OB-GYN Salary in New York 2026,
$348,800 Median | BLS Data by City

The published New York figure is $348,800 a year, or $167.69 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025 — 19.1% above the national median of $292,910. The band runs from $91,510 at the 10th percentile, which is training-stage pay, to $449,020 at the 90th. The middle of the distribution is thin: $207,460 at the 25th percentile and $426,730 at the 75th, with very little published between them.

Kiryas Joel-Poughkeepsie-Newburgh at $348,580 publishes the highest metro figure, ahead of New York-Newark-Jersey City $329,750, Syracuse $320,350, Buffalo-Cheektowaga $258,760 and Albany-Schenectady-Troy $253,580. Every one of those sits at or below the statewide median, which means the state's best-paid obstetric practice is not captured by any single published metro row.

No. New York issues a single physician licence, through the State Education Department's Office of the Professions rather than a freestanding medical board, and there is no obstetric or gynaecological endorsement on it. Specialty standing comes from residency completion and American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology certification, which the state does not administer. In practice the gate that matters is hospital privileging, because obstetrics cannot be practised outside a facility — and privileging is where delivery volume, call obligation and malpractice coverage are actually settled.

Because the New York-Newark-Jersey City metro contains the densest concentration of academic and hospital-employed obstetric practice in the country, and salaried appointments pay below established private and high-volume practice. The metro figure of $329,750 sits about nineteen thousand dollars under the statewide $348,800 for that reason, not because the work is different. A location quotient of 2.08 across the state confirms the supply picture: New York trains and retains more obstetricians per capita than the country does.

It is the largest cost no wage table shows. Obstetrics carries among the highest malpractice premiums of any specialty, and New York is one of the more expensive states to insure in, which compresses the effective income behind every figure on this page — particularly for private practice, where the premium is paid out of the practice rather than by an employer. It is also why the peer states on pay are Tennessee $354,580, Georgia $354,000 and Indiana $351,990 rather than the coastal high-wage states: obstetric compensation nationally tracks delivery volume and liability exposure more closely than it tracks cost of living.

Because the two are set by different mechanisms. Density comes from training: New York has one of the largest concentrations of obstetric residency positions in the country, and a large fraction of those trainees stay, which produces a location quotient of 2.08. Pay comes from delivery volume and liability, which are properties of the practice rather than the labour market. A saturated market normally suppresses wages, but obstetric income is anchored to procedure volume and to what a hospital must pay to keep a delivery service staffed and covered around the clock, and neither of those falls just because there are more obstetricians in the state.

It is a wage-and-salary measure applied to an occupation where a large share of income is not a wage. Partnership distributions, productivity bonuses tied to deliveries and surgical volume, and call stipends are structured differently across New York employers and are captured inconsistently. The $449,020 ninetieth percentile should be read as where the published data stops rather than where New York obstetric income stops. The $91,510 10th percentile is equally misleading in the other direction — it is residents and fellows, not underpaid attendings.

Delivery volume first, since obstetric income is fundamentally procedural and the difference between a moderate and a heavy panel is large. Then employment structure: hospital-employed appointments trade income for predictability, and the distance from the $207,460 twenty-fifth percentile to the $426,730 seventy-fifth is substantially the distance between salaried and partnership practice. Then subspecialty — maternal-fetal medicine and gynaecologic surgery command distinct rates. And then geography within the state, but not in the direction expected: several upstate regions pay premiums to cover delivery services they struggle to staff, while the downstate market is saturated.