Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine — 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: PRM, pediatric physiatry, pediatric rehab. A 24-month ACGME-accredited fellowship entered after a PM&R residency. Organ system: the developing body, and every condition that changes how a child moves, communicates, or grows up.

Subspecialty fellowship of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation.

The 30-second version

Pediatric rehabilitation medicine is the only PM&R subspecialty that asks for two years of fellowship, and the one survey of its own pay puts it below the general practice of the parent specialty. The work is the long care of children with cerebral palsy, spina bifida, muscular dystrophy, brachial plexus injury, limb deficiency, acquired brain and spinal cord injury, and the medical complexity that follows any of them. The physician meets a child at diagnosis or injury and stays with the family through growth, school, surgery, puberty, and the handoff to adult medicine two decades later, treating a moving target, because a body that is still growing changes what the same diagnosis means every year. Two features make this field unusual in the data rather than in the brochure. It is the only one of PM&R's three rehabilitation-track subspecialties with a published compensation survey of its own, and that survey puts it below the parent field. And it is roughly two-thirds women in a specialty that is under 40% women, with a documented pay gap inside its own ranks. The trade at the center: the longest fellowship in PM&R, for the smallest of its major subspecialties, doing work almost nobody else is trained to do.

Quick dashboard (details and sources below)
Training after med school 6 years (4 yr PM&R residency + 2 yr PRM fellowship)
Total from college start ~14 years (4 undergrad + 4 med school + 4 residency + 2 fellowship)
Training chain Med school (4) → PM&R (4) → 24-month ACGME PRM fellowship → ABPMR PRM certificate
Competitiveness Low. 29 positions offered and 14 filled (48.3%) in the 2026 NRMP match; the smallest of PM&R's major subspecialties at 2.5% of ABPMR diplomates on data through 2019 ⟳
Typical full-time pay The field's own 2017 survey found ~$224,000–$245,000, below general PM&R ⟳
Pay vs. parent (general PM&R) Below, and below inpatient rehabilitation, after two extra years of training ⟳
Lifestyle Children's hospital clinic and inpatient rehabilitation, daytime, limited call ⟳
Burnout No subspecialty figure, and no PM&R row on either survey. This page reads the only published proxy, general pediatrics at 51% (Medscape 2024, 49% average), and expects this field below it on practice pattern rather than on measurement ⟳
% women ~66% in the field's own 2017 survey; 84.6% of current fellows, against 36.8% of PM&R residents ⟳
DO / IMG accessibility Excellent. PM&R is among the most DO-friendly fields (~38–39% DO, ~6–8% IMG of matched positions) ⟳

What they actually do

Cerebral palsy is the field's anchor diagnosis, and managing it is a decades-long project rather than a treatment. Tone management runs through oral medication, botulinum toxin and phenol chemodenervation, serial casting, and intrathecal baclofen pumps. Alongside it sits hip surveillance, scoliosis monitoring, orthotic prescription, gait analysis, and the coordination of orthopedic surgery timed to growth.

Spina bifida care is comprehensive and lifelong in the same way spinal cord injury care is, with the added variable of development. Neurogenic bladder and bowel, shunt function, tethered cord, orthopedic deformity, latex allergy, and mobility all move as the child grows.

Neuromuscular disease has changed more than any other part of this practice in the last decade. Spinal muscular atrophy and Duchenne muscular dystrophy now have disease-modifying therapy, and children who once died young are living into adulthood with substantial support needs. The rehabilitation physician manages contracture, scoliosis, respiratory decline, and function across a trajectory the field is still learning.

Acquired injury fills the inpatient service: traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, stroke in children, brain tumor and its treatment effects, and the rehabilitation that follows critical illness.

Brachial plexus birth injury, limb deficiency and prosthetic management, burns, and concussion round out the outpatient clinics, and each tends to run as its own multidisciplinary program.

Transition to adult care is a defined part of the job and a widely acknowledged failure point in the health system. Adult clinicians are frequently unfamiliar with conditions like spina bifida and cerebral palsy in adulthood, and pediatric physiatrists spend real effort trying to land that handoff well.

