Pediatric Pathology — 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: peds path, pediatric and perinatal pathology, placental pathology. A 1-year ACGME-accredited fellowship entered after a pathology residency. Organ systems: all of them, in patients from the placenta to adolescence.

Subspecialty fellowship of Pathology.

The 30-second version

Pediatric pathology is the diagnosis of disease in children, and it starts earlier than people expect: a large share of the work is the placenta, which is the only organ in medicine routinely examined after it has finished its job. The specialty covers three territories that share almost nothing except the age of the patient. Perinatal pathology examines placentas and performs fetal and perinatal autopsies, which is often the only way a family learns why a pregnancy ended or a newborn died. Pediatric surgical pathology diagnoses the tumors of childhood, which are biologically different from adult cancers and classified by their own systems, along with the congenital malformations, metabolic disease, and organ-specific problems of children. And pediatric autopsy work carries a forensic and medicolegal weight that adult autopsy usually does not, since sudden unexpected infant death and suspected non-accidental injury both come through here. The trade at the center of the field: uniquely consequential work for families at the worst moments of their lives, in an academic subspecialty with a narrow job map and a compensation figure below its own parent specialty.

Quick dashboard (details and sources below)
Training after med school 5 years (4 yr AP/CP pathology + 1 yr pediatric pathology fellowship)
Total from college start ~13 years (4 undergrad + 4 med school + 4 residency + 1 fellowship)
Training chain Med school (4) → Pathology (4) → 1 yr ACGME pediatric pathology fellowship → ABPath pediatric pathology certificate
Competitiveness Low. A small fellowship whose own society reports positions going unfilled ⟳
Typical full-time pay Nobody publishes a figure for it. Parent pathology: Survey · Medscape 2026 $394,000, Doximity 2025 $373,384. Pediatric pathology sits below that, by an unmeasured amount ⟳
Pay vs. parent (general pathology) Below, and the mechanism is near-total concentration in academic children's hospitals ⟳
Lifestyle Daytime, weekday, minimal call, with autopsy and frozen-section obligations ⟳
Burnout No subspecialty figure; parent pathology is 28.3% against a 41.9% all-physician average (AMA Organizational Biopsy 2025), among the lowest of any specialty measured ⟳
% women 55.6% of pediatric pathology fellows (ACGME, AY2024-25); parent pathology 44% practicing, 54.7% of residents ⟳
DO / IMG accessibility Very open. Gated behind pathology (19.6% DO, 34.7% IMG of positions filled, 2026 Main Match) and undersubscribed at the fellowship stage ⟳

What they actually do

Placental and perinatal pathology is the highest-volume work and the least visible. Placentas are submitted for a long list of indications, including preterm birth, growth restriction, stillbirth, maternal hypertensive disease, and suspected infection, and the examination frequently explains an outcome nothing else does. Findings such as maternal vascular malperfusion, ascending intrauterine infection, or fetal vascular malperfusion have direct implications for the next pregnancy, which makes the report a piece of clinical care rather than a record. Placental pathology has also become medicolegally significant in cases of neonatal encephalopathy, because it can establish that an injury was antenatal rather than intrapartum.

Perinatal and pediatric autopsy is the field's most demanding work. A fetal or neonatal autopsy after a stillbirth or a death in the neonatal intensive care unit is often the only route to a diagnosis, and the family is waiting on it, sometimes because they are deciding whether to attempt another pregnancy. Genetic and metabolic diagnoses discovered at autopsy change what happens to a family's future children.

Pediatric surgical pathology covers the tumors of childhood, which are their own biological category: Wilms tumor, neuroblastoma, hepatoblastoma, rhabdomyosarcoma, medulloblastoma, and the leukemias and lymphomas of children, most of them classified and risk-stratified through protocols that differ from adult oncology. Around the tumors sit the non-neoplastic pediatric problems: biliary atresia, necrotizing enterocolitis, inflammatory bowel disease of childhood, congenital anomalies, muscle and metabolic disease, and transplant biopsies.

