Anesthesiologist Salary in Houston, TX 2026,
$210,230 Median | BLS + Market Data

BLS publishes a median of $210,230/yr for anesthesiologists across the Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands metro, with a band from $83,920 to $488,670. The median should not be read as private consultant pay: the 25th and 75th percentiles sit almost on top of it, which indicates a large cluster of training and academically employed physicians in the sample.

The metro figure sits 2.3% below the Texas statewide median, and 46.3% below the US median — the latter gap being a composition effect rather than a statement about local rates. Peer metros show how variable this classification effect is: San Antonio publishes $335,300 and Atlanta $226,830, while Dallas at $218,060, Denver at $179,190 and San Francisco at $101,730 show the same training-weighted pull to differing degrees.

Private anaesthesia group practice and fellowship-trained subspecialty work — cardiac, paediatric, transplant and interventional pain medicine. Those reach toward the $488,670 at the top of this published range. Hospital-employed and ambulatory surgical practice follows. Academic appointments at the metro's medical schools sit lower, which is the standard trade of compensation for teaching, research and access to the most complex cases — and in this metro there are a great many of those appointments.

Through the Texas Medical Board, which issues a general physician licence rather than a speciality one. 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. Licensure is statewide; Houston issues nothing additional, though hospitals credential separately.

Not on its own. A consultant anaesthesiologist benchmarking against $210,230 would understate the market considerably, because that figure is heavily influenced by training and academic employment. The $488,670 at the 90th percentile is closer to private group and subspecialty practice. This page reports every figure exactly as BLS released it and explains what each one measures, because a distribution with three percentiles clustered together needs interpretation rather than repetition.

In this record the 25th percentile, the median and the 75th percentile fall within about $1,300 of each other, and then the 90th percentile is more than double. That is the signature of a large group of physicians paid at similar institutional rates — residents, fellows and academic faculty on published salary scales — with a separate, smaller group in private practice above them. It is not an error, and nothing here has been adjusted. But publishing that median as the market rate for a consultant anaesthesiologist would mislead, so this page does not.

Anaesthesia in this region is delivered largely through care team models, with anaesthesiologists supervising certified registered nurse anaesthetists across several concurrent operating rooms. That structure determines how much a single physician can cover and therefore what a group can pay them, and it is the main reason private group practice reaches the top of this published range. The practical consequence is that supervision ratio, call frequency, case mix and ambulatory versus hospital setting matter far more to an anaesthesiologist's income than the headline figure in any offer.

This metro combines an enormous surgical volume — cardiac, transplant, oncological, paediatric — with a medical centre district containing multiple training programmes. Those two facts pull the published wage data in opposite directions: high demand for consultant anaesthesiology, and a large population of trainees and academic faculty counted in the same statistic. The result is the distribution on this page. For a physician, the underlying market is considerably stronger than the median implies, and the no-income-tax position makes the comparison against other large surgical markets more favourable still.