Pediatric Urology — 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 urology, pediatric urologic surgery. A 2-year ACGME-accredited fellowship entered after a urology residency, not a residency you match into from medical school. Organ systems: the kidneys, ureters, bladder, and genitalia of children, including the ones that formed incorrectly before birth.

Subspecialty fellowship of Urology.

The 30-second version

Pediatric urology was the first urology subspecialty to earn its own board certificate, and it earned that status by being the one whose patients are structurally different rather than merely smaller. Most of what an adult urologist treats is disease acquired over decades: stones, cancer, obstruction from a prostate. Most of what a pediatric urologist treats is anatomy that did not form correctly, discovered on a prenatal ultrasound or in the first minutes of a newborn examination. Hypospadias, posterior urethral valves, vesicoureteral reflux, bladder exstrophy, undescended testes, and the differences of sex development that require a team rather than a surgeon. The reconstructive operations are done on structures a few millimeters across, and the result has to work for eighty years, through puberty, through sexual function, through fertility. A second and growing part of the job is the adult end of it, since children who had major reconstruction now survive into adulthood carrying urinary tracts that no adult urologist was trained to manage. The trade at the center of the field: a genuine ABU certificate, technically distinctive reconstruction, and outcomes measured across a whole life, in exchange for two years of fellowship, an academic job market at the bottom of urology's pay distribution, and a map limited to cities with a children's hospital.

Quick dashboard (details and sources below)
Training after med school 7 years (5 yr urology residency + 2 yr pediatric urology fellowship)
Total from college start ~15 years (4 undergrad + 4 med school + 5 residency + 2 fellowship)
Training chain Med school (4) → Urology (5 yr, early AUA match) → 2 yr ACGME pediatric urology fellowship → ABU pediatric urology certificate
Competitiveness (as a urology fellowship) No published match rate. AUA and Society for Pediatric Urology run the match; results in late June ⟳
Typical full-time pay No survey publishes pediatric urology. Parent urology: Survey · Doximity 2025 $559,474, Medscape 2026 $535,000. These jobs sit at the academic end of the field, which a self-reported member survey (n=52) puts near $455,000 ⟳
Pay vs. parent (general urology) Below, and the mechanism is the academic setting rather than the subspecialty itself ⟳
Lifestyle Elective and largely scheduled, hospital-based, with real call at a children's hospital ⟳
Burnout No subspecialty figure; parent urology is ~49.5%, roughly second-highest of all specialties on the AMA's 2025 survey ⟳
% women No published subspecialty figure; parent urology 11% practicing (AAMC, 2022 data) and ~42% of 2025 matched applicants, and pediatric subspecialties usually run higher ⟳
DO / IMG accessibility Gated behind urology (~7–8% DO, ~3–4% IMG of matches) ⟳

What they actually do

Pediatric urologists manage congenital and acquired disorders of the urinary tract and genitalia in children, from prenatal diagnosis through adolescence, and increasingly beyond it.

Congenital anomalies are the core. Hydronephrosis found on prenatal ultrasound, ureteropelvic junction obstruction, vesicoureteral reflux, posterior urethral valves, duplicated collecting systems, and ureteroceles. Many are followed rather than operated on, and knowing which is much of the specialty's judgment.

Genital reconstruction is the technical signature. Hypospadias repair is the operation the field is known for, performed on an infant urethra with a result that must serve for a lifetime, and it carries a real revision rate that shapes how the field talks about its own outcomes. Alongside it sit chordee correction, undescended testis surgery, and repair of buried penis and other variants.

Bladder function and reconstruction covers neurogenic bladder in spina bifida and spinal cord injury, bladder augmentation, continent catheterizable channels, and bladder exstrophy, which is among the most complex reconstructive problems in surgery and is increasingly regionalized to a handful of centers.

Differences of sex development are managed by multidisciplinary teams with endocrinology, genetics, psychology, and ethics involvement, and the field's own approach here has changed substantially over two decades, moving toward delayed and shared decision-making.

And then the adult tail. Children who had major urinary reconstruction now reach adulthood in large numbers, and transitional urology has become a recognized part of the practice, because an adult urologist has generally never seen an augmented bladder or a Mitrofanoff channel.