Representative work: cerebral palsy tone and function management · botulinum toxin and phenol chemodenervation · intrathecal baclofen pump management · serial casting · spina bifida multidisciplinary care · neuromuscular disease management including SMA and Duchenne · inpatient rehabilitation after pediatric brain and spinal cord injury · brachial plexus birth injury · limb deficiency and prosthetic prescription · electrodiagnosis in children · wheelchair, orthotic and assistive technology prescription · school and accommodation advocacy · transition to adult care.1

A day in the life: mostly a children's hospital outpatient practice, organized into multidisciplinary clinics that run with orthopedics, neurology, orthotists, therapists, and social work in the same room. Procedure sessions for chemodenervation and pump refills are usually blocked separately, often under sedation. The inpatient rehabilitation service is smaller than the adult equivalent and heavily weighted toward family education, because the family is the care team once the child goes home.

On call: limited. The acute events are managed by pediatric critical care, neurosurgery, and trauma, and the rehabilitation service inherits the patient afterward.

The training path & time to completion

Medical school (4 yrs) → PM&R residency (PGY-1 intern year + 3 years) → 24-month ACGME-accredited pediatric rehabilitation medicine fellowship → ABPMR subspecialty certification.12

  • The fellowship is two years, and that is the single most important structural fact about this field. Every other PM&R subspecialty fellowship runs 12 months. Pediatric rehabilitation asks for twice that, and the pay data below does not reward it.23
  • Three routes reach the certificate. ABPMR accepts a PM&R residency followed by the two-year PRM fellowship; a combined PM&R and pediatrics training program; or consecutive ACGME-accredited residencies in both PM&R and pediatrics that include at least six months of pediatric rehabilitation medicine training.2
  • It matches through the NRMP, in the Rehabilitation Medicine Match alongside brain injury medicine and cancer rehabilitation.4 Spinal cord injury medicine runs through the NRMP too, but in a separate match on an earlier calendar: for the 2026 appointment year it opened 6 August and matched 22 October, while the Rehabilitation Medicine Match opened 17 September and matched 17 December.5 If you are weighing the two, check both sets of dates early, because the earlier one closes while the later one is still open. ⟳
  • The programs are small. Roughly two dozen ACGME-accredited fellowships exist, and the typical program takes one or two fellows a year, so the national output is small enough that people in the field know each other.1 ⟳
  • Total from the start of college: about 14 years, the longest route in PM&R.

How competitive is it?

This is the smallest and least subscribed of PM&R's major subspecialties.

  • The match table shows how far under-subscribed it is. For the 2026 appointment year, 23 programs offered 29 positions and filled 14, or 48.3%, against 15 applicants. Thirteen of the 23 programs finished with at least one empty seat, and 14 of the 15 applicants matched.5 ⟳
  • And it is not a one-year dip. Fill ran 85.7% for the 2022 appointment year and has sat at or below half every year since: 50.0%, 44.4%, 46.4%, then 48.3%.5 ⟳
  • Pediatric rehabilitation medicine is held by 2.5% of ABPMR diplomates, on data through 2019, the smallest of the major subspecialties: pain medicine 15.5%, sports medicine 6.6%, brain injury medicine 4.8%, spinal cord injury medicine 4.2%, then PRM, with neuromuscular medicine last at 0.7%.3 ⟳
  • Only 31.2% of ABPMR diplomates hold any subspecialty certificate, so subspecialization is a minority path to begin with.3 ⟳
  • New certificates fell after the practice pathway closed, in PRM as across PM&R's subspecialties.3 ⟳
  • The field has published a call for action about its own workforce, citing a relative decline in training participants against a rising prevalence of childhood disability, and calling for a commission to address it.6 The specific counts sit in the full paper rather than the abstract, so treat the direction as documented and the magnitude as unverified here. ⟳
  • The upstream residency is moderately competitive and among the most DO-accessible fields in medicine.7

The honest read. Availability is not the constraint. Programs would take more applicants than they get, and the field says so in print. The constraint is that two years of fellowship for lower pay is a hard sell against a 12-month pain fellowship from the same residency.

Board: ABPMR subspecialty certification in pediatric rehabilitation medicine, requiring 24 months of ACGME-accredited fellowship or one of the two combined-training routes.2

Compensation — the robust version

Unusually for a subspecialty this small, the field surveyed itself, and the number is the most useful and least flattering fact in this profile.

