New compensation data show the gender pay gap among millennial physicians widened substantially over the past year, undoing progress that had narrowed the divide in prior years, according to survey data from Medscape’s Millennial Physician Compensation Report 2026.
The findings were drawn from a survey of 5,916 full-time U.S. practicing physicians across more than 29 specialties, fielded from Sept. 5 to Dec. 17, 2025. The margin of error for the full sample was 1.27 percentage points at a 95% confidence level. Physician compensation was modeled using survey data spanning 12 years and 69,571 physicians, weighted to match the American Medical Association’s physician population.
Here are five takeaways from the report:
1. Male millennial physicians earned an average of $414,000 in 2025, up from $393,000 in 2024.
2. Female millennial physicians, meanwhile, averaged $312,000 in 2025, down slightly from $314,000 the year before.
3. That left male millennial physicians earning $102,000 more than their female counterparts in 2025, compared with a $79,000 gap in 2024 — a 29% increase in the size of the gap in a single year.
4. The widening gap was not evenly distributed across specialties. Among millennial primary care physicians, men’s average pay climbed from $295,000 to $303,000, while women’s average pay fell from $266,000 to $256,000 — a nearly 4% decline. That pulled the primary care pay gap from $29,000 in 2024 to $47,000 in 2025, a jump of more than 60%.
5. Millennial specialists saw a similar, if less dramatic, divergence. Male specialists’ average pay rose from $425,000 to $448,000, a gain of more than 5%, while female specialists’ average pay was essentially flat, edging up from $331,000 to just $332,000. The specialist pay gap grew from $94,000 to $116,000 year over year.
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