Representative procedures: hypospadias repair · orchiopexy for undescended testis · pyeloplasty for UPJ obstruction, increasingly robotic · ureteral reimplantation, open and endoscopic · valve ablation in posterior urethral valves · bladder augmentation and continent catheterizable channel creation · bladder exstrophy closure and reconstruction · nephrectomy and partial nephrectomy for Wilms tumor, in coordination with pediatric oncology · pediatric stone surgery, including ureteroscopy and percutaneous approaches · testicular torsion, which is the field's true emergency.12

A day in the life: hospital-based, at a children's hospital, and shaped by long-term follow-up. Clinic mixes newborn consultations arising from prenatal imaging with post-operative follow-up stretching years, and a substantial share of visits are reassurance rather than intervention, since many congenital findings resolve. Operative days combine short high-volume cases such as orchiopexy and circumcision revision with occasional long reconstructions. Robotic surgery has become a large part of the field's upper tract work.

The multidisciplinary structure is formal: spina bifida clinics, differences-of-sex-development teams, and stone clinics run jointly with nephrology. The parent relationship carries the consultation, because the patient may be a newborn, and the decisions being made are about a body that will grow.

On call: real. Testicular torsion is time-critical and arrives unscheduled, and a children's hospital needs pediatric urology coverage. Against that, the elective practice is scheduled and the overall call burden is lighter than acute surgical fields.

The training path & time to completion

Medical school (4 yrs) → urology residency (5 yrs, entered through the separate early AUA match) → 2-year ACGME-accredited pediatric urology fellowship → ABU subspecialty certification in pediatric urology.123

  • The residency is the hard gate. Urology runs an early match, roughly six weeks ahead of the NRMP, with about 1.3 to 1.5 applicants per position and roughly one in four applicants unmatched.4 The parent urology profile covers it in full.
  • The fellowship is two years, and the structure is prescribed. It comprises 12 months of clinical pediatric urology plus 12 months of clinical and basic research, and completing 24 months of accredited fellowship is what makes a candidate eligible to sit the certifying examination.13
  • This is one of only two urology subspecialties with its own certifying examination, and it was the first. ABU began certifying pediatric urology in 2008 and urogynecology and reconstructive pelvic surgery in 2013; andrology, endourology, and urologic oncology have none, and that shapes how the field is regarded and hired.3
  • The match is run jointly by the AUA and the Society for Pediatric Urology on the AUA's medmatch platform. For the 2027 cycle, registration opened November 13, 2025, applications closed May 6, 2026, rank lists ran May 8 to June 8, and results were released June 26, 2026. Results land in late June, months later in the cycle than most fellowship matches, with fellowships starting July 1.2
  • Total from the start of college: about 15 years, two more than general urology's 13, and the longest path in urology.

The research year is not optional and it is worth thinking about. Half the fellowship is research, which is unusual, and it exists because the certificate requires 24 months. If you want a purely clinical two years, this fellowship does not offer it, and that structure is part of why the field's graduates land in academic practice.

How competitive is it?

No match rate is published. The AUA and SPU run the match and do not release public applicant-to-position statistics, so any competitiveness figure is an estimate.2

What can be said with sources:

  • The filter is the urology residency, and it is one of the harder matches in medicine, running early enough that a failed application leaves limited options in the same cycle.4
  • Programs are small and institutionally constrained. A pediatric urology fellowship requires a children's hospital with the case volume to support two years of training, which limits how many can exist.
  • The two-year commitment with a mandatory research year self-selects. Residents who want to start earning after five years do not apply, and that alone thins the field considerably relative to a one-year fellowship.

The honest read. Attainable for a urology resident who wants it, with genuine competition concentrated at the large children's hospitals that carry exstrophy and complex reconstruction volume. The event that shaped your career was the urology match.

Board: American Board of Urology subspecialty certification in pediatric urology, requiring 24 months of accredited fellowship. One of ABU's two subspecialty examinations, and the first of them.3

Compensation — the robust version

No survey publishes a pediatric-urology figure. Medscape and Doximity both stop at urology. Physician Side Gigs, which surveyed urologists from mid-2023 to mid-2024, states explicitly that its dataset was too small to break out subspecialties.5 Aggregator sites do publish pediatric-urology numbers, and they disagree with each other by more than $120,000, which is what thin data looks like when it is dressed up as a benchmark. This page used to quote their range. It no longer does, because a number that cannot show its data is not evidence of anything, including of what the field actually earns.