The field's own survey. A 2017 survey of US pediatric physiatrists, published in Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in 2020, reached 235 of 307 physicians for a 76.5% response rate, with 198 reporting both salary and gender. Mean full-time salary was $244,798 ± $52,906 for men and $224,497 ± $60,756 for women.8 ⟳

Set that against the parent field. General PM&R runs roughly $360,000–$390,000 nationally, forking between inpatient rehabilitation at roughly $260,000–$370,000 and interventional pain and spine at roughly $400,000–$700,000 and above.7 The pediatric survey figures sit below the bottom of the inpatient range, and they are 2017 dollars, so a fair comparison should inflate them forward before drawing the gap. Even adjusted generously, the ordering holds: this subspecialty pays less than the general practice of its parent, after two additional years of training. ⟳

Why. The revenue mechanism is the whole explanation. Pediatric rehabilitation is cognitive, multidisciplinary, and time-intensive, with a payer mix weighted toward Medicaid, and the procedures it does own, chemodenervation and pump management, are low-volume and often require sedation and an anesthesia team. Nothing in the practice generates the throughput that interventional pain does. Children's hospitals also tend to pay across the board below adult systems.

The gap inside the field. The same survey found an average annual difference of $20,311 in favor of men, and the authors report that the predictors that ordinarily explain men's salaries did not account for the variation among women, which they read as evidence for the influence of bias and institutional culture. Women were more likely to work part-time and had higher odds of holding no leadership role.8 In a field that is about two-thirds women, this is a structural finding rather than a footnote, and any woman considering the specialty should read the paper directly.

Limited-data caveat: the 2017 survey is the best field-specific source located and it is now dated. No current MGMA, Doximity, or Medscape line isolates pediatric rehabilitation medicine. Benchmark against children's hospital academic scales rather than against general PM&R, and ask directly about the split between clinical, administrative, and program-director time, which carries real stipend value here. ⟳

Lifestyle

  • Among the more controllable practices in medicine, inheriting PM&R's defining advantage of daytime work with limited call.7
  • Clinic-dominant and scheduled, built around multidisciplinary clinic days and blocked procedure sessions.
  • The inpatient service is small relative to adult rehabilitation, and weighted toward family education.
  • Call is limited, since acute events are managed elsewhere before rehabilitation is involved.
  • Children's hospitals set the working culture, which generally means academic affiliation, teaching, and salaried employment rather than private practice.
  • Geographic flexibility is limited. The jobs sit at children's hospitals and pediatric specialty centers, which is a much narrower map than general PM&R.
  • The documentation load is heavy, because school letters, equipment justifications, and insurance appeals are a standing part of the practice.

Lifestyle rating: 4/5. Daytime, predictable, and low-call, deducted for a narrow job map and a paperwork burden the schedule does not show.

Wellbeing — the part to take seriously

No PRM-specific wellbeing data was located, so the figure has to come from a parent, and the two candidates are in very different evidentiary shape. Only one of them has a published row: general pediatrics, which Medscape's 2024 report puts at 51%, just above that survey's own 49% all-physician average. PM&R has no row on either instrument. The "low-to-mid 40s%" this page and the parent profile have carried is a hedged reading across several years rather than a figure lifted from a named table, and AMA's 2025 Organizational Biopsy, the free primary survey this site ranks from where it reaches, has no PM&R row and no pediatrics row, so Medscape is the only instrument with anything to say about either parent.7 ⟳

So this page reads general pediatrics as the number and the PM&R practice pattern as the correction to it. The patients, the clinic, the children's-hospital employer and the Medicaid-weighted payer mix are pediatric, which is what the 51% is measuring. What PM&R contributes is the shape of the day rather than a rival figure: outpatient, largely non-procedural, almost no nights and very little acute call, and those are the features that keep physiatry off the high-burnout lists in the years anyone has read it. Expect this field to sit under general pediatrics for that reason, and treat the expectation as a reading of how the work is structured rather than as a measurement, because no survey has measured it. ⟳

The length of the relationship defines the emotional shape of this work. A pediatric physiatrist may follow one child from an infant diagnosis to a twenty-one-year-old's transition clinic, which is a depth of continuity few specialties offer and which also means being present for every hard year in between.

