Anesthesiologist Salary in Chicago, IL 2026,
$77,770 Median | BLS + Market Data

BLS publishes a median of $77,770/yr for anesthesiologists across the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin metro, but that figure should not be read as consultant pay. The same record publishes a 75th percentile of $217,040 and a 90th percentile of $442,270, and the gap between them is the tell: the lower part of this distribution is dominated by residents, fellows and part-time appointments, of which this metro has an unusually large number.

No comparison is possible — BLS publishes no Illinois state median for this occupation, so this page makes no state claim at all rather than inventing one. Peer metro figures for the same occupation give a better sense of scale: Atlanta at $226,830, Dallas at $218,060, Houston at $210,230 and Denver at $179,190 all show the same downward pull from training-heavy samples to different degrees, and San Francisco's published figure of $101,730 shows it even more starkly than Chicago's.

Fellowship-trained subspecialty practice — cardiac, paediatric, transplant and interventional pain medicine — sits at the top, followed by established consultant practice in hospitals and large anaesthesia groups. Ambulatory surgery centre work pays less but offers predictable daytime hours and no overnight call, which many anaesthesiologists trade for deliberately. The metro's academic centres, which run the transplant and paediatric cardiac programmes, employ most of the subspecialists but also pay below private group practice for equivalent general work.

The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation issues a general Physician and Surgeon licence through its Medical Board — there is no anaesthesiology-specific licence. The clinical route is a medical degree, the national licensing examination sequence, and a four-year accredited anaesthesiology residency, with board certification through the American Board of Anesthesiology expected for hospital privileges. Subspecialty fellowships add a year. Licences are statewide; Chicago issues nothing additional.

No — use the upper percentiles. A consultant anaesthesiologist comparing an offer against the $77,770 median would draw a badly wrong conclusion, because that figure is describing a different population. The 75th percentile at $217,040 is a more defensible reference point for general consultant practice in this metro, and the $442,270 at the 90th percentile is closer to what subspecialty and high-call practice reaches. This page publishes every figure exactly as BLS released it and explains what each one is measuring, which is the only honest way to handle a distribution shaped like this one.

In a healthy wage distribution the median sits between the quartiles with room on both sides. Here the 10th percentile, the 25th and the median are within a few hundred dollars of each other, and then the distribution jumps. That pattern means more than half the sampled anaesthesiology payroll records in this metro are at essentially one low value. Residency and fellowship stipends are paid at standardised institutional rates, which is exactly what produces a spike like this. It is not an error in the data and nothing here has been adjusted — but publishing the median as though it were a market wage would be misleading, so this page does not.

Chicago accounts for 4.39% of national anaesthesiology employment, well above its share of US jobs, and a large part of that is training capacity: several medical schools, multiple large academic hospitals, and high surgical volumes across trauma, transplant, cardiac and paediatric services. Those are exactly the conditions that support big residency and fellowship programmes. The consequence for this page is a survey sample weighted toward trainees. The consequence for an anaesthesiologist is more positive: a metro with this much training infrastructure also has deep consultant demand and an unusually broad range of subspecialty practice available without relocating.

Anaesthesia in this region is delivered largely through care team models, in which anaesthesiologists supervise certified registered nurse anaesthetists and anaesthesiologist assistants across several concurrent operating rooms. That structure raises what a single anaesthesiologist can cover and therefore what a group can pay them, and it is the main reason established consultant practice reaches the upper part of this published range. It also means an offer's supervision ratio, call frequency and case mix matter more to income than the headline hourly comparison — details that no published wage series captures and that anyone evaluating a post in this metro should ask about directly.