The parent anchor. Two national surveys publish urology. Doximity's 2025 report, on 2024 earnings, gives $559,474; Medscape's 2026 report, on 2025 earnings, gives $535,000 and ranks urology 9th of the 29 specialties it covers.4 Both are means rather than medians, and neither breaks out setting. ⟳

Where the setting structure comes from, and what it is worth. The only public source that splits urology by practice setting is a member survey run by Physician Side Gigs, in which 52 full-time urologists reported their own compensation between mid-2023 and mid-2024: average $564,000, median $530,000, range $220,000 to $1.2 million, which brackets the two survey figures closely enough to be usable.5

Cut Self-reported figure
Owner or partner $717,000
Group private practice $622,000
Non-academic hospital $621,000
W-2 employee $500,000
Academic hospital $455,000

Self-reported · 52 urologists · 2023–24. Fifty-two people is a real sample for a ladder like this and a thin one for any single rung, and self-reported pay skews toward high earners, private practice, and partners rather than employees, with people mixing salary, total compensation, and collections. Read the ordering rather than the cells.5 ⟳

On those figures, academic urology sits about 27% below group private practice, and employed urologists about 30% below owners. Pediatric urology sits almost entirely on the academic and hospital-employed side of both splits, because the jobs are at children's hospitals, which are nonprofit institutions that do not offer practice ownership. The subspecialty does not reduce your pay so much as it commits you to the setting that does.

Two structural reasons pediatric surgical care pays less, and they recur across the Sky. Children are disproportionately covered by Medicaid, which reimburses below commercial rates, and pediatric practices are hospital-employed rather than owner-operated, so there is no partnership income. The sibling profiles show the same pattern: pediatric anesthesiology lands flat to slightly below general anesthesiology, and pediatric cardiology sits well below the adult equivalent.6

What partly offsets it. Pediatric urology is a high-volume surgical practice rather than a cognitive one, and robotic pyeloplasty and reconstruction generate substantial work-RVUs. Within academic urology, pediatric urologists are not the low earners; they are simply inside the lower-paying half of the specialty.

What we can honestly tell you: no survey and no member survey isolates pediatric urology, so there is no measured figure for this field. The defensible inference is that it tracks academic and children's-hospital urology, which the only public setting data puts near $455,000, well below the $535,000–$559,474 the two national surveys give for urology as a whole. That is reasoning from the setting rather than a measurement of the subspecialty. Benchmark a real offer against academic urology in the same market and against children's-hospital employment terms. ⟳

Lifestyle

  • Parent urology has moderate hours for a surgical field, roughly 45 to 56 a week with strong schedule control, and pediatric urology broadly inherits that.4
  • The elective practice is highly scheduled, with clinic and operating days fixed well ahead and a large share of clinic being follow-up and surveillance.
  • Call is genuine but not punishing. Testicular torsion is the field's time-critical emergency, and a children's hospital needs coverage. Frequency is manageable, and the burden is lighter than trauma-facing surgery.
  • Hospital employment shapes the week, with defined clinical FTEs, teaching and administrative expectations, and less autonomy than private practice, alongside more predictability and better benefits.
  • The geographic map is narrow. Pediatric urology jobs are at children's hospitals. A metropolitan area without one has no position for you, and this is the single largest practical constraint on the career. General urology can be practiced almost anywhere in the country.

Lifestyle rating: 3/5. Scheduled elective surgery with reasonable hours, deducted for real call and for a job market limited to cities with a tertiary children's hospital.

Wellbeing — the part to take seriously

No pediatric-urology-specific wellbeing data has been published.

The parent number is alarming and needs its survey named. Urology carries roughly 49.5% burnout on the AMA's 2025 survey, second-highest of any specialty behind emergency medicine's 49.8% and against a 41.9% average, which the parent profile identifies as the field's paradox given its moderate hours and good schedule control. The figure and the rank travel together only within one survey, and this pair is the AMA's; Medscape's 2024 report is the other instrument in circulation and it publishes no urology row that this page can read.4 The drivers usually cited are administrative burden, patient volume, and the emotional content of oncology and incontinence work. How much transfers to a pediatric practice is unmeasured, and several of those drivers are weaker here. ⟳

The satisfaction case is about time horizon, and it is strong. A successful hypospadias repair or valve ablation in infancy determines urinary and sexual function for a lifetime. Pediatric surgeons across specialties name that duration as the reason they chose children, and it is a real and repeatable source of meaning that adult surgical practice does not offer in the same form.