Progressive disease is part of the caseload and it is the hardest part. In Duchenne muscular dystrophy and in the severe end of the neuromuscular spectrum, the physician manages a decline while remaining the family's source of practical hope, and does it for years. The recent arrival of disease-modifying therapy in spinal muscular atrophy has changed some of these trajectories and created new uncertainty about what the coming decades look like.

The family is the unit of care, which is a satisfaction and a load. Parents of children with significant disability carry an enormous amount, and the physiatrist is often the one clinician who sees the whole picture and gets told the truth about how the household is coping.

The system-fighting is constant. Insurance denials for wheelchairs and orthotics, school districts declining accommodations, Medicaid waiver waitlists, and the shortage of adult clinicians willing to take these patients at transition. It is uncompensated, it consumes real hours, and practitioners describe it as both the most exhausting and the most obviously worthwhile part of the job.

The counterweight is function gained during growth. A child who walks into clinic having gained a skill is a category of outcome adult rehabilitation rarely gets, because development is working alongside the treatment rather than against it.

Who's in the field (demographics)

This is one of the few subspecialties this small with field-specific demographic data, and it inverts the parent field.

  • Women: about 66% of respondents in the field's own 2017 survey, 130 of the 198 physicians analyzed.8 Current fellows run higher again, at 84.6% in AY2024-25, which counts trainees rather than the practicing physicians the survey reached. Parent PM&R residents are 36.8% women, and AAMC publishes no practicing figure for PM&R at all.7 ⟳
  • Certification prevalence: 2.5% of ABPMR diplomates, the smallest of the major PM&R subspecialties.3 ⟳
  • A documented internal pay gap: $20,311 per year on average in favor of men, not explained by the usual predictors.8 ⟳
  • DO: parent PM&R is among the most DO-friendly fields in medicine at roughly 38–39% of matched positions.7 ⟳
  • IMG: roughly 6–8% of matched PM&R positions.7 ⟳
  • Underrepresented in medicine: no subspecialty figure located. Childhood disability prevalence and access to specialist rehabilitation both track income and insurance closely, and a Medicaid-weighted payer mix is part of why this field pays what it does. ⟳

Culture, personality & the online stereotypes

Who gravitates here: PM&R residents who wanted pediatrics, and pediatricians who found rehabilitation. The field draws people who like multidisciplinary teams, who are comfortable with families rather than patients alone, who tolerate slow-moving outcomes measured across years, and who are willing to fight institutions on a patient's behalf. It has a strong academic and children's-hospital character. 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:

  • "Two years of fellowship to earn less." Accurate on both halves, and the field knows it.
  • "The nicest people in PM&R." A durable reputation, usually attributed to the multidisciplinary and family-facing nature of the work.
  • "It is a women's specialty." Roughly two-thirds women is real, and the phrase is more often used to explain away the pay than to describe the workforce.
  • "You are a case manager with a medical degree." Said dismissively about the advocacy and paperwork load, and the field's answer is that a wheelchair that fits changes a child's decade.

What people say online (synthesized and paraphrased, not quotes): across trainee and physician forums, pediatric rehabilitation reads as the field people admire and talk themselves out of. The dominant recurring theme is the arithmetic of two fellowship years against lower pay, discussed openly and without much disagreement. A second thread is how much people who do it like it, described in warmer terms than almost any other subspecialty in the parent field. A third is the children's-hospital job market, described as thin, geographically fixed, and salaried. A fourth is transition to adult care, raised repeatedly as a systemic failure that practitioners feel personally. The tone is affectionate and slightly resigned about the economics.

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

  • ABPMR requires 24 months of ACGME-accredited fellowship for PRM examination eligibility, or one of two combined PM&R and pediatrics training routes.2
  • ABPMR certification data through 2019 records pediatric rehabilitation medicine at 2.5% of diplomates, the smallest of the major subspecialties.3
  • A 2023 call for action in the Journal of Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine names a relative decline in participants in PRM training against a rising prevalence of children with disabilities, and asks for a commission to address training and care needs.6

Why people choose it / why people leave

Why choose it: relationships that run for two decades with the same child and family · function gained during growth, an outcome adult rehabilitation rarely sees · genuine multidisciplinary practice rather than the word · a real ABPMR subspecialty board · conditions almost nobody else is trained to manage well · one of the most DO-accessible routes in medicine · a controllable daytime schedule · a field small enough to know everyone in it.

