General Surgeon Salary in New York 2026,
$410,410 Median | BLS Data by City

A median $410,410 a year, or $197.31 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025 — 0.9% below the national median of $414,010, which makes New York essentially a national-average market for this specialty. The band runs $85,040 at the 10th percentile to $702,270 at the 90th, with a very large gap between the $97,750 quarter-point and the $497,470 seventy-fifth percentile.

Binghamton at $443,420, ahead of Buffalo-Cheektowaga $411,410, New York-Newark-Jersey City $399,990, Rochester $321,070 and Albany-Schenectady-Troy $76,300. Two upstate metros out-paying the metropolitan area is a recruitment signal, and the very low Albany-Schenectady-Troy figure is an artefact of the training cohort at the region's academic centres rather than a local pay rate.

Supply. The New York-Newark-Jersey City market trains an enormous number of surgeons and employs many of them on academic and health-system salaries, so it does not need to bid. Binghamton, at $443,420, does — a smaller market with real surgical demand and no local training pipeline has to make an offer attractive enough to move someone. Add the New York City resident income tax of 3.078% to 3.876% on top and the effective gap between the two markets is larger than the published one.

No. New York issues a single physician licence, through the State Education Department's Office of the Professions rather than a standalone medical board, and it does not distinguish surgical from non-surgical practice. Surgical standing comes from residency completion, board certification and hospital privileging. What does vary by hospital is trauma centre designation, which the Department of Health awards and which determines where the acute surgical volume — and much of the call pay — actually sits.

SOC 29-1249 is a residual category: it captures surgical specialties that BLS does not publish separately, so general surgery sits alongside other surgical work in one estimate. That breadth is part of why the New York band runs from $85,040 to $702,270 — different surgical specialties with genuinely different economics are pooled. Use the $410,410 median as a sound general-surgery benchmark, but treat the $702,270 ninetieth percentile as describing the highest-value surgical work in the code rather than general surgery specifically.

Because concentration in this state is substantially a training and academic phenomenon. New York holds roughly 18.1% of the country's employment in this surgical code, and a large part of that is residents, fellows and salaried faculty at teaching hospitals — a population paid on academic scales and counted in the same estimate as private surgical practice. Averaged together, a dense academic base and a normal private market produce a state median of $410,410 that sits marginally below the $414,010 national figure. The $497,470 seventy-fifth percentile is the better guide to what established New York surgical practice actually pays.

Three things at once. The occupational code is residual, so it pools surgical specialties with different economics. The band is bimodal, splitting a large training population from an attending one with almost nothing between $97,750 and $497,470. And the metro rows vary enormously in reliability — Albany-Schenectady-Troy's $76,300 is not a surgical salary in any meaningful sense, it is what happens when an academic centre's trainees dominate a small local sample. The wage measure also excludes call pay, partnership distributions and facility income.

Market choice first, and unusually it points away from the metropolitan area: Binghamton's $443,420 against New York-Newark-Jersey City's $399,990, before the city income tax is applied, is a real and reversible decision. Subspecialty volume second. Practice structure third — moving from a salaried health-system appointment to a group with a partnership track is most of the distance from the $410,410 median to the $497,470 seventy-fifth percentile. Acute and trauma call fourth, since Department of Health trauma designation determines where that volume and its associated pay sit.