The specific weights are three. First, the parents: the consultation is with adults who are frightened, the consent is theirs, and a poor outcome is carried by a family for decades. Second, revision surgery: hypospadias in particular has a meaningful complication and reoperation rate, and a field where you sometimes operate three times on the same child requires a particular relationship with your own results. Third, the ethical load of differences of sex development, where the field's own consensus has shifted, where decisions are irreversible, and where an approach considered standard twenty years ago is now contested. Practitioners describe that as intellectually and morally demanding in a way surgery rarely is.

Career longevity is good. Operative ergonomics are microscope- and robot-assisted rather than physically punishing, hospital employment provides structure, and call is taperable with seniority.

Who's in the field (demographics)

No published pediatric-urology-specific demographic data exists. Inherit urology and read this as directional.

  • Women: no subspecialty figure. Parent urology ran 11% women practicing on AAMC's 2022 data, up from 4% in 2004, against roughly 42% of the 2025 matched applicant cohort, so the pipeline is transforming from a very low base.4 Across medicine, pediatric subspecialties consistently run above their adult counterparts on this, so pediatric urology is plausibly higher than 11%, but that is inference rather than measurement. ⟳
  • DO: roughly 7–8% of urology matches, low.4 No additional fellowship filter is documented. ⟳
  • IMG: roughly 3–4% of urology matches, among the least open in medicine.4 ⟳
  • Underrepresented in medicine: no subspecialty figure. Urology has historically been among the less diverse surgical specialties, and the gap is inherited. Children's hospitals serve a Medicaid-heavy and substantially more diverse population than the workforce treating them. ⟳
  • The parent-field pay gap belongs here. In the same self-reported member survey, women averaged $484,000 against $601,000 for men, unadjusted for setting, seniority, or hours, and on a sample of 52.5 ⟳

Culture, personality & the online stereotypes

Who gravitates here: urology residents who liked reconstruction and liked children, which is a narrower intersection than it sounds. The field rewards patience with long follow-up, comfort with watchful waiting, and a tolerance for operating on structures measured in millimeters where the result is judged over decades. It is academic by construction and team-oriented by necessity. 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 extra years to be paid less." The most common one, and largely accurate on the numbers, since the fellowship is the longest in urology and the destination is the lowest-paying setting in it.5 The field answers with the certificate, the reconstruction, and the time horizon.
  • "Circumcisions and undescended testicles." The volume jab. Both are genuinely common, and both are done by general urologists too. What the fellowship trains for is exstrophy, valves, augmentation, and complex hypospadias, which general urology does not touch.
  • "The only urology subspecialty that counts, because it is the only one with a board." Said half-seriously inside urology, and it was true for five years: pediatric urology got its ABU certificate in 2008 and urogynecology got the second one in 2013.3
  • "The DSD conversation is a minefield." Fair, in the sense that it is genuinely difficult and genuinely contested, and unfair in implying the field avoids it. Multidisciplinary DSD teams exist precisely because the specialty took the criticism seriously.

What people say online (synthesized and paraphrased, not quotes): across trainee and physician forums, pediatric urology reads as a field with a clear identity and a clear cost. The recurring financial thread is that two fellowship years plus an academic salary is the largest opportunity cost in urology, and that a general urologist five years out is comfortably ahead financially and will stay ahead. The recurring counter is the certificate and the case mix, with posters noting that pediatric urology is one of the two subspecialties a hospital can actually verify and that the reconstructive work has no equivalent in adult practice. A third and consistent thread is geography, with warnings that the job list is short, that it is essentially a list of children's hospitals, and that a two-body problem becomes difficult quickly. A fourth, newer thread is transitional urology, discussed as an expanding and underserved need. The tone is warm about the work and blunt about the economics.