Representative work: placental examination and reporting · fetal, perinatal, and pediatric autopsy · pediatric tumor diagnosis and protocol-based risk stratification · liver biopsy for biliary atresia and metabolic disease · gastrointestinal biopsy including Hirschsprung disease evaluation · congenital anomaly and syndromic assessment · skeletal dysplasia evaluation · sudden unexpected infant death investigation · suspected non-accidental injury cases, in coordination with child abuse pediatrics and forensic pathology · intraoperative frozen section for pediatric surgery.12

A day in the life: microscope work, gross examination, and conversation with clinicians. Placental sign-out is the daily rhythm at most children's hospitals; surgical cases arrive from pediatric surgery, oncology, and gastroenterology; autopsies are scheduled and take substantially longer than adult ones because the examination is more detailed and the documentation more thorough. Multidisciplinary participation is heavy, since pediatric oncology protocols require pathology review and fetal loss conferences bring together obstetrics, neonatology, genetics, and pathology.

The family-facing dimension is unusual for pathology. Pediatric pathologists frequently participate in the meetings where a family is told what an autopsy found, and some do so directly.

On call: modest. Frozen sections for pediatric surgery and occasional urgent autopsy needs, without an overnight service.

The training path & time to completion

Medical school (4 yrs) → anatomic and clinical pathology residency (4 yrs) → 1-year ACGME-accredited pediatric pathology fellowship → ABPath subspecialty certification in pediatric pathology.12

  • The fellowship is one year and ACGME-accredited, and pediatric pathology is one of ABPath's eleven subspecialty certifications, available to candidates with ABPath primary certification.2
  • Total from the start of college is about 13 years.
  • Training requires a children's hospital with the case mix to support it, which is what limits the number of programs and, later, the number of jobs.

On recruitment. Pathology fellowship recruitment is being restructured toward a unified match, with hematopathology, molecular genetic pathology, forensic pathology, and bone and soft tissue pathology committed for the 2026–27 academic year and other subspecialties invited to the 2027 cycle.3 Pediatric pathology has not committed, and as with transfusion medicine, its problem is too few applicants rather than too many. 85% of pathology residents say they prefer a later, unified timeline.4 ⟳

How competitive is it?

This is one of the least competitive fellowships in pathology. The Society for Pediatric Pathology surveyed residents, fellows and programs about recruitment and reported that many positions in North America go unfilled, concluding that the supply of fellowship positions will likely continue to exceed the demand for the training; nearly half of the pathology residents it surveyed had ruled the subspecialty out without ever being exposed to it.5 No fill-rate figure is published, because this fellowship does not run through a match, so what the field describes as a workforce shortage is its own report rather than a measurement made here. ⟳

The reasons are structural:

  • The autopsy content deters people. A field whose most demanding work involves dead infants self-selects hard, and many residents rule it out without examining it closely.
  • The pay is below the parent specialty and the job market is narrow, which are difficult things to compete against when dermatopathology and hematopathology are the alternatives.
  • Placental pathology is invisible. The field's highest-volume and arguably most clinically useful work is almost unknown outside obstetrics and neonatology, so it does not attract anyone toward the specialty.

The consequence favors a trainee. Children's hospitals need pediatric pathologists, few residents enter the field, and a fellowship-trained candidate has genuine leverage.

Board: ABPath subspecialty certification in pediatric pathology.2

Compensation — the robust version

Nobody publishes a compensation figure for pediatric pathology, and there is a structural reason for that, and it comes before you go looking. The field falls into a gap between two survey frames. The pathology surveys stop at "pathologist" and do not break the field into subspecialties at all, so Medscape and Doximity each publish one pathology number and nothing beneath it. The pediatric surveys, meanwhile, are built around the American Board of Pediatrics subspecialties, and this field certifies through the American Board of Pathology instead, so it sits outside their frame. Neither side counts it, so neither side reports it.

