's part of the honest picture, and because there's a real, growing effort to change it.

What people say online (synthesized and paraphrased, not quotes): Across trainee and physician forums the picture is consistent and two-sided. The money and the procedural thrill are real and genuinely loved by the people who fit the field. But the call, rather than the raw hours, is described as the true dealbreaker, because it shreds predictability. There's frequent, matter-of-fact talk of senior interventionalists with chronic back and neck problems, and of people pivoting toward less call-heavy or non-invasive niches as they age. A running theme is that general/non-invasive cardiology or EP is the "lifestyle-friendlier" alternative for people who love cardiology but not the 3 a.m. activations. Threads also discuss the field's diversity gap candidly, and note that it is slowly changing.

Voices from the field. Paraphrased from public writing, with links to the originals:

  • An interventional cardiologist writing for TCTMD frames IC's burnout as structural, a product of hours, call, and administrative load, even though the clinical work itself is deeply satisfying.17
  • James B. Hermiller, MD and Allison Dupont, MD, reporting SCAI's occupational-hazard survey, call the orthopedic and radiation risks "unacceptable and largely unchanged" over two decades, and argue new protective technology exists but needs institutional buy-in.18
  • Celina M. Yong, MD and colleagues (via Cardiovascular Business) describe barriers of inflexibility, physical demands, an "old boys' club," and few female mentors, that deter women more than men, while innovation and financial drivers attract men more.24
  • An interventional cardiologist in the same coverage acknowledges the obstacles but points to a growing pool of female role models as grounds for optimism.24

Why people choose it / why people leave

Why choose it: you genuinely love procedures and the acute save, and the STEMI page is a rush rather than a dread · near the top of cardiology pay and one of the highest earning fields in medicine · immediate, visible impact, since you restore blood flow and see the result in real time · constant technical innovation (structural heart, robotics, imaging) · a relatively accessible on-ramp for the pay level (the path runs through internal medicine) · under-subscribed at the fellowship step right now.

Why leave or avoid it: relentless, unpredictable STEMI call that dominates life outside work · real, cumulative occupational injury, with spine and neck damage and radiation over a career · high burnout and cath-lab career longevity limited by the body · a very long training runway (7+ years after med school, 8+ with structural) · a culture that has been slow to diversify · lower schedule control than nearly any other cardiology path.

Best fit if: you're decisive and thrive under acute pressure · you take real pride in hand skills and procedural craft · you want the top of cardiology pay and go in clear-eyed about protecting your body (modern shielding, ergonomics) and negotiating sane call · you can absorb a long training runway.

Not for you if: you want schedule control and protected family time · you dislike being on the hook at 3 a.m. · chronic physical strain would be a dealbreaker · you love cardiology's thinking more than its procedures (non-invasive/imaging cardiology or heart failure may fit better) · you can't stomach 7+ years of post-med-school training before attending pay.

The FLI angle — Interventional Cardiology for first-gen, low-income & immigrant students

Where IC fits FLI realities well:

  • A high-ceiling target reached through an accessible on-ramp. This is the genuine draw. You don't need a hyper-competitive match straight out of med school. The path runs through internal medicine residency, one of the largest and least-gatekept residencies, enterable from a wide range of US and international schools. From there it's cardiology, then interventional. "Do well in IM, then subspecialize into the money" is a real, well-trodden ladder.
  • Unusually IMG-open at the fellowship step. The majority of filled IC positions go to international medical graduates (~59% in 2026), a direct consequence of the applicant shortfall. For immigrant and IMG students, that's a meaningful, uncommon opening at the top of the pay scale.
  • Top-tier, portable income. IC sits near the top of all of medicine: $788,083 in health-system-employed groups and $625,000 in private practice on MedAxiom's 2025 report, two different jobs rather than one blendable median. Either is a life-changing income for a student without a family financial cushion.7

Risks to name honestly:

  • Time. ~7+ years of training after medical school before attending pay (8+ for structural and CTO work), the longest runway in this corner of medicine. That's a long stretch of resident/fellow wages while loans accrue, and it hits harder when there's no family cushion to lean on.
  • The body is collateral. The radiation and orthopedic toll are not hypothetical (~60% orthopedic injury, ~3× cancer rates in the SCAI survey). If your career longevity is your financial plan, a spine that gives out at 55 is a real risk to model.
  • Call as a life-tax. The 3 a.m. STEMI activations are hardest to absorb if you're also a caregiver or breadwinner without backup support at home.
  • Culture barriers. Women (~14.5%, and by some counts far fewer practicing) and URiM physicians (~9%) remain scarce in the cath lab; the "old boys' club" reputation and thin mentorship can make the climb lonelier without a network, which belongs alongside the real, growing effort to change it.

Bottom line: IC is a legitimate high-ceiling target reachable through an accessible internal-medicine-to-cardiology route, but it asks for the longest runway, the highest physical price, and entry into a culture that hasn't historically looked like you. Go in eyes open, and know that non-invasive cardiology and electrophysiology offer nearby paths that trade some ceiling for far more schedule control and far less bodily wear.

Subspecialties & sub-focuses within IC

The interventional year itself can branch into further, usually additional-year, focuses:1

  • Structural heart / TAVR. Transcatheter valve replacement and repair (aortic, mitral, tricuspid), the fastest-growing pillar of the field; often carries a more schedulable case profile than pure coronary STEMI call, and commands the top of the IC comp range.
  • Chronic total occlusion (CTO) PCI. The hardest, longest coronary cases; a highly technical niche.
  • Peripheral / endovascular intervention. Arteries beyond the heart, especially the legs.
  • Coronary physiology & intravascular imaging. FFR, IVUS, OCT-guided intervention.
  • Adjacent within cardiology: general/non-invasive cardiology, advanced heart failure, and electrophysiology (EP), the latter two frequently cited as lifestyle-friendlier or lower-radiation alternatives for people who love cardiology but not the cath-lab call.

Fun facts

  • "Time is muscle" is the field's mantra: every minute a coronary artery stays blocked, more heart muscle dies, which is why the STEMI call is so unforgiving.
  • Lead aprons commonly weigh 10+ lbs; interventionalists effectively wear a small weighted vest for hours a day, for years, hence the documented epidemic of back and neck injury.18
  • IC fellowships have recently struggled to fill all their slots. A striking trend for such a high-paying field, and widely read as trainees weighing lifestyle and physical toll against pay.525
  • Interventional cardiology is among the least female-represented specialties in all of medicine.2022
  • The field is actively moving toward "lead-free" cath labs (suspended shields, robotic PCI) to attack its two signature hazards, radiation and orthopedic strain, at once.19
  • Structural heart (TAVR) exploded from a niche into a major, growing pillar of IC in barely over a decade, reshaping what an "interventional" career can even look like.9

Sources

Last reviewed: 2026-07-25.

Footnotes

  1. IC training pathway (IM 3 yrs → CVD fellowship 3 yrs → 1 ACGME interventional yr, + optional non-accredited structural/CTO/peripheral year). 2023 ACC/AHA/SCAI Advanced Training Statement on Interventional Cardiology, JACC (2023). https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2022.11.002 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  2. Board certification — ABIM Interventional Cardiology, requiring prior/concurrent ABIM Cardiovascular Disease certification. ABIM Interventional Cardiology MOC/certification (accessed 2026) https://www.abim.org/maintenance-of-certification/moc-requirements/interventional-cardiology ; ABIM Cardiovascular Disease subspecialty policies https://www.abim.org/certification/policies/internal-medicine-subspecialty-policies/cardiovascular-disease/ (⟳ exact eligibility-clause wording not machine-readable this pass; structure corroborated by 1). ↩ ↩2

  3. IC's first-ever NRMP Match (2025 appointment year): 326 offered, 272 filled, 83.4% fill, 290 applicants / 272 matched (~94%). SCAI, "Historic First Interventional Cardiology Match" (Dec 2024). https://www.scai.org/media-center/news-and-articles/scai-celebrates-historic-first-interventional-cardiology-match ↩

