Recruiting a pathologist.

What does a pathologist earn?

Ranked among the states and the District of Columbia where BLS publishes both the mean wage and the employment figure; 23 of the 51 are left out because BLS withholds or top-codes a figure or has no row. The pathology salary page has every state, the metro areas and BLS’s caveats.

BLS reports a national mean of $285,420 (BLS, May 2025 release) a year for pathologists, a median of $312,400 (BLS, May 2025 release), and about 11,110 (BLS, May 2025 release) on payrolls. BLS counts medical examiners in the occupation too, so the figures mix public office pay with private group practice.

In a private group, a new pathologist is usually paid a salary on a track toward partnership, with the partnership share coming from the group's professional fees and its laboratory contracts. Academic and reference laboratory positions pay a salary with less upside and fewer evenings on call for frozen sections.

Where do pathologists look for jobs?

Where new hires come from

Most new hires finish a fellowship after residency

Who employs them

Private pathology groups that contract with hospitals, academic departments, national reference laboratories, and hospitals that employ their pathologists.

Who you compete with for candidates

Reference laboratories and academic centers that can offer narrow subspecialty work, and groups that recruit fellows a full year ahead.

Most pathologists complete one or two fellowships after residency, and the subspecialty decides the search. A group needing gastrointestinal pathology looks at the fellows in that field, who are known to their program directors well before they finish.

Fellows look a year or more ahead, so a group that posts only when a partner gives notice is already late. The general physician boards carry pathology postings; the networks that matter more are fellowship directors and the pathologists who trained alongside your current partners.

Every board’s listing, with its posting lengths and how CV access is sold, is in the job board directory; what a physician job posting costs compares them.

The locum agency directory has each agency’s states, malpractice coverage and physician pay where it states them.

What does an open pathology position cost?

What the calculator has for pathology

• Revenue one physician brings in: no published figure, so you supply the annual revenue one physician in the specialty brings your organization
• Locum pay: $160 to $215 an hour (estimate, Locumstory (CHG Healthcare), 2025)
• First-year pay: $285,420 a year (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025)
• Contingency agency fee: 20 to 30% of first-year pay (estimate, MedStaff Nationwide, 2026)

There is no published revenue figure per pathologist in the calculator, so put in your own: the professional fees the position would bill plus its share of contract income. The harder cost to price is risk. A hospital that sees turnaround slip, or a cancer center without its hematopathologist, starts to look at other groups before the contract renews.

Locum pathologists are available through agencies at $160 to $215 (estimate, Locumstory (CHG Healthcare), 2025) an hour in physician pay, and many groups use them to cover a leave. Coverage by a locum without the subspecialty your clients expect solves the volume problem and leaves the expertise problem in place.

Open the calculator with pathology chosen

Which recruiting channels work for pathology?

Pathology recruiting is planned around the fellowship year. The groups that do it well know which subspecialties their contracts will need two years out and are already talking to the fellows in those fields.

Questions to ask

• Which subspecialties will your hospital and outpatient contracts require when the next ones renew?
• How many cases a year would the new pathologist sign out, and how is that split by subspecialty?
• Who in the group knows the directors of the fellowships you hire from?
• Is the partnership track written down, with the years and the buy-in?

Which rules bite pathology recruiting?

Clinical laboratory work sits at the center of both federal referral laws, so the money flowing between a pathology group, its hospitals and the clinicians who send specimens is where recruiting deals get reviewed.

Every federal rule this site cites, grouped by what a practice or recruiter is doing, is on the federal rules page. For the contract itself (pay models, tail coverage, restrictive covenants), read the physician employment contract, clause by clause. These notes describe the rules and cite them; they are not legal advice for a particular offer or contract.