The parent anchor, which is what we do have. Two national surveys publish pathology. Medscape's 2026 report, on 2025 earnings, gives $394,000; Doximity's 2025 report, on 2024 earnings, gives $373,384.6 Both are means rather than medians, neither is inflation-adjusted, and neither breaks pathology down further. ⟳

What we can honestly say about this field, and it is an inference rather than a measurement. Pediatric pathology sits below the parent field. Every mechanism below pushes in the same direction and none pushes back, so the direction is solid; the size is not published and this page will not manufacture it. If you need a working anchor for a decision, start at pathology's $373,384–$394,000 and adjust down for hospital employment, payer mix, and the unbillability of autopsy, and then get a real number from someone doing the job.

The mechanism is the same one that runs through every pediatric subspecialty on this site, and it is not about children being less valuable. Pediatric practices are hospital-employed rather than owner-operated, so there is no partnership income; children are disproportionately covered by Medicaid, which reimburses below commercial rates; and the specific work this field does most of, meaning placental examination and autopsy, is among the least well-reimbursed activity in pathology. Autopsy in particular is close to unbillable and is supported by institutions as a service rather than as revenue. The sibling profiles show the same pattern from other angles: pediatric urology and pediatric anesthesiology both land at or below their adult equivalents for structurally identical reasons.7

The offset is scarcity. A field that cannot fill its fellowship positions, concentrated at institutions that cannot do without it, gives a new attending real negotiating leverage, and it is worth using.5

What changed here, and why: this page used to carry an average near $313,000 for pediatric pathology. It traced back to Salary.com through a compilation site, and both are excluded under this site's compensation sourcing standard. An aggregator's number is not evidence of anything, including of what the field earns, so it was removed rather than relabeled as an estimate. Nothing replaced it, because nothing exists. Benchmark a real offer against children's-hospital and academic pathology salary scales in the same market. ⟳

Lifestyle

  • Daytime, weekday, and controllable, inheriting pathology's central advantage.8
  • Autopsy work is time-consuming and physically demanding in a way slide sign-out is not, and pediatric autopsies take considerably longer than adult ones.
  • Frozen sections for pediatric surgery create scheduled interruptions rather than unpredictable ones.
  • Heavy multidisciplinary participation, in tumor boards, fetal loss conferences, and perinatal morbidity reviews, which is more clinical engagement than most of pathology offers.
  • Geographic flexibility is poor. The jobs are at children's hospitals, and there are a limited number. This is the field's most binding practical constraint and the one that most often decides against it.

Lifestyle rating: 4/5. Excellent hours and control, deducted for autopsy load and, more seriously, for a job map limited to cities with a tertiary children's hospital.

Wellbeing — the part to take seriously

No pediatric-pathology-specific wellbeing data exists. Inherit pathology, which the AMA's 2025 Organizational Biopsy puts at 28.3% burnout against a 41.9% all-physician average, among the lowest of any specialty it measures. Medscape's 2024 report places it in the same position on its own instrument, at 41% against a 49% all-physician average.8 ⟳

The emotional content is the honest centerpiece of this section. This field performs autopsies on infants and examines the placentas of pregnancies that ended badly. A pediatric pathologist encounters more dead children in a year than most physicians do in a career, and does so in a deliberate, unhurried, documentary way rather than in the acute chaos of a resuscitation. That is a specific psychological load, and it is not for everyone.

The compensating meaning is unusually direct, and practitioners describe it consistently. A family who has lost a pregnancy or a newborn usually wants to know why, and frequently nobody else can tell them. The pediatric pathologist's report is often the answer, and it changes what happens next: whether there is a genetic risk, whether a future pregnancy needs different management, whether the death was preventable. Being the person who provides that is described by people in the field as among the most meaningful work in medicine, and it is why they stay.

The non-accidental injury cases are their own weight. Suspected child abuse comes through this specialty, in coordination with child abuse pediatrics and forensic pathology, and the findings can determine a criminal outcome. That is a level of consequence pathology does not usually carry.

