Pediatrician Salary in North Carolina 2026,
$183,550 Median | BLS Data by City

The published figure is $183,550 a year, or $88.25 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025 for SOC 29-1221, with a band from $85,220 at the 10th percentile to $297,220 at the 90th. That is 12.6% below the national median of $210,040. The row covers only 740 jobs in the state, so it is a thin estimate and both the median and the metro figures move more between releases than a larger occupation would.

Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, at $217,670, then Raleigh-Cary $214,680, Asheville $170,140 and Winston-Salem $124,200. The spread of $93,470 between top and bottom is far too large to be a cost-of-living story; it reflects the mix of academic, employed and private practice in each market and the small number of observations behind each figure.

Composition, mostly. Residency stipends are counted on this row alongside practising salaries, and North Carolina has a substantial graduate medical education footprint relative to a state paediatrician count of just 740. That drags the lower half of the band down to a $85,220 tenth percentile and a $125,460 twenty-fifth, which pulls the median well under the $210,040 national figure without implying that any individual North Carolina paediatrician is paid less than a national peer.

Through the North Carolina Medical Board, which issues a single physician licence to MDs and DOs on the basis of the medical degree, the USMLE or COMLEX sequence and postgraduate training. There is no paediatric endorsement — paediatrics is an American Board of Pediatrics certification and a matter of hospital privileges, neither of which the state records. Credentialling at each institution is a separate and usually longer process than the licence itself.

The $216,250 seventy-fifth percentile, not the $183,550 median, for a board-certified physician in full-time practice — and the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia $217,670 or Raleigh-Cary $214,680 metro medians if the post is in either market. The median on this row averages residents, part-time and academic appointments with practising private-practice paediatricians, so it understates full-time employed practice.

740 jobs statewide at a location quotient of 0.59 — North Carolina employs general paediatricians at little more than half the national rate of concentration for a workforce its size. Two things follow. First, the estimates carry more sampling noise than a large occupation's, which is the honest explanation for four metro medians spanning $93,470. Second, the low concentration is itself informative: paediatric primary care in this state is delivered substantially by family physicians and by nurse practitioners, particularly outside the Charlotte and Triangle metros, so the general paediatrician count is smaller than the child population would suggest.

The likeliest reason is what is being counted rather than what is being paid. Winston-Salem is a heavily academic medical market, and academic paediatric departments carry residents, fellows and part-time or research-track faculty whose annualised pay lands on the same SOC row as a private-practice partner's. Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia at $217,670 and Raleigh-Cary $214,680 have proportionally more employed and private general paediatrics and fewer trainees per attending. On a base as small as 740 statewide jobs, a difference in the trainee share of one metro's count moves that metro's median substantially.

Practice model, more than location or seniority. Hospital-employed general paediatrics pays a base with a work-RVU incentive; private-practice partnership pays out of collections and carries the practice's economics directly, which is where the $216,250 to $297,220 upper band comes from. Layering urgent-care shifts, newborn nursery coverage or paediatric hospitalist work onto an outpatient panel is the common route upward in this state. Call is compensated separately in most employed arrangements, and none of these incentive and call components appear in the straight-time BLS figure.