Why leave or avoid it: two years of fellowship for pay below the parent field's general practice · a narrow job map fixed to children's hospitals · a documented internal pay gap for women · progressive disease in part of the caseload · constant system-fighting for equipment, schooling, and coverage · a transition-to-adult-care problem the specialty cannot solve alone · a subspecialty held by 2.5% of physiatrists, so local professional community is thin.

Best fit if: you want pediatrics and rehabilitation together · long relationships and slow outcomes appeal to you · you work well with families and with large teams · you are willing to advocate against institutions routinely · you are content on an academic children's-hospital salary.

Not for you if: you need PM&R's income ceiling, which is in interventional pain · you want geographic freedom · two extra years of training must produce a financial return · progressive childhood disease would be more than you want to carry.

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

Where it fits FLI realities well:

  • PM&R is among the most accessible specialties in medicine, at roughly 38–39% DO and 6–8% IMG of matched positions, and this fellowship is undersubscribed enough that programs are asking for applicants in print.67 The door is genuinely open.
  • PSLF fits this field almost perfectly. The jobs are at children's hospitals and academic centers, which are overwhelmingly nonprofit, and the salaried employment model makes qualifying employment straightforward. For a large debt balance, ten years of qualifying payments on this salary is a materially different calculation than the headline number suggests.
  • The patients are disproportionately the families the system serves worst. Medicaid weighting, equipment denials, and waiver waitlists are the daily texture of this practice, and a physician who has navigated public systems personally understands the fight in a way that is difficult to teach.
  • The lifestyle is genuinely sustainable, daytime and low-call, which matters when supporting family alongside a career.

Risks to name honestly:

  • The arithmetic is worse here than anywhere else in PM&R, and it should be modeled explicitly. Two additional years at a fellow's salary, followed by a practice that the field's own survey puts below general PM&R, against a 12-month pain fellowship from the same residency leading to $400,000 and above.78 For someone carrying large debt without family support, that difference compounds. Run the numbers before falling in love with the work.
  • The pay data is dated and thin. A 2017 survey is the best field-specific source available. Get current offers in writing and benchmark against children's hospital scales rather than general PM&R.
  • If you are a woman, read the gender-gap paper before negotiating. A documented $20,311 average gap unexplained by the usual predictors, with higher odds of holding no leadership role, is information worth having in advance.8
  • Geography is constrained. The jobs are where children's hospitals are. If living in a specific place near family is non-negotiable, general PM&R preserves that and this does not.

Bottom line for FLI: an open door, work that matters obviously and daily, a near-perfect PSLF profile, and the worst training-to-pay ratio in its parent specialty. The honest version is that this field asks you to buy something with two years and a salary gap. Some people find it plainly worth the price. Decide that with the numbers in front of you rather than after the fellowship.

Fun facts

  • It asks for two years of fellowship when every other PM&R subspecialty asks for one, and it is the rare case where the extra year is followed by less pay than the parent field's general practice.8
  • It is roughly two-thirds women in a parent specialty that is under 40% women, one of the sharpest demographic inversions between a field and its subspecialty.78
  • It is one of the few subspecialties this small to have surveyed its own compensation, and the survey documented a $20,311 gender gap that the usual predictors failed to explain.8
  • Three separate routes reach the same certificate, including consecutive residencies in both PM&R and pediatrics.2
  • It and its sibling spinal cord injury medicine both match through the NRMP, in separate matches whose match days fall about two months apart.5
  • It is held by 2.5% of physiatrists, the smallest major subspecialty in a specialty where only 31.2% hold any subspecialty certificate at all.3
  • The field published a formal call for action about its own shrinking pipeline in 2023, which is a rare thing for a specialty to do about itself in print.6

