Radiology Pays $571K — But Is It Enough?

Thursday, July 16, 2026. Episode 18 of Beyond the Scan, and we are doing something a little different today.

This episode is brought to you by RadiologyJobs — the job board built specifically for imaging professionals. Worth bookmarking.

Every story today is about workforce. Pay, pipeline, vacancies, and what happens when the system starts fraying at the edges. Let's get into it.

Two salary reports dropped recently that are worth reading together, because they tell a more complete story side by side. The Medscape report puts the average annual physician salary in 2025 at $386,000 overall — specialists at $417,000. Radiology came in third among specialties at $571,000, behind orthopedics at $611,000 and cardiology at $575,000. And radiology saw 9% compensation growth, which is strong. Cardiology led at 10%, but radiology and ophthalmology were right behind.

Now layer in the NOW Healthcare Recruiting report, which goes deeper on radiology specifically. Median diagnostic radiology compensation sits between $544,000 and $590,000 depending on the market. Interventional radiology runs higher — median between $599,000 and $650,000. Private practice averages $893,000, with partner-track positions frequently clearing a million. Hospital employed averages $645,000. Academic comes in at $563,000, with the usual tradeoffs in research time and fellowship involvement.

My read is that these numbers look impressive on paper, and they are. But a 3% overall physician pay increase in an inflationary environment is essentially flat in real terms. Gains that barely outpace inflation are not the same as genuine growth, even when the dollar figures are high.

If you are a department head trying to recruit right now, the numbers that matter most are probably the regional ones. The highest-paying markets tend to cluster in states with physician shortages and fewer training programs — South Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Iowa, Indiana. The demand is real, and the leverage is real. Keep that in mind when you're evaluating an offer or making one.

Speaking of demand outpacing supply — the NOW report makes that explicit. The 2026 radiology recruitment landscape is described as fiercely competitive, with demand drastically outpacing available supply in most regions. Employers are using signing bonuses, relocation assistance, student loan help, productivity incentives. Longer search timelines are becoming standard.

Which makes the next story land harder.

A Seattle Times opinion piece published at the end of June connects the dots between federal workforce policy and VA radiology, and the picture it draws is not good. When the Trump administration issued the Inauguration Day executive order ending remote work arrangements for federal employees, VA radiologists were included. Teleradiology had been a significant part of how the VA covered its imaging needs — especially in rural and underserved areas.

A 2025 OIG report had already documented recruitment difficulties at the VA due to the national radiologist shortage. The piece quotes directly from VA leadership: the agency is, in their words, no longer an employer of choice for radiologists.

That sentence stopped me. Because the VA serves millions of veterans, many of them with complex imaging needs — trauma histories, chronic conditions, the full spectrum. And the radiologists who covered those patients remotely were doing real clinical work, often in markets where on-site coverage was already thin.

My take: workforce policy and clinical policy are the same thing. When you restrict how radiologists can work, you restrict who gets read. The veterans waiting on imaging results at a rural VA facility are not abstractions. They are the downstream consequence of a decision made in Washington about remote work. I want to be careful not to overstate what the reporting tells us — but what it does tell us is serious enough.

And then there is the technologist side of this equation, because radiology is not just radiologists.

The Amergis allied health shortage report pulls data from the American Society of Radiologic Technologists. Vacancy rates across all medical imaging disciplines remained above their 2020 levels in 2025. CT reached an all-time high vacancy rate of 19.4%. Nineteen point four percent. Some disciplines saw modest declines from 2023 peaks, but the overall picture is that vacancies are at or near record highs across the board.

Here is who that number belongs to: the tech who is running a third CT shift because the department is two people short. The imaging manager who has been posting the same position for four months. The patient whose scan gets delayed because there is nobody to run the suite at 6am.

A 19.4% CT vacancy rate means roughly one in five CT positions is unfilled. In a modality that handles trauma, oncology staging, cardiac workups — the stuff that cannot wait. That is not a staffing inconvenience. That is a patient access problem wearing a staffing label.

My take: the technologist pipeline has not kept pace with demand, and the salary data for physicians — as strong as it looks — does not address the people actually running the equipment. These are connected problems. You cannot staff a reading room and leave the scanner understaffed. The whole system moves together.

So that is the workforce picture as of mid-July 2026. Radiologist pay is strong and growing. Demand exceeds supply in most markets. Federal policy decisions are making VA recruitment harder. And tech vacancies, especially in CT, are at historic highs. None of these stories exist in isolation. They are the same story, told from different angles.

Thanks for spending time with me today. If this episode was useful, share it with someone in your department — or leave a review wherever you listen. You can find us at beyondthescan.io. I'll be back in two weeks with more updates.