Radiologist Salary in Houston, TX 2026,
$131,470 Median | BLS + Market Data

BLS publishes a median of $131,470/yr for radiologists across the Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands metro, with a band from $74,640 to $439,740. The median is not a consultant benchmark: the 75th percentile at $380,320 is a far better reference for practising radiology, and the gap between them reflects a sample containing many residents, fellows and academically employed physicians.

The metro figure sits 58.8% below the Texas statewide median, which is itself strong evidence that the metro sample is training and academically weighted rather than that radiologists here are paid a fraction of state rates. Peer metros show how variable the effect is: Philadelphia publishes $452,940, San Antonio $398,680 and Denver $344,270, while Dallas at $156,800 and San Francisco at $106,000 show the same downward pull Houston does.

Yes, and along with private group partnership it accounts for most of what sits at the top of this published range. Interventional and neurointerventional radiologists perform catheter-based procedures — embolisation, stroke thrombectomy, oncological intervention — requiring additional fellowship training and overnight call for services that must run continuously. This metro's stroke, trauma and cancer centres depend on that coverage and compete nationally for a small pool of people able to provide it.

Through the Texas Medical Board, which issues a general physician licence — 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. Licensure is statewide, and radiologists reading remotely for facilities in other states need licensure in each of those states as well.

Clinically it is exceptional — one of the largest concentrations of oncological, cardiac, paediatric and trauma imaging in the country, with subspecialty practice available across essentially every area. Financially, the national radiologist shortage means recruitment is competitive everywhere, and Texas's lack of state income tax gives this metro a real advantage in that competition. The published median on this page understates consultant earnings substantially, for the compositional reasons set out above.

OEWS surveys establishments about payroll. Where a metro's speciality workforce is dominated by academic institutions and training programmes — as radiology is in this medical centre district — the sample fills with residents, fellows and salaried faculty on institutional pay scales. Private practice radiologists, who earn considerably more, are a smaller share of the count. The published median then describes the institutional population rather than the market. Recognising that is the difference between using this page well and drawing a badly wrong conclusion from it.

Imaging volumes have grown considerably faster than the number of radiologists trained, and the effect is visible in recruitment everywhere — groups compete nationally, sign-on arrangements have become routine, and reading backlogs are common. In this metro the effect is layered onto exceptional case complexity from the cancer and trauma centres. For a radiologist evaluating this market, the shortage is the dominant near-term fact, and it sits behind the upper percentiles on this page rather than the median.

Radiology's labour market is less geographic than most. Remote reading lets radiologists based here serve facilities elsewhere and lets local groups contract overnight coverage from other time zones. That supports local rates, because a radiologist here has options beyond local employers, and it complicates the interpretation of any metro wage figure, since the reader's location and the patient's increasingly differ. The figures on this page describe payrolls attributed to this metro, which is the honest scope of the source.