Radiologists among employers’ 5 most-requested specialists, staffing firm says
Radiologists are among employers’ five most-requested medical specialists, according to new data from AMN Healthcare released Tuesday.
Hiring managers made 76 requests for rads with the Dallas-based talent search firm in 2024-25, up nearly 25% from the 61 seen the previous year. Nurse practitioners claimed the top spot for the fifth year in a row with 222 talent requests, followed by family medicine specialists (134), anesthesiologists (103) and internists (89).
“Demand for specialists is particularly strong and is being driven by the rapid growth of the nation’s senior citizen population,” Leah Grant, MBA, president of AMN Healthcare Physician Solutions, said in an Aug. 5 announcement. “While demand is growing, many specialists are in short supply, resulting in high starting salary offers.”
Radiologists were among eight specialties seeing the largest year-over-year gains in average compensation, up 1% to $500,000. Otolaryngologists recorded the biggest increase at 36%, up to $487,000, followed by cardiologists ($470,000/18.8%) and psychiatrists ($315,000/10.4%). Overall, the average physician starting pay is about $403,000, with orthopedic surgeons at the top end of the salary scale ($576,000) and pediatricians at the bottom ($258,000).
Amid rising demand for talent, employers are offering sizable signing bonuses, relocation allowances, and continuing medical education
credits. Radiologists are scoring bonuses anywhere from $5,000 to as high as $250,000, according to AMN Healthcare data, with an average hiring incentive of about $39,706. Across all physician specialties, the average signing bonus is $38,315, up 23% year over year, while average relocation allowance is $12,619 (up 12%), and CME credits at $4,073 (up 3%). Combining all three figures, the average signing bonus for physicians is $58,854.
AMN Healthcare also offered radiologist salary details based on practice setting and geography. Rads earned an average of about $509,000 in both the Southeast and Southwest versus over $375,000 in the Northeast and $620,000 in the West. AMN could not offer an estimate for average radiologist pay in the Midwest. Meanwhile, radiologists in academia earn an average salary of $315,000 compared to $582,000 in other non-teaching settings.
The staffing firm’s 2025 Review of Physician and Advanced Practitioner Recruiting Incentives is based on a representative sample of 1,420 search engagements conducted between April 2024 and this past March. AMN Healthcare determines demand for physicians by tracking the number of search requests from its clients. However, it’s expected that specialties with a high number of physicians, such as family medicine, will generate a comparably high number of searches. When ranking specialties by number of job openings, instead, as a percent of all active providers in the profession, radiologists were still the fifth most-requested specialists in terms of such “absolute demand.”
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.