Physician Burnout by Specialty: The 2026 Numbers
Is physician burnout really declining? Here’s what the latest 2026 data means for you.
Reviewed by the clinical team at Gladstone Wellness
If you’re reading this between charts, after a shift that ran two hours long, or at 11 p.m. because it’s the first quiet moment of your day — the recent headlines announcing that physician burnout is “declining” probably land a little strangely.
You’re being told things are improving. You don’t feel improved.
You’re not imagining the gap. The data does show progress, and that progress is real. But the full story is more complicated than the headline suggests — and for physicians in certain specialties, it’s frankly grim. So, what is the full story?
What the Latest Data Actually Says
In April 2026, the American Medical Association released its 2025 National Physician Comparison Report, drawn from nearly 19,000 physician responses across 38 states and 106 health systems.
| AMA 2025 indicator | Figure |
| Physicians reporting ≥1 burnout symptom | 41.9% (down from 43.2% in 2024, 48.2% in 2023) |
| Key well-being indicators improved year-over-year | 4 of 5 |
| Physicians feeling valued by their organization | 56.2% |
| Job satisfaction | 72.1% (up from 68%) |
| Intent to leave within two years | 31.1% — roughly one in three |
This continues a four-year decline from the COVID-era peak of 62.8% in 2021, and it is consistent with peer-reviewed research from Mayo Clinic Proceedings tracking physician burnout since 2011. Health systems that invested seriously in administrative burden reduction and well-being infrastructure are seeing returns.
But different surveys tell different stories. Medscape’s 2026 Physician Burnout & Career Satisfaction Report, surveying over 15,000 physicians across 29 specialties, places overall burnout closer to 49 percent — and emergency medicine at 62 percent. The answer to “how bad is it?” depends substantially on which physicians you ask and how.
Visualizing the trend — physician burnout, share reporting ≥1 symptom:
| Year | Burnout rate |
| 2021 (peak) | 62.8% |
| 2023 | 48.2% |
| 2024 | 43.2% |
| 2025 | 41.9% |
The Headline Hides a Two-Tier Reality
When you break the AMA data down by specialty, a wide gap appears.
| Highest-burnout specialties (2025) | Rate | Lowest-burnout specialties | Rate |
| Emergency medicine | 49.8% | Infectious diseases | 23.3% |
| Urological surgery | 49.5% | Nephrology | 29.3% |
| Hematology/oncology | 49.3% | Dermatology | 31.5% |
| Obstetrics & gynecology | 45.7% | Psychiatry | 31.6% |
| Radiology | 45.2% | Anesthesiology | 39.2% |
| Family medicine | 45.0% |
The distance between an emergency medicine physician (49.8%) and a dermatologist (31.5%) is more than 18 percentage points. That isn’t a rounding difference — it’s a fundamentally different working life. Hospital-based specialties performed below the overall benchmark on three of five well-being indicators, with workload intensity, staffing constraints, and operational workflow problems cited as dominant drivers.
If you work in emergency medicine, urology, or oncology, a national average that includes dermatologists and infectious disease specialists does not describe your reality.
May follow-up coverage from the AMA and Medical Economics surfaced one more axis worth noting: a meaningful gender gap in feeling valued by one’s organization. 59.6 percent of male physicians reported feeling valued, compared with 53.3 percent of female physicians. That six-point gap cuts across specialties and adds another dimension to who experiences burnout most acutely.
Why “Declining Burnout” Can Still Feel Like Drowning
Three reasons the gap between the headline and your lived experience makes sense.
First, a 1.3-point drop in aggregate burnout doesn’t translate to noticeable change in any individual workday. The systemic conditions that burned you out last year — short staffing, overflowing inboxes, prior authorization battles, moral compromises forced by reimbursement structures — are mostly still in place. One stubborn data point: 20.9 percent of physicians still spend more than eight hours per week on EHR work outside normal hours, unchanged since 2022 despite years of attention to “pajama time.”
Second, the survey measures whether physicians experience any burnout symptom. It doesn’t distinguish mild emotional exhaustion from severe depletion. A physician whose burnout has worsened materially can still be counted the same way as last year.
Third, burnout is not monolithic. The Maslach Burnout Inventory defines burnout across three dimensions — emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced sense of personal accomplishment. One physician may feel cynical but functional; another competent but utterly emptied. Recovery requires understanding which dimension is most affected.