The isolation is real. Many children's hospitals employ one or two pediatric pathologists, so professional community is national rather than local.

Who's in the field (demographics)

Beyond the fellowship's gender breakdown, no source publishes further pediatric-pathology-specific demographics. Inherit pathology for the rest, directionally.

  • Women: 55.6% of pediatric pathology fellows in AY2024-25. Parent pathology runs 44% women practicing (AAMC, 2022 data) and 54.7% of residents.8 ⟳
  • DO: parent pathology is among the most DO-accessible specialties at 19.6% of the positions it filled in the 2026 Main Match, and an undersubscribed fellowship adds no filter.8 ⟳
  • IMG: parent pathology runs 34.7% IMG of the positions it filled in the 2026 Main Match, among the highest of any specialty.8 ⟳
  • Underrepresented in medicine: no subspecialty figure. Stillbirth and infant mortality in the United States fall disproportionately on Black families, so the population this field serves is not demographically the population practicing in it. ⟳

Culture, personality & the online stereotypes

Who gravitates here: people who like children's medicine and can hold its worst outcomes steadily. The field draws pathologists interested in development and genetics, since so much of pediatric disease is developmental, and people who value the family-facing dimension of autopsy work. It rewards thoroughness, since a pediatric autopsy is a documentary exercise where completeness matters, and comfort with being the one who explains. 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:

  • "The saddest job in medicine." The one everyone reaches for. There is real truth in the emotional load, and it misses that the field's practitioners overwhelmingly describe the work as meaningful rather than depressing, precisely because the answers matter so much to families.
  • "Autopsy is dying and this field went with it." Adult autopsy rates have fallen sharply, and pediatric and perinatal autopsy has held its clinical value far better, because in this population it still frequently produces a diagnosis nothing else can.
  • "Placentas." Meant dismissively and describing something genuinely central. Placental pathology is high-volume, clinically consequential, and increasingly medicolegally important, and almost nobody outside the field knows it exists.
  • "Nobody applies." Uncomfortably accurate, and the reason a trainee who wants this has an easy path in and real leverage afterward.

What people say online (synthesized and paraphrased, not quotes): across trainee and physician forums, pediatric pathology reads as a field people respect and few pursue. The recurring theme is the emotional content, discussed seriously and without flippancy, with residents who rotated through often reporting they found it more meaningful and less grim than they expected. A second thread is the job market, described as favorable in the sense that positions exist and unfavorable in the sense that they exist only at children's hospitals, so geography is the real constraint. A third is compensation, generally acknowledged as below the pathology median and attributed to academic employment and the unbillability of autopsy. A fourth, more technical, is placental pathology's growing role in obstetric litigation and the pressure that puts on reporting. The tone is respectful and quietly protective of the specialty.

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

  • ABPath lists pediatric pathology among its eleven subspecialty certifications, available after one or two years of ACGME-accredited fellowship training.2
  • No survey, society or study publishes a compensation figure for pediatric pathology. The parent field has two: $394,000 for pathologists overall (Medscape 2026, 2025 earnings) and $373,384 (Doximity 2025, 2024 earnings). Everything this page says about the subspecialty's pay is reasoned down from those, and the reasoning is on the page so you can check it.6 ⟳
  • Pathology fellowship recruitment is being reformed toward a unified match, with four subspecialties committed for 2026–27; pediatric pathology is not among them, and 85% of residents report preferring a later, unified timeline.34

Why people choose it / why people leave

Why choose it: work that gives families an answer nobody else can give them · placental pathology, which is high-volume, clinically consequential, and genuinely under-recognized · pediatric tumors, a biologically distinct category with their own classification and protocols · heavy multidisciplinary engagement for a diagnostic specialty · few people entering the field, so jobs exist and you have leverage · an accessible residency and an undersubscribed fellowship · one year of fellowship.

Why leave or avoid it: the emotional load of infant and fetal autopsy, which is genuinely not for everyone · compensation below the parent specialty · a job map limited to children's hospitals · professional isolation in departments with one or two pediatric pathologists · autopsy work that is time-consuming and largely unbillable · medicolegal exposure in placental and non-accidental injury cases.

