Gastroenterologist Salary in California 2026,
$281,590 Median | BLS Data by City

The published figure is $281,590 a year, or $135.38 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, on SOC 29-1229 — Physicians All Other, which pools every specialty without a dedicated code and includes physicians in postgraduate training. The band runs from $80,590 at the 10th percentile to $431,980 at the 90th, and the state figure sits 5.9% above the national median of $265,930.

Santa Rosa-Petaluma, at $421,490, then Salinas $384,990, El Centro $370,290, Chico $334,980 and Modesto $323,580. Every published metro is a smaller or rural California market paying far above the $281,590 state median — recruiting physicians into the agricultural valleys, the far north and the rural coast is difficult, and these figures are the price of it.

No. The Medical Board of California issues one physician and surgeon licence covering all practice, and the Osteopathic Medical Board licenses osteopathic physicians; neither records subspecialty. Gastroenterology is defined by fellowship training, American Board of Internal Medicine certification and, decisively, by endoscopy privileges granted through a hospital or surgery centre's credentialling committee.

Because SOC 29-1229 is a residual code. It collects every specialty BLS does not separately publish and it includes residents and fellows on training stipends. California has one of the largest graduate medical education footprints in the country, so a great many trainees sit on this row at the $80,590 to $98,870 end, pulling the median well below what a practising, board-certified gastroenterologist earns.

The $340,730 seventy-fifth percentile for an established board-certified physician with an endoscopy practice, and the $431,980 ninetieth percentile for high-volume, advanced-endoscopy or partnership arrangements. Quoting the $281,590 median in a negotiation concedes ground to a figure that averages in physicians who are still in training.

Because the state's physician distribution problem is real and priced. Santa Rosa-Petaluma $421,490, Salinas $384,990, El Centro $370,290, Chico $334,980 and Modesto $323,580 are all markets where recruiting and retaining subspecialists is genuinely hard — agricultural valleys, the Imperial Valley border region and the far north — and health systems there have to outbid the state's coastal metropolitan areas, which physicians want to live in and which therefore need offer no premium. It is the same recruitment mechanism visible in other licensed professions, but amplified because the population of gastroenterologists is small and highly mobile.

The wage row is not gastroenterology-specific and cannot be made so. SOC 29-1229 pools every physician specialty without its own code, so the composition of the row differs by state with the local mix of training programmes and specialty practice, and California's is unusually training-heavy. Beyond that, the figure is a wage-and-salary estimate: it excludes ambulatory surgery centre ownership distributions, which are a large part of procedural gastroenterology income in California, and it excludes partnership profit in private practice. Both push practising income above what this row shows.

Procedure volume and the ownership structure around it. Endoscopy is the economic engine of the specialty, and whether a physician performs it in a hospital as an employee, in a health-system ambulatory surgery centre, or in a facility in which they hold an ownership interest changes the economics far more than base salary negotiation does. Beyond that: advanced endoscopy and hepatology practice, call and inpatient consultation obligations, and geography — where the rural premium visible in this metro table is the largest single lever available inside California.