  4. NRMP SMS Results and Data 2025 (2025), Table 1A — IC 156 programs, 326 positions offered, 291 applicants, 272 filled (83.4%), 44 programs with an unfilled position; Table 3 gives the same applicant count, 291. https://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/SMS_Results_and_Data_2025.pdf Corrected 2026-08-17: the body gave the applicant count as 290 and cited both 3 and this footnote for it. NRMP prints 291 in two tables. The applicant count is the only figure that moved: 326, 272 and 83.4% are exact, and 272 of 291 is 93.5%, which still rounds to the ~94% the sentence states, so nothing downstream changes. The 290 most likely came from 3, SCAI's own announcement of the match; the sentence now cites the match report itself. ↩ ↩2

  5. NRMP SMS Results and Data 2026 (revised) — IC 153 programs / 307 offered / 236 filled / 76.9% fill / 71 unfilled / 247 applicants; general CVD fellowship 100.0% filled; IC matched-position breakdown US-MD 26.7%, DO 13.6%, US-IMG 20.3%, non-US-IMG 39.0%. https://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/SMS_Results_and_Data_2026_Revised-20260522.pdf ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  6. SCAI response to IC match results (underfill; workforce/pipeline attribution — radiation, orthopedic strain, call, burnout, longevity) (2026). https://www.scai.org/media-center/news-and-articles/scai-responds-2025-interventional-cardiology-match-results-and ↩ ↩2

  7. MedAxiom Cardiovascular Provider Compensation and Production Survey, 2025 report (2024 data). The 13th annual edition, covering 232 programs and 6,830 cardiovascular providers. MedAxiom is the cardiovascular arm of the American College of Cardiology, and it is the only survey that breaks compensation out by cardiology subspecialty and by practice cohort. Interventional cardiology: $788,083 integrated (health-system-employed), $625,000 private practice. Invasive (non-interventional): $826,280 private, $764,200 integrated. Electrophysiology: $623,134 private, $804,129 integrated. General/non-interventional: $525,000 private, $662,870 integrated. Advanced heart failure: $652,000 integrated, not reported for private. MedAxiom publishes cohort medians rather than a percentile distribution. Figures read from TCTMD's report of the survey (https://www.tctmd.com/news/cardiologists-saw-rising-incomes-additional-pressures-2024-medaxiom); MedAxiom's own landing page carries the headline all-cardiology figures but no subspecialty splits (https://info.medaxiom.com/2025compsurvey). This footnote previously carried the 2024 report (2023 data), which put integrated IC at $756,000. The private-practice figure is $625,000 in both editions, which is unusual enough to be worth confirming against a second relay before it is quoted as unchanged. Corrected 2026-08-17: the 2026-08-13 rewrite of the compensation section reached this footnote and not the FLI section, which went on printing a blended median range of ~$700k–$760k. Neither endpoint is a published figure: $700k falls between the two cohorts and $760k is closest to the superseded 2024-report integrated figure of $756,000. The FLI bullet now states both cohort medians. The Why-choose-it list also claimed "the highest earning ceiling in cardiology," which the compensation section had already corrected in the body and the dashboard; it now reads "near the top of cardiology pay," the wording the thesis uses, and there is no ceiling claim, because no publisher gives an IC distribution. ⟳ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  8. Doximity 2025 Physician Compensation Report — cardiology (general, no separate IC line) median $587,360. https://www.doximity.com/reports/physician-compensation-report/2025 ↩

