Anesthesiologist Salary in Seattle, WA 2026,
$646,930 Median | BLS + Market Data

Seattle anesthesiologists earn a BLS median of $646,930/yr for the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro, with a published band running from $421,780 at the 10th percentile. That is 29.4% above the Washington statewide figure and 65.2% above the US median. The metro counts 990 anesthesiologists at 1.91 times the national concentration, a dense specialty market for a region of this size.

Substantially — 29.4% above the Washington statewide median. The Puget Sound region carries the state's tertiary and quaternary surgical volume, its transplant and cardiac programmes and its paediatric specialty centre, all of which require subspecialty anesthesia coverage that hospitals elsewhere in Washington do not employ.

Because the survey estimate compresses at the top for this cell: the 75th and 90th percentiles resolve to essentially the same value as the median. That is a property of the estimate rather than of the market — it does not mean no anesthesiologist in Seattle earns above the median, only that BLS cannot distinguish the upper half of the distribution here. The honest way to read this page is from the bottom: the 10th percentile at $421,780 is the reliable lower reference point.

Typically yes, and the region has an unusually large academic footprint for its size. Academic appointments trade clinical income for protected research and teaching time, institutional benefits and a different call structure. Private and hospital-group practice covering high-volume operating rooms and ambulatory surgical centres generally pays more, particularly with subspecialty training and heavy call. Both sit within a band whose upper half the published data cannot resolve.

Referral geography. The Puget Sound region serves as the tertiary and quaternary referral base not only for Washington but for a wide surrounding area with few comparable centres, which concentrates complex surgical volume — and therefore subspecialty anesthesia — into a small number of institutions. A location quotient of 1.91 for a physician specialty is high, and it reflects that catchment rather than the local population alone.

Anesthesia in most large American hospitals is delivered by a care team: an anesthesiologist medically directs several rooms staffed by nurse anesthetists or anesthesiologist assistants, handling induction, complex cases and emergencies personally. That model multiplies the surgical volume one physician can cover, and physician compensation reflects the supervision responsibility and the throughput it enables. Reading this figure as payment for one clinician in one room misunderstands what the job is in a metro of this size.

OEWS records wages for employed workers. A large share of physician income in this specialty arrives through partnership distributions, productivity units, call stipends and directorship payments, and the treatment of those varies with employment structure. Physicians in independent partnership arrangements may not be captured the same way as hospital-employed physicians at all. The figure on this page is a real published observation, but it is not the same thing as a survey of total physician compensation.

Roughly thirty positions a year across the whole metro, against a counted workforce of 990, is a tight market by any measure. Anesthesiology posts in this region are typically filled through residency and fellowship pipelines at the local teaching institutions and through group partnership tracks rather than through open recruitment. For a physician considering relocation, the constraint here is availability rather than compensation — the compensation, as this page shows, is among the strongest published anywhere.