Radiologist Salary in Virginia 2026,
$376,270 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Virginia figure is $376,270 a year, or $180.90 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $117,530 at the 10th percentile to $614,360 at the 90th and quartiles at $284,320 and $557,540. That is 10.6% below the national median of $420,860. The row is SOC 29-1224, an exact match to the occupation.

BLS published only a statewide all-areas row at $376,270; Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk and Richmond are withheld, which BLS does where publication could disclose an identifiable establishment or where the estimate fails reliability standards. Northern Virginia is separately absent because the Washington metropolitan area is published as a multi-state metro. The result is a page with no usable geographic detail, and this site will not invent any.

Almost certainly, though the direction is not determinable from the data. Images can be interpreted from anywhere, and a radiologist reading for a Virginia facility must hold a Virginia licence regardless of where they physically sit. OEWS attributes wages to the establishment's location, so a Virginia practice's reported wages may include remotely-working radiologists while Virginia-resident radiologists reading for out-of-state practices may not appear. That decoupling makes the state figure a weaker guide than it would be for a bedside specialty.

Yes. Virginia participates in the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact, which provides an expedited route to licensure for board-certified physicians already licensed in another participating state. For radiology this is unusually valuable, because the specialty routinely requires licensure in multiple states — a radiologist reading studies for facilities in several jurisdictions must be licensed in each of them.

The data does not determine it, and the honest answer is that several explanations fit. The very wide interquartile range from $284,320 to $557,540 suggests a mixed practice model composition, and a state whose radiology workforce leans more toward academic and hospital-employed practice than toward private group partnership will publish a lower median even where individual compensation is comparable. Teleradiology attribution adds further uncertainty. Treat the 10.6% deficit as a fact about the published data rather than a firm conclusion about the market.

It weakens the link between where a radiologist works and where their wage is counted, more than in any other clinical specialty. OEWS assigns wages to the establishment's location. A radiology group headquartered in Virginia employing radiologists who read from three other states will report those wages as Virginia wages; a Virginia-resident radiologist employed by an out-of-state teleradiology company will not appear in Virginia's figures at all. The licensure requirement — a Virginia licence to read for a Virginia facility, regardless of physical location — means this cross-flow is routine rather than exceptional. Any state radiology median should therefore be read as a statement about establishments rather than about a local labour market.

Because radiology contains several distinct compensation models. Academic radiology pays on university and health system scales with protected time for teaching and research. Hospital-employed practice pays a salary with productivity components. Private group partnership pays a share of the group's collections, which at a well-run practice with good payer mix can be very substantial. Teleradiology often pays per study read. Those four models produce genuinely different outcomes for equally competent radiologists, and SOC 29-1224 counts them all — which is why the interquartile range spans from $284,320 to $557,540 and why the median describes a midpoint between models rather than a typical career.

It is the most-discussed automation question in medicine and the most frequently overstated. Current systems function as triage and detection support — flagging findings, prioritising worklists, quantifying measurements — rather than as autonomous interpreters, and they operate under a radiologist's responsibility. The practical effect so far has been to increase throughput, which increases the volume of studies a practice can handle rather than reducing the number of radiologists needed. Meanwhile imaging volume continues to rise with population age and with the substitution of imaging for exploratory procedures. The specialty's constraint remains residency and fellowship capacity, not demand.