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

  • The fellowship requirement is explicit: 12 months of clinical pediatric urology plus 12 months of clinical and basic research, meeting the training requirement for the pediatric urology certificate governed by the American Board of Urology, with 24 months of accredited fellowship needed to sit the examination.13
  • The AUA and the Society for Pediatric Urology jointly sponsor the match, with rank lists due in early June and results in late June for a July 1 start.2
  • Physician Side Gigs' self-reported urologist survey puts academic urology at $455,000 against $622,000 in group private practice and $717,000 for owner-partners, and declines to break out subspecialties on a sample of 52.5

Why people choose it / why people leave

Why choose it: the first of ABU's two subspecialty certificates in urology, which is a real and verifiable credential · reconstructive surgery with no adult equivalent, from exstrophy to complex hypospadias · outcomes measured across an entire lifetime rather than a few years · prenatal-to-adult continuity, since you may meet the patient on an ultrasound and follow them into their twenties · formal multidisciplinary practice in spina bifida, DSD, and stone teams · a growing transitional-urology need that the field is uniquely positioned to meet.

Why leave or avoid it: the longest fellowship in urology at two years, half of it research · an academic and hospital-employed job market at the bottom of urology's pay distribution · a job map limited to cities with a children's hospital · a real revision rate in the field's signature operation · genuine call, including a time-critical emergency in torsion · ethically demanding DSD care where the standards have shifted within living memory.

Best fit if: reconstruction was the part of urology you wanted more of · you want a verifiable subspecialty board · you are comfortable with watchful waiting and long follow-up · you want academic practice and can accept its economics · you can be flexible about which city you live in.

Not for you if: you want urology's income ceiling, which is in private practice and ownership · two more training years is more than you can afford · you need geographic freedom · repeated reoperation on the same child would be hard to carry · you would rather have practice autonomy than institutional structure.

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

Where it fits FLI realities well:

  • The employment base is about as PSLF-eligible as a surgical career gets. Children's hospitals are nonprofit 501(c)(3) employers, and the entire job market is inside them. Five residency years plus two fellowship years count toward the 120 payments if you are on an income-driven plan throughout training, which puts forgiveness about three years into attending practice. Read what that is worth carefully rather than as the answer to this page's pay problem: PSLF forgives federal loans, and since July 2026 federal borrowing stops at $200,000 while medical school costs more than that at almost every school, so a student starting now graduates with a private loan beside the federal one and no program forgives the private half.
  • The income remains excellent in absolute terms. Academic urology, self-reported near $455,000, is life-changing by any FLI measure.5 The deduction discussed here is against other urologists, not against most of the world.
  • Hospital employment means no buy-in and no capital requirement, which matters if there is no family money behind you. You draw a defined salary with benefits from your first day as an attending.
  • The certificate is real and it is portable. In a specialty where most subspecialties are society-endorsed, an ABU subspecialty certificate is a credential no employer can question, which is worth something to anyone whose credentials get scrutinized more closely than average.

Risks to name honestly:

  • The barrier is the urology match, and it is severe, early, and expensive. Roughly 1.3 to 1.5 applicants per position, about one in four unmatched, ~7–8% DO and ~3–4% IMG, with results arriving weeks before the NRMP, which changes how a backup plan has to work.4 Away rotations and research are the currency, and both cost money.
  • The opportunity cost is the largest in urology and it needs arithmetic, not vibes. Two fellowship years at trainee income, followed by a career in the setting that self-reported data puts roughly $167,000 a year below group private practice.5 Over thirty years that is not a rounding error. It may still be the right choice, and it should be a choice made with the number written down. Read it against the Money section on debt and specialty choice.
  • Geography is the constraint that bites hardest. The jobs are at children's hospitals. If living near family in a specific place is non-negotiable, general urology preserves that and this does not.
  • Two extra trainee years is two more years of not helping at home. If people depend on you financially, model that concretely rather than assuming it away.

Bottom line for FLI: the hard part ends when you match urology, and that part is genuinely stacked against applicants without research funding and a home department. If you clear it, pediatric urology offers one of the field's two verifiable subspecialty boards, reconstruction that nobody else does, and an employment base that is almost entirely PSLF-eligible. What you pay is two years and a permanent position on the lower half of urology's pay ladder. Choose it because the embryology and the reconstruction are what you want, and decide the geography question before the fellowship rather than after it.