Best fit if: you can hold the worst outcomes in medicine steadily and find meaning in explaining them · you are interested in development, genetics, and congenital disease · you want a diagnostic career with real clinical and family contact · you can be flexible about geography · you want a short fellowship into a field that needs you.

Not for you if: the autopsy content would erode you, which is worth testing on a rotation rather than reasoning about · you need geographic freedom · you want pathology's income ceiling · professional isolation would wear on you.

The FLI angle — Pediatric pathology for first-gen, low-income & immigrant students

Where it fits FLI realities well:

  • Both doors are open. Pathology takes 19.6% DO and 34.7% IMG of the positions it fills in the Main Match (2026), among the most accessible specialties in medicine, and this fellowship is undersubscribed.8 There is no research arms race at either gate.
  • PSLF fits about as well as it can. Children's hospitals and academic medical centers are nonprofit qualifying employers, the field has essentially no private-employer alternative, and four residency years plus a fellowship year count toward the 120 payments. Where PSLF and pay diverge in dermatopathology and hematopathology, here they point the same way. What it offsets is bounded, though: PSLF discharges the federal balance and nothing else, and since July 2026 the federal system stops lending at $200,000. Medical school costs more than that at almost every school, so a reader starting now graduates with a private loan sitting above the federal one, no program forgives it, and its payment is set by the balance rather than by income, so it does not fall when your salary does.
  • Scarcity is leverage. A field whose fellowship positions go unfilled, concentrated at institutions that need it, is a genuinely favorable negotiating position for a new attending without a professional network.5
  • The lifestyle is sustainable, weekday and low-call, which matters alongside family responsibilities.

Risks to name honestly:

  • The pay is below pathology, which is already below most of medicine. How far below is not published, which is its own problem when you are trying to model a loan against it.6 The PSLF fit is the main thing working in your favor on the federal half of the debt, and because the size of the pay gap is unknown, modeling the forgiveness concretely, against the federal balance only, matters more than it would in a field with a published number.
  • Geography is the binding constraint, and it is often the thing FLI students most want to control. The jobs are at tertiary children's hospitals. If living near family in a specific place is non-negotiable, this field probably cannot accommodate it, and general surgical pathology can.
  • The emotional content is a serious consideration, not a squeamishness question. Anyone carrying significant outside stress should think honestly about adding this particular load, and should test it on a rotation before committing.
  • The compensation data is thin, so you will negotiate without a reliable benchmark. Ask academic pathology departments directly about their scales.

Bottom line for FLI: an open residency, an undersubscribed fellowship, a field that needs people, and a PSLF fit strong enough to do real work against a below-average salary on the federal part of the loan. What you pay is a narrow map and a genuinely heavy subject. If you can carry the second and accept the first, this is a reachable career doing work that matters to families more than almost anything else in the Sky.

Fun facts

  • The placenta is the only organ routinely examined after it has finished its job, and it explains outcomes that nothing else can.
  • Pediatric autopsy has held its value where adult autopsy has not. In children the examination still frequently produces a diagnosis no other test would have found, including genetic and metabolic conditions with implications for future pregnancies.
  • Childhood tumors are their own biology. Wilms tumor, neuroblastoma, hepatoblastoma, and rhabdomyosarcoma are classified and risk-stratified through protocols that have little in common with adult oncology.
  • Placental pathology has become a courtroom document, because it can establish whether a neonatal brain injury occurred before labor rather than during it.
  • It is one of the few fellowships whose own society reports that positions go unfilled year after year, which makes it one of the easiest good jobs in pathology to reach.5
  • Most children's hospitals employ one or two pediatric pathologists, so the professional community is national rather than down the corridor.