  9. MedAxiom 2025 report (2024 data) — overall cardiologist median $694,954 (all-time high); integrated >$700k vs private $588,479; sub-subspecialty ranking EP > invasive > interventional > heart failure > general; productivity plateau; structural growth. Via Cardiovascular Business / BusinessWire (Oct 2025). https://cardiovascularbusiness.com/topics/healthcare-management/cardiologist-salary/cardiologist-compensation-hits-all-time-high ; https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251015425867/en/New-Data-on-Cardiology-Compensation-and-Production-Highlights-Solutions-for-Workforce-Shortages ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  10. What this page removed, and why. Four compensation sources came off this profile on 2026-08-13, and none was replaced, because nothing publishable exists to replace them with. (1) An MGMA percentile ladder for interventional cardiology (25th $600,000 / median $725,000 / 75th $850,000), a ~$71/wRVU conversion factor, a private-versus-academic split of $780,000 against $620,000, and per-case wRVU values for TAVR and coronary stenting, all reached this page through FastRVU, a republisher that attributes figures to MGMA without linking to MGMA; MGMA's per-specialty tables are paywalled and cannot be read. (2) An RVUDoc "Doximity-based model" giving an IC median of $685,000 with modeled regional medians, which is a model output rather than a measurement. (3) A Marit Health average of $714,029. (4) Residency Advisor bands of $450,000–$650,000 academic, $650,000–$900,000 community, $900,000–$1.3M private partner, and $1.4M–$1.6M structural-heavy. An AMN Healthcare blog post comparing IC at ~$690,000 against general cardiology at ~$470,000 came off with them; AMN's Review of Physician Recruiting Incentives is genuine offer data, but that blog post is not it. An aggregator's number is not evidence of anything, including of what physicians report, so these were deleted rather than downgraded. ⟳ On Marit Health: it publishes a panel of self-reported physician salaries, and displays MGMA and AMGA benchmarks beside them that are masked unless you create an account. The figure quoted here comes from the self-reported panel, not from either benchmark. Read it as crowd data: unweighted, of unstated sample size, and directional. ↩

  11. Cardiology incentive/productivity bonus ~$63,000/yr. Medscape via Physicians Thrive. https://www.medscape.com/p11/medscape-cardiologist-compensation-report-2026-evaluating-2026a1000ddf ↩

  12. Interventional cardiologists reporting their own pay in public discussion. Anecdotal, not survey data. Student Doctor Network, a public physician and student forum. Thread "Post-pandemic cardiology salary" (started 29 September 2022), https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/post-pandemic-cardiology-salary.1470023/ — four interventional positions described: Arizona $550,000 base plus $25,000 signing; Florida $510,000 base plus $20,000 signing; a metro position at $410,000 plus production at $67/wRVU with a $15,000 bonus; a Texas position at $65.75/wRVU plus $2 quality. Thread "Cardiology Salary?" (started 28 January 2020), https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/cardiology-salary.1398572/ — a hospital-employed non-metro interventional package described at $600,000–$800,000 total. Thread "How much do you get paid for STEMI call as an interventional cardiologist?" (started 24 October 2020), https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/how-much-do-you-get-paid-for-stemi-call-as-an-interventional-cardiologist.1426744/ — private practice $1,000 per night; employed contracts typically fold call into base with no separate stipend; one poster reported never being paid separately for call. Six people posting across four years is a set of observations, not a distribution, and the reports are three to six years old. Self-reported pay skews toward high earners, private practice and partners rather than employees, and posters routinely mix up base salary, total compensation and collections. This page reports them as individual observations with their year and setting, and gives no range. ⟳ A forum may source pay here, because a poster reporting their own salary is first-hand about their own life — never a price, a fee, a legal requirement or a claim about an institution. Read as anecdote, not survey data. ↩ ↩2

  13. 2026 CPT/reimbursement changes affecting IC coding/pay. Cardiovascular Business, "CPT code updates in 2026 will change how interventional cardiologists get paid" (2026). ⟳ specifics when finalized. https://cardiovascularbusiness.com/topics/clinical/interventional-cardiology/cpt-code-updates-2026-will-change-how-interventional-cardiologists-get-paid ↩