Fun facts

  • It holds the first of ABU's two subspecialty certificates, from 2008; urogynecology and reconstructive pelvic surgery followed in 2013. Andrology, endourology, and urologic oncology have society endorsement and no certificate.3
  • Half the fellowship is research by design. The 24 months required for board eligibility comprise 12 months of clinical training and 12 months of clinical and basic research.1
  • The specialty often meets its patient before birth, since a large share of referrals begin as hydronephrosis found on a routine prenatal ultrasound.
  • The match runs months later in the cycle than most fellowship matches, with results in late June and fellowships starting July 1.2
  • Transitional urology exists because the field succeeded. Children who had bladder augmentation or exstrophy reconstruction now reach adulthood in numbers, carrying anatomy no adult urologist was trained on.
  • Testicular torsion is the field's clock. It is one of the few genuinely time-critical emergencies in elective surgical practice, measured in hours to salvage.

Sources

Footnotes

  1. Fellowship structure and board requirement. Pediatric urology fellowships comprise 12 months of clinical pediatric urology plus 12 months of clinical and basic research, meeting the training requirements for the pediatric urology certificate governed by the American Board of Urology. Washington University in St. Louis Division of Urologic Surgery, Pediatric Urology Fellowship (https://urology.wustl.edu/education/fellowships/pediatric-urology-fellowship/) and University of Colorado Anschutz, Fellowship in Pediatric Urology (https://medschool.cuanschutz.edu/surgery/divisions-centers-affiliates/urology/education/fellowship-in-pediatric-urology), accessed 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. Match administration and timeline. American Urological Association — Specialty Match Timelines: the Pediatric Urology Fellowship Match is sponsored jointly by the AUA and the Society for Pediatric Urology and run on the AUA's medmatch platform; for the 2027 cycle registration opened November 13, 2025, applications closed May 6, 2026, rank lists ran May 8 to June 8, 2026, and results were released June 26, 2026. Interviews run through the spring, rank lists are due in early June, results land in late June, and most fellowships start July 1. Corrected 2026-08-17: this page stated in four places, including the Quick dashboard, that results come "the third Monday of June," and then gave the only actual date AUA publishes, which is not it. June 26, 2026 is the fourth Friday; the third Monday of June 2026 was June 15. The AUA timeline states no recurring day-of-week convention, and nothing else found does either, so the four places now say late June. Every other date in this footnote is verbatim from the AUA page. https://www.auanet.org/meetings-and-education/for-residents/urology-and-specialty-matches/specialty-match-timelines and https://www.auanet.org/meetings-and-education/for-residents/urology-and-specialty-matches (accessed 2026). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  3. Board status. ABU issues two subspecialty certificates: pediatric urology, from 2008, for urologists whose practice is at least 75% pediatric urology, and urogynecology and reconstructive pelvic surgery, from 2013, after an ACGME-accredited fellowship of at least 24 months. Sitting for the pediatric urology examination requires 24 months of accredited fellowship training. American Board of Urology, Subspecialty Certification (https://abu.org/subspecialty-certification/), Pediatric Urology (https://abu.org/pediatric-urology/) and Urogynecology and Reconstructive Pelvic Surgery (https://abu.org/urogynecology-and-reconstructive-pelvic-surgery/). Corrected 2026-08-17: this page said in six places, including the bold thesis that the constellation map displays, that pediatric urology is ABU's ONLY subspecialty certificate. URPS has held one since 2013, and this site's own urogynecology profile is the counterexample. The claim rested on a footnote with no URL that checked itself against two sibling profiles rather than against ABU's certificate list. Three further instances of the superlative survived that pass and were fixed the same day: the Board line under How competitive is it, the first Why choose it item, and the FLI bottom line. ⟳ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  4. Parent-field compensation and other carried figures. Compensation, from the two national surveys directly: Doximity 2025 Physician Compensation Report (2024 earnings, ~37,000 US physicians, means rather than medians) gives urology $559,474, https://www.doximity.com/reports/physician-compensation-report/2025 ; Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2026 (2025 earnings) gives urology $535,000, 9th of the 29 specialties it ranks, and that report is paywalled and returns HTTP 402, so its table is read through relays rather than at the primary. Neither survey breaks urology out by setting or by subspecialty. Other carried figures: urology typical comp ~$535k–$560k; burnout ~49.5%, roughly second-highest of all specialties, against moderate hours of ~45–56/week and strong schedule control; 11% women practicing and ~42% of 2025 matched applicants; ~7–8% DO and ~3–4% IMG of matches; separate early AUA residency match with results in late January or early February; ~1.3–1.5 applicants per position with about one in four unmatched. See the urology profile on this site for the full version, including the AUA match sources. Sources for the non-pay figures above: women in practice, AAMC, "Women are changing the face of medicine in America" (2022 data), https://www.aamc.org/news/women-are-changing-face-medicine-america , which puts urology at 11% on 2022 data, up from 4% in 2004. Corrected 2026-08-17: the dashboard, the demographics bullet and this footnote's own carried-figures list said ~12%, while this same footnote recorded that the source says 11%. The correction had reached the footnote and never reached the reader; the body now prints 11% with its vintage. Swept 2026-08-17: 11% practicing, of the active urology workforce on AAMC's 2022-data specialty table, is the value all five urology profiles now state. This page was already right and is unchanged; the sweep moved the urology and urologic oncology profiles onto it and cleaned a stale ~12% out of the endourology profile's carried-figures list. The AUA's own 2024 Census puts the workforce at about 12%, a later vintage on a different instrument and within a point; it is named on the urology profile. Burnout, Medscape Physician Burnout & Depression Report 2024 (n=9,226, fielded July–October 2023), which is paywalled and is relayed here through 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). Corrected 2026-08-17: this footnote put urology at 49% on that edition and called it "eleventh of the specialties it ranks," then used the rank to argue that the second-highest claim above did not hold. Neither relay prints a urology row. Healthgrades publishes exactly twenty, ten highest and ten lowest, running from emergency medicine at 63% down to plastic surgery at 37%, and urology is in neither list; Advisory Board names six specialties and carries no table. The all-physician average of 49% and the survey description are Advisory Board's and stand. The urology percentage and its rank were not, so both are removed and the page's burnout claim now rests on the AMA row below, which is primary. The DO and IMG shares come from AUA rather than NRMP, because urology runs its own early match and carries no row in NRMP's Results and Data: 2026 Main Residency Match. ⟳ A second, freely readable instrument: the AMA's 2025 Organizational Biopsy (~19,000 physicians, 38 states) puts Urological surgery at 49.5% 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. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9