Sources

Footnotes

  1. Clinical scope, fellowship structure, and program size. Composite of published US pediatric rehabilitation medicine fellowship curricula, which consistently describe a two-year ACGME-accredited program taking one to two fellows per year and covering cerebral palsy, spina bifida, neuromuscular disease, acquired brain and spinal cord injury, brachial plexus injury, limb deficiency, burns, concussion, and neuro-oncology rehabilitation, with chemodenervation, intrathecal baclofen management, and electrodiagnosis as the procedural core. Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (https://www.chop.edu/pediatric-fellowships/pediatric-rehabilitation-medicine-fellowship), Children's Mercy Kansas City (https://www.childrensmercy.org/professional-education/training-programs/fellowship/pediatric-rehabilitation-medicine/), Children's National Hospital (https://www.childrensnational.org/for-healthcare-professionals/healthcare-education/graduate-medical-education/residencies-and-fellowships/rehabilitation-medicine), and Baylor College of Medicine (https://www.bcm.edu/departments/physical-medicine-and-rehabilitation/education/pediatric-rehabilitation-fellowship/curriculum), all accessed 2026. The national program count is an approximate composite from program listings rather than a figure published by ACGME, and should be verified against the ACGME program directory before quoting. ⟳ ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Certification requirements. American Board of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation — Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine: eligibility requires two years of ACGME-accredited PRM fellowship after PM&R residency, or a combined PM&R and pediatrics training program, or successful completion of consecutive ACGME-accredited residency programs in both PM&R and pediatrics including at least six months of pediatric rehabilitation medicine training; candidates must be ABPMR diplomates in good standing holding an unrestricted license. https://www.abpmr.org/subspecialties/prm (accessed 2026). ⟳ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  3. Subspecialty prevalence and trends. American Board of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, "Current Status and Trends in Subspecialty Certification in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation," data through December 31, 2019 — 31.2% of ABPMR diplomates held a subspecialty certificate; pain medicine 15.5%, sports medicine 6.6%, brain injury medicine 4.8%, spinal cord injury medicine 4.2%, pediatric rehabilitation medicine 2.5%, neuromuscular medicine 0.7%; the average number of new certificates added annually was higher before temporary practice-track eligibility ended than after; overall recertification 73.4%, higher among fellowship-trained candidates. https://www.abpmr.org/Research/Detail/published-subspecialty-certification-trends Corrected 2026-08-17: three places on this page called pediatric rehabilitation medicine the smallest PM&R subspecialty outright, and the Quick dashboard named the metric while getting it wrong on that metric. Two ABPMR subspecialties sit below it, neuromuscular medicine at 0.7% and hospice and palliative medicine at 0.5%. All three now carry the qualifier the rest of the page already used, "of the major subspecialties." ACGME's Data Resource Book AY2024-25 agrees on the program side: neuromuscular medicine runs 1 program and 0 active fellows under PM&R against pediatric rehabilitation medicine's 24 programs and 26 fellows. ⟳ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  4. Match participation. National Resident Matching Program, Rehabilitation Medicine Fellowship Match — the participating subspecialties are brain injury medicine, cancer rehabilitation, and pediatric rehabilitation medicine. https://www.nrmp.org/fellowship-applicants/participating-fellowships/rehabilitation-medicine-match-fellowship/ (accessed 2026). ⟳ ↩

