Obstetrics and gynecology tops the list, with burnout rates as high as 91% in recent surveys. Across all specialties, about 49% of physicians reported burnout in 2024, down slightly from 53% the year before but still higher than the 44% rate measured before the pandemic. The differences between specialties are enormous, with some reporting rates more than double the national average while others sit well below it.
Specialties With the Highest Burnout
A cross-sectional survey published in The Permanente Journal found burnout prevalence ranging from 36% in radiology to 91% in obstetrics and gynecology. The overall rate across all surveyed physicians was 69%. Surgical and nonsurgical specialties had nearly identical rates (70% vs. 68%), which challenges the common assumption that the operating room is uniquely stressful.
Emergency medicine consistently ranks near the top in burnout surveys, along with critical care, family medicine, and internal medicine. These specialties share a few common threads: high patient volumes, unpredictable schedules, and heavy documentation demands. Radiology, at the other end, tends to have more predictable workflows and less direct patient confrontation, which likely contributes to its lower numbers.
One notable finding: working on the frontline during COVID-19 didn’t produce a statistically significant difference in burnout (74% for frontline physicians vs. 66% for those not on the frontline). That suggests the drivers of burnout are more structural than situational. Pandemic surges made things worse temporarily, but the underlying problem existed long before 2020.
The Electronic Health Record Problem
Documentation is the single biggest time drain competing with actual patient care. Primary care physicians spend nearly 6 hours per day in electronic health records, including about 1.4 hours outside of normal clinic hours. During a typical half-day clinic session, physicians see an average of 5.6 patients but spend 2.4 of those 5 hours interacting with the EHR rather than with patients directly.
That ratio matters. Physicians trained for years to diagnose and treat illness, not to click through software. When roughly half of every workday goes to documentation, it erodes the sense of purpose that brought most doctors into medicine. This is a consistent finding across burnout research: the problem isn’t hard work itself but work that feels meaningless or disconnected from patient care.
Who Burns Out Most: Gender and Experience
Women physicians burn out at significantly higher rates than their male colleagues. In 2021, 56% of women physicians reported burnout compared to 41% of men. That 15-point gap has been consistent across multiple studies, with women showing 30% to 60% higher odds of burnout after adjusting for specialty and work hours. The reasons are layered: women physicians are more likely to shoulder domestic responsibilities alongside clinical work, face gender-based discrimination in the workplace, and report less autonomy in their practice settings.
Experience level is the other major predictor. Physicians with 10 or fewer years of experience consistently report the highest burnout, with rates reaching 56.7% in 2021. The numbers drop steadily with seniority. Doctors with more than 30 years of experience had just a 35.1% burnout rate that same year, and their odds of burnout were roughly one-fifth those of their early-career peers. This pattern likely reflects a combination of factors: younger physicians carry heavier workloads, have less control over their schedules, are still paying off debt, and haven’t yet developed the coping strategies that come with decades in practice. There’s also survivorship bias at play. Physicians who couldn’t tolerate the conditions may have already left medicine.
Regional Differences Across the US
Burnout isn’t evenly distributed geographically. Between 2018 and 2023, the Pacific states saw the largest increase in healthcare worker burnout (7.0%), followed by the West North Central (6.5%) and New England (6.0%) regions. Some areas have started recovering faster than others. The East South Central, West North Central, and Mountain states reported the biggest decreases between 2022 and 2023, suggesting that post-pandemic recovery is happening unevenly across the country.
What Burnout Costs Patients and the System
Physician burnout costs the US healthcare system an estimated $4.6 billion annually in turnover and reduced clinical hours, roughly $7,600 per employed physician per year. But the human cost may be more concerning. In a survey of more than 6,500 physicians, 10.5% reported making a major medical error in the previous three months. Among those who reported errors, 77.6% were experiencing burnout, compared to 51.5% of those who didn’t report errors. After adjusting for age, sex, workload, and specialty, burned-out physicians had 2.2 times the odds of reporting a medical error.
The mental health toll is steep as well. About 28% of medical residents display depressive symptoms, and 42% experience anxiety and depression during training. Suicidal ideation runs higher among healthcare workers than in the general workforce: 7.1% within a given year, compared to 4.3% for other workers.
What Actually Reduces Burnout
Individual strategies like meditation and peer support groups have measurable effects on specific burnout dimensions, particularly emotional exhaustion and the sense of detachment from patients. But the research consistently points to organizational changes as more impactful than personal wellness programs. Reducing documentation burdens, giving physicians more control over their schedules, clearly defining roles, and ensuring workloads are sustainable all target the root causes rather than asking individual doctors to become more resilient in a broken system.
The economic case for these interventions is straightforward. With $4.6 billion lost annually to burnout-related turnover and reduced hours, even moderate investment in structural fixes pays for itself. The challenge is that the specialties most affected, like OB-GYN, emergency medicine, and primary care, are also the ones facing the greatest workforce shortages, creating a cycle where remaining physicians absorb heavier loads and burn out faster.