  5. The setting ladder, and it is self-reported rather than surveyed. Physician Side Gigs — average urologist salary survey, mid-2023 to mid-2024, n = 52 full-time urologists reporting their own compensation: average $564,000, median $530,000, range $220,000–$1,200,000; group private practice $622,000, non-academic hospital $621,000, academic hospital $455,000; W-2 employees $500,000 against owners and partners $717,000; female urologists $484,000 against male $601,000. The survey states explicitly that its dataset was not large enough to assess salary differences by subspecialization. https://www.physiciansidegigs.com/average-urologist-salary . Read it knowing who answers a survey like this: self-reported pay skews toward high earners, private practice, and partners rather than employees, and people mix salary, total compensation, and collections. Correction 2026-08-13: this page carried the source's own claim that academic urology sits "36% below private practice." On the figures in the table it is 27% below ($455,000 against $622,000); group private practice is 37% above academic, which is the arithmetic that produced the larger number. The neighboring 30% owner-versus-employee figure was computed the other way round, so the two were inconsistent. This page also previously quoted an aggregator range of roughly $440,000–$566,000 for pediatric urology itself; those hosts are excluded under this site's compensation sourcing standard and the range has been removed rather than downgraded. Corrected 2026-08-17: the FLI section's PSLF bullet closed with "for a specialty at the low end of urology's pay distribution, that is the lever that matters most," which answered this page's central financial objection with forgiveness. It now names the federal cap. PSLF forgives federal loans only, the federal system stops at $200,000 as of July 2026, and a student starting now graduates carrying a private loan that no program forgives. The same bullet said forgiveness arrives "shortly after becoming an attending"; seven training years against 120 qualifying payments is a three-year wait, and the payment count assumes an income-driven plan throughout, which is now stated. ⟳ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  6. The pediatric-subspecialty pay pattern: pediatric anesthesiology ~$480,000 against general anesthesiology ~$535,000–$550,000, flat to slightly below; pediatric cardiology ~$350,000–$380,000, well below the adult equivalent; the mechanism in both cases being payer mix and hospital employment rather than the patients. See the pediatric anesthesiology and pediatric cardiology profiles on this site, each of which carries its own compensation sources. ⟳ ↩

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