  14. IC lifestyle/hours — attendings ~63 clinical hrs/week, fellows ~67; time-critical STEMI call; low schedule control. Multi-society survey, JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions (2023), via Medscape/TCTMD. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/993394 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  15. IC burnout/wellbeing — 69% burnout affecting life, 64% emotional exhaustion, 78% working excessively hard, 41% considered quitting, 84% loneliness, 30% physically unhealthy (1,159 attendings + 192 fellows). JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions (2023), via Medscape. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/993394 ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  16. IC culture / who gravitates / structural case-profile note. Synthesis of TCTMD, Cardiovascular Business, and community sources below; structural work is sometimes described as more schedulable than STEMI-call coronary practice. ↩ ↩2

  17. Tushar Mishra, MD — "Braking Before the Breaking Point: Burnout in Interventional Cardiology," TCTMD (2023). https://www.tctmd.com/news/braking-breaking-point-burnout-interventional-cardiology ↩ ↩2

  18. SCAI 2023 occupational-health survey (Hermiller, Dupont, Abudayyeh) — ~60% orthopedic injury, ~3× cancer rate, 17% reduced cath-lab time; hazards "unacceptable and largely unchanged over two decades." https://www.scai.org/media-center/news-and-articles/survey-confirms-radiation-and-orthopedic-health-hazards-cardiac ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  19. "Lead-free" cath lab / suspended shielding / robotic PCI. JSCAI, "Update on Radiation Safety in the Cath Lab: Moving Toward a 'Lead-Free' Environment." https://www.jscai.org/article/S2772-9303(23)00531-8/fulltext ↩ ↩2

  20. IC demographics — women 14.5% practicing, URiM 8.9% (against general cardiology 9.9% URiM and EP 11% women). Corrected 2026-08-17: the demographics section opened with "below EP at ~11%," which reverses this footnote: 11% sits below 14.5%, so EP is the lower of the two. On the plain reading the sentence was false, and it was the first thing the section said. Methodist DeBakey Cardiovascular J DEI review, citing AAMC/ACGME (2022). https://journal.houstonmethodist.org/articles/10.14797/mdcvj.1080. Practicing cardiologists, 16% women: AAMC, "Women are changing the face of medicine in America" (2022 data), https://www.aamc.org/news/women-are-changing-face-medicine-america. Fellows: ACGME, Data Resource Book, Academic Year 2024-2025, Table C.21, https://www.acgme.org/globalassets/pfassets/publicationsbooks/2024-2025_acgme_databook_document.pdf — cardiovascular disease 30.2%, interventional cardiology 18.1%, clinical cardiac electrophysiology 13.7%. Corrected 2026-08-13: this page put general cardiology at ~24% of fellows, six points low, and set it beside IC's practicing 14.5% as though the two were the same measure. They are not. The practicing share lags the fellowship share by a generation, which is the whole gap between 16% and 30.2%. ⟳ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  21. Naser et al., "Trends in female representation in cardiology and its subspecialties," Current Problems in Cardiology, PMID 38718932 (Aug 2024) — significant increase over 2013–2023 but cardiology remains least represented by women among IM subspecialties. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38718932/ ↩

  22. Commonly cited ~7% women among practicing US interventionalists (life.md synthesis); best-sourced recent point estimate 14.5% per 20 — range reflects different years/denominators. ⟳ https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/993394 ↩ ↩2

  23. NRMP 2026 SMS press release — IC among specialties with the highest share of positions filled by US-IMG and non-US-IMG (Feb 2026). https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nrmp-publishes-results-and-data-for-the-2026-specialties-matching-service-302692891.html ↩

  24. Celina M. Yong, MD et al. and Annapoorna Kini, MD — on culture barriers deterring women (inflexibility, physical demands, "old boys' club," few mentors) and reasons for optimism. Via Cardiovascular Business. https://cardiovascularbusiness.com/topics/clinical/interventional-cardiology/culture-interventional-cardiology-drives-women-away ↩ ↩2

  25. JSCAI, "The Growing Concern of Unfilled Interventional Cardiology Fellowships." https://www.jscai.org/article/S2772-9303(26)01057-4/pdf ↩

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