Oncologist Salary in New York 2026,
$242,500 Median | BLS Data by City

The published New York figure is $242,500 a year, or $116.59 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $86,250 at the 10th percentile to $414,440 at the 90th. That is 8.8% below the national median of $265,930. The row is SOC 29-1229, Physicians, All Other — BLS does not publish an oncologist code, so the figure pools every specialty without a dedicated row, including physicians still in postgraduate training.

Binghamton, at $328,150, followed by Albany-Schenectady-Troy $314,460, Utica-Rome $287,370, Syracuse $286,920 and New York-Newark-Jersey City $265,930. The ordering is the reverse of most New York occupations. Upstate systems compete for a small pool of oncologists in markets that offer no lifestyle premium to offset a lower offer, while the downstate figure carries the weight of the city's academic training cohorts.

Because the code is a residual. SOC 29-1229 collects the specialties BLS does not separately publish, and its composition varies by state with the local mix of training programmes and specialty practice. New York's large graduate medical education footprint puts a lot of residents and fellows on the row at the $86,250-to-$122,260 end of it, which pulls the state median down even where individual attending compensation is competitive.

No. The State Education Department's Office of the Professions and its State Board for Medicine issue one physician licence covering all practice. Oncology is a board certification through an ABMS member board and a set of clinical privileges granted by a hospital's credentialing committee — the state records neither. Practically, a physician moving to New York needs the state licence and then a separate credentialing process at each institution where they will practise.

Not from the median. Take the 75th percentile of $352,190 as the reference point for a board-certified attending with an established disease-site practice, and the 90th of $414,440 as the leadership and high-volume tier. The 10th and 25th percentiles describe the training population sharing the SOC row, and quoting the $242,500 median in a negotiation concedes ground to a figure that includes people who are not yet doing the job.

Every physician specialty for which BLS does not publish a dedicated row, in one bucket — oncologists alongside pathologists, physical medicine specialists, allergists and others, plus the residents and fellows working under supervision. In a state with New York's concentration of academic medical centres that mix is unusually training-heavy. The consequence is visible in the ladder itself: a $86,250 tenth percentile is not a wage any attending oncologist in New York is being offered, and its presence on the same row as a $414,440 ninetieth is the clearest possible signal that the median is an average of two different populations.

Two forces run together. First, composition: the downstate figure is weighted by the training cohorts of a very large academic sector, which the Binghamton and Utica-Rome markets simply do not have. Second, recruitment economics: an upstate health system filling an oncology post is bidding against the whole country for a physician who has no other reason to move to Binghamton, and pays accordingly. Add that New York City residents carry a 3.078%–3.876% city income tax on top of a state rate reaching 10.9%, and the net gap between a $328,150 Binghamton offer and a $265,930 city one is wider than the gross gap suggests.

The pro-rated figure of about 460 openings a year in the state is a rough scale marker derived from the national 9,600 by New York's employment share, not a New York projection. The more useful read is structural. Cancer incidence rises with population age and treatment now runs for years rather than months, so the volume of oncology work is growing faster than the 2.5% national employment projection for the residual physician code implies. What limits entry is fellowship capacity, and that is fixed nationally — which is why upstate New York keeps paying above the city to fill posts.