Pediatrician Salary in Ohio 2026:
$217,970 Median

The published Ohio figure is $217,970 a year, or $104.80 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $163,780 at the 10th percentile to $296,660 at the 90th. That is 3.8% above the national median of $210,040. The SOC match is exact — 29-1221, general paediatricians — and the band is narrow by physician standards, reflecting a specialty with little procedural income and compensation anchored to primary care benchmarks.

Children's hospitals. Ohio's location quotient of 1.50 on 2,110 paediatricians means the state employs half again as many as its employment size predicts, and the reason is the concentration of very large paediatric institutions in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus. Those hospitals employ general paediatricians across hospital medicine, urgent care, primary care networks and academic roles, and they draw referral patients from well beyond Ohio — so the workforce is sized to a regional and national catchment rather than to the state's own child population.

No. The State Medical Board of Ohio issues one physician licence covering all practice, with biennial renewal and continuing medical education. Paediatrics is defined by a three-year residency and board certification through the American Board of Pediatrics, neither of which the state records. In practice the decisive gate for a hospital-based paediatrician in Ohio is the institution's own credentialling and privileging process, which is where the large children's hospitals set their standards.

Cleveland, at $217,970, narrowly ahead of Cincinnati $216,750, then Dayton-Kettering-Beavercreek $209,790 and Toledo $207,990 — a spread of about ten thousand dollars across the table. That tightness is characteristic: Ohio paediatric compensation is largely set inside big employed health systems using published benchmark structures, so there is far less metro-to-metro bidding than in specialties with more independent practice.

The gross comparison is modestly favourable at 3.8% above the national median, and the tax position improves it further. Ohio's flat 2.75% state income tax for 2026, with roughly the first twenty-six thousand dollars of taxable income exempt, is very low at physician income levels; the offset is a municipal income tax of 1% to 2.5% in most cities, 2.5% in Cleveland, Columbus and Akron, levied where the work is performed. The combined burden remains well below top marginal rates in high-tax states, which matters most at the $252,270 seventy-fifth percentile and above.

Because general paediatrics has almost no procedural income and a compensation structure tied to primary care benchmarks. On specialties where physicians bill for procedures — surgery, cardiology, dermatology — individual productivity creates enormous dispersion, and the ninetieth percentile can be several times the tenth. Here the ratio from $163,780 to $296,660 is under two to one. The practical implication is that a paediatrician's compensation in Ohio is negotiated within a fairly narrow, benchmark-anchored range, and the levers that exist are acuity, call, administrative responsibility and academic appointment rather than volume of billable procedures.

It bifurcates the work. The 0.8% national growth projection and the pro-rated figure of about 60 openings a year in Ohio reflect a shrinking well-child population, which pressures routine primary care paediatrics — fewer patients, smaller panels, consolidation of practices into larger networks. What is not shrinking is complex chronic paediatric care: children with congenital conditions, prematurity sequelae and chronic disease now survive and require lifelong management, and that care concentrates in exactly the tertiary children's hospitals Ohio has in abundance. A paediatrician entering the Ohio market should read the 1.50 location quotient as a statement about that second category.

Almost entirely. With paediatric employment concentrated in large children's hospitals and their primary care networks, an Ohio paediatrician's compensation, scope and progression are governed by an institution's benchmark structure and credentialling process rather than by an independent practice market. That produces the tight metro table — Cleveland $217,970 through Toledo $207,990 — and it means the route to the $296,660 ninetieth percentile runs through institutional roles: division leadership, medical directorship, academic appointment. It is a more predictable career than in specialties with private practice options, and a less individually negotiable one.