Sources

Footnotes

  1. Fellowship structure and clinical scope of pediatric pathology — placental and perinatal pathology, fetal and pediatric autopsy, pediatric tumors, congenital and metabolic disease, gastrointestinal and hepatic biopsy, sudden unexpected infant death, and non-accidental injury casework. Composite of published US pediatric pathology fellowship curricula and the ACGME subspecialty description. (accessed 2026). ↩ ↩2

  2. Board structure. American Board of Pathology — Subspecialty Certification: ABPath issues subspecialty certificates in blood banking/transfusion medicine, chemical pathology, clinical informatics, cytopathology, dermatopathology, forensic pathology, hematopathology, medical microbiology, molecular genetic pathology, neuropathology, and pediatric pathology; candidates with ABPath primary certification may qualify after one or two years of ACGME-accredited fellowship training. Subspecialty exams scheduled September 8–28, 2026. https://abpath.org/subspecialty-certification/ (accessed 2026). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  3. Fellowship match reform. College of American Pathologists — "CAP Supports Fellowship Match Effort, Reinforces Workforce Commitment": hematopathology, molecular genetic pathology, forensic pathology, and bone and soft tissue pathology committed to a match for the 2026–27 academic year, with other eligible subspecialties encouraged to join the 2027 cycle placing fellows for 2028–29. Pediatric pathology is not among the committed four. https://newsroom.cap.org/latest-news/cap-supports-fellowship-match-effort--reinforces-workforce-commitment/s/97304fd5-c16c-459d-a2ce-acb517b0bd06 ⟳ ↩ ↩2

  4. The recruitment-timing problem. The Pathologist, "Fixing Fellowship Fatigue" (October 2025) — pathology fellowship recruitment has shifted earlier in residency, often requiring residents to commit before experiencing many subspecialty areas; 85% of residents prefer a later, unified timeline. https://thepathologist.com/issues/2025/articles/october/fixing-fellowship-fatigue/ ⟳ ↩ ↩2

  5. Fellowship recruitment and the field's own account of its numbers. Singh V, Eldin K, Timmons C, Bush J, Rabah R, "Pediatric Pathology Fellowship Recruitment — Report of a Survey Conducted by the Fellowship Committee of the Society for Pediatric Pathology," Pediatric and Developmental Pathology 21(3):279–284 (2018), doi:10.1177/1093526617722905, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28840791/. A three-part survey of 175 pathology residents, 29 fellows and recent graduates, and 19 training programs. Its own framing: "many pediatric pathology fellowship positions remain unfilled in North America," and its conclusion is that "existing PP fellowship positions likely will continue to exceed demand for subspecialty training." Nearly half of the resident respondents had discounted the subspecialty without prior exposure to it. Added 2026-08-17: the competitiveness section, the compensation section's scarcity paragraph, the FLI leverage bullet and a fun fact all rested on "a documented workforce shortage" with no citation attached anywhere on the page, seven times over. This is the documentation for the unfilled-positions half. No fill-rate figure exists for this fellowship, because it does not run through a match, and no study measures the number of practicing pediatric pathologists against the number of posts, so the shortage itself is the field's characterization and the page now says so. ⟳ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. Compensation. Parent field, from the surveys directly: Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2026 (2025 earnings) gives pathology $394,000; Doximity 2025 Physician Compensation Report (2024 earnings, ~37,000 US physicians) gives $373,384, https://www.doximity.com/reports/physician-compensation-report/2025 . Both report means rather than medians. The Medscape report is paywalled and returns HTTP 402, so its table is read through relays rather than at the primary. Neither survey breaks pathology into subspecialties, and neither does the College of American Pathologists' own practice characteristics survey. Pediatric pathology also sits outside the American Board of Pediatrics frame that every national pediatric compensation dataset is built on, because it certifies through the American Board of Pathology, so it is absent from those too. Correction 2026-08-13: this page previously carried a pediatric pathology average near $313,000, an overall pathologist figure of ~$366,000, and a percentile ladder for general pathology ($320k 25th, $390k median, $450k 75th, $500k–$550k for partners and top subspecialists). The pediatric figure came from Salary.com through a compilation site; the $366,000 came from the same compilation and was $28,000 below what Medscape itself published; the percentile ladder was carried from the pathology profile on this site with no publisher named on this page. All of it is removed rather than downgraded, under this site's compensation sourcing standard, which treats an excluded aggregator's number as evidence of nothing at all. No replacement figure for pediatric pathology exists at any tier. ⟳ On Salary.com: its CompAnalyst benchmark is HR-reported employer survey data blended with job-posting data, not a physician panel. It is base-weighted and so runs low against total-compensation surveys, and it is used here for percentile structure rather than for levels. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. The pediatric-subspecialty pay pattern. Pediatric anesthesiology ~$480,000 against general anesthesiology ~$535,000–$550,000; pediatric cardiology ~$350,000–$380,000, well below the adult equivalent; pediatric urology concentrated in academic children's-hospital employment at the low end of urology's distribution. The mechanism in each case is payer mix and hospital employment rather than the patients. See the pediatric anesthesiology, pediatric cardiology and pediatric urology profiles on this site. Those are cross-references rather than sources, and the compensation survey behind each figure is cited on the page the figure comes from. ⟳ ↩