  5. Match data and match calendars. National Resident Matching Program, Results and Data: Specialties Matching Service 2026 Appointment Year, February 2026, Table 1A and Figure 2 — pediatric rehabilitation medicine: 23 programs, 29 positions offered, 14 filled (48.3%), 15 applicants of whom 14 matched, 13 programs left with at least one unfilled position. Fill by appointment year: 85.7% (2022), 50.0% (2023), 44.4% (2024), 46.4% (2025), 48.3% (2026). Spinal cord injury medicine appears in the same Table 1A with 22 programs, 33 positions offered, 22 filled (66.7%), 23 applicants, and 9 programs left with at least one unfilled position, and Figure 2 lists it as its own match, opening 6 August 2025 with a match day of 22 October 2025, against 17 September and 17 December 2025 for the Rehabilitation Medicine Match. https://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/SMS_Results_and_Data_Report2026.pdf (2026). Correction, 2026-08-13: this page previously said spinal cord injury medicine does not match through the NRMP and that the two subspecialties use different application systems. Both statements were wrong. Both run through the NRMP Specialties Matching Service, and the real difference is the calendar. ⟳ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. Workforce. Turk MA, Gans BM, Kim H, Alter KE. "A call for action: Increasing the pediatric rehabilitation medicine workforce." Journal of Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine. 2023;16(3):449–455. doi:10.3233/PRM-230044. PMID: 37718879. The abstract describes a relative decline in participants in PRM and other PM&R subspecialty training against an increasing prevalence of children with disabilities, and calls for a commission to address PRM training and care needs; specific counts of applicants, positions, and vacancies sit in the full text rather than the abstract. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37718879/ ⟳ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  7. Parent-field figures: PM&R typical comp ~$360k–$390k nationally, with a documented fork between inpatient rehabilitation at ~$260k–$370k and interventional pain and spine at ~$400k–$700k+; 4 years of training and ~12 years from the start of college; moderate competitiveness filling near 100%; burnout in the low-to-mid 40s%; 36.8% women among residents; ~38–39% DO and ~6–8% IMG of matched positions, among the most DO-friendly fields in medicine; among medicine's most controllable lifestyles. See the PM&R profile on this site for the full version. Sources for the non-pay figures above: fill rate and 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 , which shows all 334 PM&R PGY-2 positions filled, 38.3% of them by DOs and 7.5% by IMGs. Burnout: no freely readable source publishes a PM&R row. Medscape's Physician Burnout & Depression Report 2024 (n=9,226, fielded July–October 2023) is paywalled and returns HTTP 402, and the two relays that carry it publish only its ten highest and ten lowest specialties, neither list containing physical medicine and rehabilitation: Healthgrades Pro (https://resources.healthgrades.com/pro/the-most-and-least-burned-out-physicians-by-specialty), which prints twenty rows, and Advisory Board (https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2024/01/31/physician-burnout), which names six specialties. AMA's 2025 Organizational Biopsy has no PM&R row either, so this site's preference for AMA cannot be applied here. The "low-to-mid 40s%" carried above is the parent field's own hedged reading across several years rather than a figure from a named table, and the parent profile says so. Correction 2026-08-17: this footnote stated that both relays "put PM&R at 46%." Neither publishes a PM&R row, and neither page contains the string 46%. On women: AAMC's published specialty tables carry no PM&R row, so this page no longer quotes a practicing figure for the parent field. The ~38% it used to carry has no primary source behind it, and AAMC's all-physician figure is 38.7%, close enough that the two look to have been confused. ACGME, Data Resource Book, Academic Year 2024-2025, Table C.21, https://www.acgme.org/globalassets/pfassets/publicationsbooks/2024-2025_acgme_databook_document.pdf , puts PM&R residents at 36.8% women and current pediatric rehabilitation medicine fellows at 84.6%, both for academic year 2024-25. That fellow figure counts a different population from the 66% in the 2017 field survey below, and the two should not be read as one trend. Correction 2026-08-13: this page previously put parent PM&R at "~38% women" in the Quick dashboard and in Who's in the field, with no source for it. ⟳ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10

  8. Field-specific compensation and gender data. Houtrow AJ, Pruitt DW, Zigler CK. "Gender-Based Salary Inequities Among Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine Physicians in the United States." Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. 2020;101(5):741–749. doi:10.1016/j.apmr.2019.11.007. PMID: 31874156. An online REDCap survey of US pediatric physiatrists conducted in 2017; 235 of 307 surveys returned for a 76.5% response rate, with 198 reporting both salary and gender, of whom 130 (66%) were women; mean annual full-time salary $244,798 ± $52,906 for men and $224,497 ± $60,756 for women, an average difference of $20,311; women were more likely to work part-time and had higher odds of holding no leadership role, and the authors conclude that the traditional predictors of men's salaries did not explain the variation among women. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31874156/ (publisher version at https://www.archives-pmr.org/article/S0003-9993(19)31442-X/abstract, which returns 403 to automated agents) ⟳ Corrected 2026-08-17: the bold thesis of the 30-second section, and its restatement in Fun facts, both claimed PRM "pays least" of the PM&R subspecialties. That needs a pay figure for brain injury medicine, spinal cord injury medicine, cancer rehabilitation, neuromuscular medicine and hospice and palliative medicine, and this page prints none of them. What the page does demonstrate, from this survey, is that PRM pays less than the general practice of its parent specialty after twice the fellowship, and that it is safe against pain and sports medicine. That is the stronger claim anyway, and it is what both sentences now say. The first half — the only PM&R subspecialty requiring 24 months — is correct and unchanged: ABPMR lists seven subspecialties and PRM's is the only one asking for two years. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9

Researched with AI assistance and reviewed by hand. How this site is made