This is also where the conversation has begun shifting toward a different framework: a growing body of research argues that what we call burnout is often more accurately described as moral injury — the wound caused by being repeatedly forced to act, or fail to act, in ways that violate one’s professional values. Burnout suggests a deficit in the individual. Moral injury locates the wound where it originates: in the system.
What the Data Means for You
If the national headline doesn’t match your experience, three honest questions are worth sitting with.
What specialty-specific drivers am I experiencing? Burnout in primary care looks different from burnout in surgery. Family medicine drivers tend to be administrative volume; in emergency medicine and surgery, acuity and shift structure; in oncology and OB/GYN, cumulative grief and moral fatigue. The interventions that work for one cluster don’t work for another. A 2025 JAMA Network Open study found ambient AI documentation tools cut ambulatory clinician burnout from 51.9 percent to 38.8 percent in 30 days — a striking result, but one that addresses administrative load specifically. It would do little for compassion fatigue in oncology.
Are the systemic improvements reaching me? Audit honestly. Has your administrative burden decreased this year? Has staffing improved on your unit, your call schedule, your clinic? Do you feel meaningfully more valued than 12 months ago? If not, you’re in a cohort the aggregate data doesn’t describe. That doesn’t mean you’re failing — it means the system-level gains are uneven and haven’t reached you yet.
What’s within my control — and what isn’t? Viktor Frankl wrote that when we cannot change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. That isn’t a call to absorb suffering quietly. It’s a recognition that some causes of burnout are systemic and outside individual control, while other dimensions — how you relate to your work, what boundaries you maintain, where you draw meaning — are within it.
The Case for Specialty-Aware Support
The AMA itself urged health system leaders to move away from “one-size-fits-all” wellness programs, with AMA President Dr. Bobby Mukkamala framing improvement as requiring “targeted, specialty-specific strategies.”
That’s a notable shift. After more than a decade of generic wellness initiatives — meditation apps, resilience trainings, occasional pizza in the break room — the consensus is finally catching up: the underlying conditions matter more than the surface-level interventions.
Meaningful recovery — particularly for physicians whose specialties run at 45 percent or higher — typically requires three things: individualized assessment of which burnout dimensions are most active; evidence-based practices, including meaning-centered approaches and structured resilience-building; and peer community with people who genuinely understand the specialty-specific texture of your day. That last piece is often what’s missing. Talking to a generalist coach about ED burnout, or a non-clinician therapist about the moral weight of an oncology practice, can leave physicians feeling further isolated rather than supported.
The Honest Bottom Line
The latest data tells us the system is bending in the right direction. Your experience may tell you it’s not bending fast enough — or, depending on your specialty, that it isn’t bending for you at all. Both can be true. The improvement is real. The remaining problem is also real. Mental Health Awareness Month is a useful frame, but not, by itself, a solution.
If you’re in emergency medicine, urology, oncology, OB/GYN, family medicine, or another specialty still running at 45 percent burnout or higher, the national trend is not your trend. And if you’re in any specialty and the statistics simply don’t match how you feel — that gap is worth taking seriously, not dismissing.
If you’d like to talk with someone who understands both the data and the human experience behind it, we’d welcome the conversation.
Gladstone Wellness was founded by Dr. Surbhi Khanna and Dr. Anthony Massey, two psychiatrists with decades of experience in behavioral health and physician wellness. Our FLOW program combines individual coaching, evidence-based practices, and peer community for healthcare professionals navigating burnout.
Sources
- American Medical Association, “Physician burnout rate continues to decline, falling to nearly 42%,” April 2026
- American Medical Association, 2025 National Physician Comparison Report (AMA Organizational Biopsy)
- American Medical Association, “These 9 physician specialties report highest burnout rates,” May 2026
- Medical Economics, “Physician burnout declines overall, but gaps persist across specialties, AMA data show,” May 19, 2026
- Healthcare Dive, “Physician burnout is improving but some specialties lag, the AMA finds,” April 20, 2026
- Medscape, 2026 Physician Burnout & Career Satisfaction Report
- JAMA Network Open, 2025 study on ambient AI documentation and ambulatory clinician burnout
- Mayo Clinic Proceedings, “Changes in Burnout and Satisfaction With Work–Life Integration in Physicians and the General US Working Population”
- “Physician Burnout: A Hidden Threat to Patient Safety,” May 2026
