Radiologist Salary in Chicago, IL 2026,
$479,910 Median | BLS + Market Data

Chicago radiologists earn a BLS median of $479,910/yr across the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin metro, with a published range from $236,800 at the 10th percentile to $479,920 at the 90th. That is 14.0% above the US median for the speciality. BLS does not publish a metro employment count for radiologists in this area, so the size of the local workforce cannot be stated from this source.

No comparison is possible — BLS publishes no Illinois state median for radiologists, so this page makes no state claim rather than constructing one. Peer metro figures give a sense of the national spread for the same occupation: Phoenix at $525,930 and Los Angeles at $488,670 sit above this metro, while Philadelphia at $452,940, San Antonio at $398,680 and Denver at $344,270 sit below it.

Yes, and along with imaging leadership it accounts for most of what sits above the very tight cluster in the middle of this published range. Interventional and neurointerventional radiologists perform catheter-based procedures — embolisation, stroke thrombectomy, oncological intervention — that require additional fellowship training and carry overnight call for services that must run continuously. The region's stroke and trauma centres depend on that coverage, and compete for a small national pool of people able to provide it.

The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation issues a general Physician and Surgeon licence through its Medical Board; there is no radiology-specific state licence. The clinical route is a medical degree, a preliminary year, a four-year accredited diagnostic radiology residency, and in practice a subspecialty fellowship, with board certification through the American Board of Radiology. Licences are statewide, and radiologists reading remotely for facilities in other states need licensure in each of those states as well — a real administrative burden in teleradiology practice.

Because the sampled payrolls cluster at one level. The 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles are the same published figure and the 90th is ten dollars higher, which happens when a strong market rate exists and the counted sample is small. Radiology nationally has a well-documented supply shortage against rising imaging volumes, and in a shortage market employers converge on whatever it takes to hire rather than spreading across a range. The practical reading for a radiologist is that this metro has a clear going rate — the median here is an unusually reliable benchmark — and that the meaningful variation is in call structure and subspecialty rather than in base level.

Wage distributions spread out when employers can be choosy and compress when they cannot. Radiology in this metro shows the compressed pattern in an extreme form: three of the five published percentiles are identical. The national context explains it — imaging volumes have grown considerably faster than the number of radiologists trained, and groups across this region compete for the same candidates. When every employer must pay approximately the market rate to fill a post, the distribution collapses toward that rate. It also means that, unusually, an individual radiologist evaluating an offer in this market can treat the published median as directly applicable.

More than most specialities, radiology's labour market is no longer strictly geographic. Remote reading arrangements let radiologists based in this metro serve facilities elsewhere, and let groups here contract overnight coverage from radiologists in other time zones. That has two effects visible in the shape of this record. It supports the local rate, because a radiologist here has options beyond local employers. And it complicates the interpretation of any metro wage figure, because the physical location of the reader and the location of the patient increasingly differ. The figures on this page describe payrolls attributed to this metro, which is the honest scope of the source.

Radiology is the speciality most discussed in relation to automated image interpretation, and a decade of that discussion has not produced a fall in demand — imaging volumes and radiologist compensation have both risen. What has changed in practice across the region's departments is workflow: triage tools, measurement automation and reporting assistance that reduce time per study rather than replacing the report. The reasonable expectation is continued pressure on throughput rather than on headcount. Anyone weighing a radiology career on the basis of this metro's figures should treat the shortage described here as the dominant near-term fact.