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What You Should Know:
– While overall physician burnout in the United States continues a multi-year decline, new data from the American Medical Association (AMA) reveals that the recovery is not uniform across the profession.
– As of 2025, 41.9% of physicians reported at least one symptom of burnout, a steady improvement from 43.2% in 2024 and 48.2% in 2023.
The Specialty Heatmap: High vs. Low Burnout
The 2025 AMA national physician comparison report, which aggregated nearly 19,000 responses across 106 health systems, underscores a widening gap between hospital-based and office-based specialties.
Specialties with the Highest Burnout Rates:
- Emergency Medicine: 49.8%
- Urological Surgery: 49.5%
- Hematology/Oncology: 49.3%
- Obstetrics and Gynecology: 45.7%
- Radiology: 45.2%
- Family Medicine: 45%
Specialties with the Lowest Burnout Rates:
- Infectious Diseases: 23.3%
- Nephrology: 29.3%
- Dermatology: 31.5%
- Psychiatry: 31.6%
- Anesthesiology: 39.2%
Hospital-based specialties—including emergency medicine and radiology—performed worse than the national benchmark on three out of five key well-being indicators, pointing to persistent operational and workflow failures.
Measuring Value and Satisfaction
The report benchmarks four other critical indicators of organizational health: job stress, job satisfaction, intent to leave, and feeling valued.
- Feeling Valued: Approximately 56.2% of physicians feel valued by their organization, a 1.7% increase from 2024. However, gender disparities persist: 59.6% of male physicians reported feeling valued compared to 53.3% of female physicians.
- Job Satisfaction: Psychiatry (83%) and OB/GYN (81.2%) reported the highest satisfaction, while hospital-based specialties trailed at 74.8%.
- Experience Matters: Physicians post-20 years in practice reported feeling more valued (59.4%) than those in their first five years (57.9%).
A Call for Targeted Intervention
The AMA is urging health system leaders to move away from “one-size-fits-all” wellness programs. Because burnout drivers vary—from the administrative intensity of family medicine to the acute stressors of emergency care—solutions must be specialty-specific.
To support this, the AMA offers a Well-being Toolkit designed to help systems calculate the financial cost of burnout and implement evidence-based strategies to reduce administrative friction and enhance physician well-being.
