Psychiatrist Salary in Michigan 2026,
$291,850 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Michigan figure is $291,850 a year, or $140.31 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $81,390 at the 10th percentile to $399,920 at the 90th and quartiles at $190,630 and $364,230. That is 3.5% above the national median of $281,870. The row is SOC 29-1223, Psychiatrists — an exact match, though it counts residents alongside attendings.

Ann Arbor publishes $92,840, close to Michigan's 10th percentile of $81,390, against Detroit-Warren-Dearborn's $339,340. That is the teaching hospital effect: a metro whose psychiatric physician count is dominated by residents and fellows at a large academic centre will report a median reflecting training stipends rather than attending compensation. It says nothing about what practising psychiatrists in Ann Arbor earn — it says something about who OEWS counted there.

Detroit-Warren-Dearborn at $339,340, well above Grand Rapids-Wyoming-Kentwood at $225,440 and Ann Arbor at $92,840. Only three Michigan metros publish a figure for this occupation, which is itself a measure of how thin the state's psychiatric workforce is at 560 people. The Detroit figure reflects health system employment at scale in a market where psychiatric recruitment is difficult.

Substantially, and more than in most specialties. Psychiatry adapted to remote delivery more completely than almost any other clinical field, which means a Michigan psychiatrist's patient population need not be geographically local and a Michigan employer's candidate pool need not be either. Michigan's participation in the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact supports multi-state practice by expediting licensure for board-certified physicians already licensed elsewhere. The effect is to loosen the geographic constraints that the metro table describes.

The data suggests yes. A 3.5% premium over the national median, a location quotient of 0.71 indicating the state employs psychiatrists well below the national rate, and only 560 of them statewide together describe a shortage market. Subspecialties — child and adolescent, addiction, geriatric, forensic — are scarcer still. The flat 4.25% state income tax is an advantage at this income level, offset by city income taxes in Detroit and roughly two dozen other municipalities.

That the state has proportionally fewer psychiatrists than the country as a whole, at a time when the country as a whole has fewer than it needs. 560 psychiatrists serving Michigan's population is a thin workforce, and it shows up in access: waiting times, reliance on primary care for psychiatric prescribing, and difficulty placing patients in inpatient beds. For a psychiatrist considering Michigan, that scarcity is the market opportunity — the 3.5% premium is the visible part of it, but the more practical consequence is bargaining power over schedule, patient mix and practice arrangement, which the wage data cannot show.

Very carefully, because two of the three are compositionally distorted and one is a small sample. Ann Arbor at $92,840 is a training population. Grand Rapids-Wyoming-Kentwood at $225,440 sits well below the state median of $291,850, which for a substantial health system market is surprising and may reflect a mix weighted toward community mental health employment where salaries are constrained by public funding. Detroit-Warren-Dearborn at $339,340 is the most plausible reflection of an employed attending market. With only 560 psychiatrists statewide, all three cells rest on small samples and should be treated as indicative.

Toward subspecialty and toward remote delivery. Child and adolescent psychiatry is in acute shortage nationally and Michigan is no exception; addiction psychiatry has grown with the opioid response; geriatric psychiatry follows the population. All three command more than general psychiatry and all three have thinner supply. Meanwhile telehealth has changed where the work can be done — a psychiatrist based in Michigan can hold a multi-state practice, and a Michigan health system can recruit a psychiatrist who never moves here. That decoupling is the most significant structural change in this specialty and it is not visible in a metro table.