  8. Parent-field figures for pathology. Compensation, and the daytime/weekday schedule with little traditional call: typical comp ~$370k–$390k with 25th percentile ~$320k, median ~$390k, 75th ~$450k, partners and top subspecialists $500k–$550k+, carried from the pathology profile on this site, which is a cross-reference rather than a source; the underlying survey is cited there. Burnout 41%, among the lowest of any specialty: Medscape Physician Burnout & Depression Report 2024 (n=9,226, fielded July–October 2023), against an all-physician average of 49%. That report is paywalled and returns HTTP 402, so its specialty rows are read through two independent relays that agree on the edition, the instrument and every row: 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, 44%: AAMC, "Women are changing the face of medicine in America" (2022 data), https://www.aamc.org/news/women-are-changing-face-medicine-america. The 38.7% that used to sit here is AAMC's figure for physicians of every specialty combined (2024 data, AAMC, 2025 Key Findings, https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/data/2025-key-findings), and it understates pathology by six points. Women in training, pathology (AP/CP) residents 54.7% and pediatric pathology fellows 55.6% in academic year 2024-25: ACGME, Data Resource Book, Academic Year 2024-2025, Table C.21, https://www.acgme.org/globalassets/pfassets/publicationsbooks/2024-2025_acgme_databook_document.pdf. Correction 2026-08-13: this page previously said no pediatric-pathology-specific figure existed and carried the parent field at ~38% practicing with residents "roughly half," in the Quick dashboard and in Who's in the field. A fellowship figure exists, the practicing figure was the all-physician one, and "roughly half" was a little low. 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 — pathology offered 636 positions and filled 634 (99.7%), of which 124 went to DO applicants (19.6%) and 220 to international graduates (34.7%). The denominator is positions filled. Corrected 2026-08-17: the page carried ~17% DO and ~36% IMG in the Quick dashboard, in Who's in the field and in the FLI section, a pair from an earlier Match cycle that this footnote diagnosed without the body ever changing. All three now carry the 2026 pair with its denominator named. The relay count in the burnout sentence above also said three and named two; it now says two. ⟳ A second, freely readable instrument: the AMA's 2025 Organizational Biopsy (~19,000 physicians, 38 states) puts Pathology at 28.3% against a 41.9% all-physician average, https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/physician-health/these-9-physician-specialties-report-highest-burnout-rates. It is primary where Medscape reaches this page through relays, and its baseline sits seven points below Medscape's 49% — the two never belong in the same sentence, and a cross-specialty rank must name which survey it comes from. Corrected 2026-08-17: the Quick dashboard and the Wellbeing section carried only the relayed Medscape figure, thirteen points above AMA's, while this footnote declared AMA primary. Both now lead with AMA's 28.3% and keep Medscape as a second instrument in its own sentence. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

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