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Pediatric surgeons

Also called Children's surgeon, Pediatric general surgeon, Pediatric surgical specialist, Neonatal surgeon, Pediatric trauma surgeon

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 1,190 US pediatric surgeons, with median pay of $559,030 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 300 from 1975, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for pediatric surgeons: Robotic-assisted pediatric surgery, 2001 to 2020. Robotic adoption changed the skill profile required of pediatric surgeons: centers with da Vinci systems increasingly expected fellowship graduates to have baseline robotic exposure.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 2% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Pediatric surgeons: jobs and pay since 1975 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/29-1243

Chicago

Future History. "Pediatric surgeons: jobs and pay since 1975." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/29-1243.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_29_1243, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Pediatric surgeons: jobs and pay since 1975}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/29-1243}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

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187519001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Surgeon to Children (general surgeons performing children's operations at children's hospitals)
Known then as Pediatric Surgeon / Children's Surgeon (Ladd-era specialist, informal specialty designation)
Known then as Pediatric Surgeon (specialty recognized by the Journal of Pediatric Surgery and APSA, pre-board-certification era)
Known then as Pediatric Surgeons (BLS SOC 29-1243; ABS board-certified)
Known today as Pediatric Surgeons (BLS SOC 29-1243; ABS board-certified)
Projected to still be called Pediatric Surgeons (BLS SOC 29-1243; ABS board-certified)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
1K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$559,030
Est.

≈ $544,698 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1855

The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia opened on November 23, 1855 as the first hospital in North America dedicated entirely to children -- founded by Dr. Francis West Lewis, inspired by London's Great Ormond Street Hospital (1852). The first surgery at CHOP was performed in 1870. Boston Children's Hospital followed in 1869. These institutions created the institutional home without which pediatric surgery as a specialty could not have emerged.

Beat · 1938

On August 8, 1938, Robert Gross -- while his mentor William Ladd was on summer vacation -- performed the first successful ligation of a patent ductus arteriosus at Boston Children's Hospital on seven-year-old Lorraine Sweeney. Ladd was furious; Gross went on to become Surgeon-in-Chief after Ladd's retirement. The 1938 operation is widely considered the founding act of pediatric cardiac surgery and a landmark moment in the broader history of the specialty.

Beat · 1965

The Journal of Pediatric Surgery published its first issue in 1965, with C. Everett Koop as founding editor. Koop later became US Surgeon General (1982-1989). The journal gave the specialty its first dedicated peer review venue and accelerated the accumulation of clinical evidence that justified board certification a decade later.

Beat · 1970

APSA held its founding meeting on April 17, 1970 in suburban Chicago -- organized by Lucian Leape and Thomas Boles after three failed attempts to win specialty recognition (1957, 1961, 1967). Robert Gross served as inaugural president. Membership was restricted to surgeons with entirely pediatric practices. The association succeeded where previous efforts within the American Academy of Pediatrics had failed: an independent surgical organization could negotiate directly with the ABS for subspecialty certification.

Beat · 1975

The inaugural ABS certifying examination for pediatric surgery was administered in April 1975, the day before the sixth APSA meeting near San Juan, Puerto Rico. Over 250 pediatric surgeons took the three-hour test; 238 passed. Harvey Beardmore, Judson Randolph, and Mark Rowe -- who had taken a preliminary examination administered in Philadelphia in 1974 -- held the first certificates. The 1975 examination transformed pediatric surgery from an informal designation into a certifiable subspecialty with verifiable training standards.

Beat · 2009

The APSA workforce survey published in 2009 found that the approximately 1,150 active pediatric surgeons in practice were not sufficient to meet national demand: APSA members estimated a need for 280 additional practitioners. Eight percent of active practices reported call-coverage problems attributable to workforce scarcity, and 8% of surgeons reported they were delaying retirement because it would leave their community without coverage. This structural scarcity has been the single most defining labor-market feature of the specialty for five decades.

Beat · 2023

AI tools began entering the pediatric surgical workflow in the 2020s, primarily at the administrative and diagnostic periphery rather than the operative core. The AMA's AI in Health Care position paper (updated 2025) affirms that physicians bear ultimate clinical responsibility for AI-assisted decisions and that surgical AI is classified as decision support only. The AMA position is consistent with the actual deployment pattern: no AI system operates autonomously in the pediatric OR, and none is on a credible near-term path to doing so given the scale and fragility of neonatal anatomy.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace pediatric surgeons? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+2%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 29-1243 (Pediatric surgeons): 1.3 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 1.3 thousand in 2035, a change of 0.0 thousand (+2.0%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (5.2% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
22.2%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 29-1243.00 Pediatric Surgeons. Shown: human-rated β = 0.222, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.056 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.389; GPT-4-rated β 0.361. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for pediatric surgeons

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereConduct AI-assisted surgical video review for quality improvement and training: using Theator AI Surgical Intelligence to review annotated laparoscopic and robotic surgical video from pediatric surgery cases

Conduct AI-assisted surgical video review for quality improvement and training: using Theator AI Surgical Intelligence to review annotated laparoscopic and robotic surgical video from pediatric surgery cases; examining AI-identified procedural phases, instrument-use patterns, and technical event markers; participating in AI-enabled structured morbidity and mortality review using video evidence; and supervising pediatric surgery residents and fellows using annotated video for competency-based milestone assessment.[12],[11]

Where your edge is

Theator's AI surgical video analytics represent the first systematic substrate for competency-based surgical education in pediatric surgery: annotated case video enables structured debriefing, peer benchmarking, and milestone-based assessment that previously required subjective attending evaluation. JAMA Surgery commentary (Jan 2026) identified AI video analytics as a transformative tool for surgical coaching. For pediatric surgeons in academic programs, building proficiency with Theator's video review workflow positions you as an educational innovation leader: a role that carries meaningful career advantage in fellowship program directorship and academic promotion. The irreplaceable contribution in video review is the expert interpretation: identifying the teaching moment in a technically complete video that a resident almost handled correctly, or recognizing that a phase timing anomaly in your own case reflects a preventable inefficiency.

AI is sitting alongside you hereConduct clinical research and contribute to pediatric surgery outcomes registries, submitting cases to the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program–Pediatric (NSQIP-Pediatric) via EHR-integrated automated data extraction

Conduct clinical research and contribute to pediatric surgery outcomes registries, submitting cases to the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program–Pediatric (NSQIP-Pediatric) via EHR-integrated automated data extraction; using AI literature synthesis (OpenEvidence, Glass Health) for current evidence on surgical technique controversies (laparoscopic vs. open appendectomy in perforated appendicitis in young children, timing of Kasai for biliary atresia, primary vs. staged repair for complex congenital cases); and reviewing AI-generated surgeon-level outcome benchmarks vs. NSQIP-Pediatric national comparators.[13],[14],[15]

Where your edge is

NSQIP-Pediatric covers more than a hundred U.S. children's hospitals and captures outcomes (SSI, readmission, return to OR, mortality) at the surgeon and program level. Epic integrations at participating institutions automate much of the case submission data abstraction from structured operative notes. Surgeons who engage with their NSQIP-Pediatric benchmarking reports, and investigate outliers, are positioned to improve outcomes systematically and demonstrate quality performance to hospital leadership. OpenEvidence and Glass Health reduce the time cost of literature review for evidence-based technique controversies in pediatric surgery, where the evidence base is often thin (small RCTs, single-center retrospective studies) and rapidly evolving.

Get started with these tools
AI is sitting alongside you hereManage OR scheduling, surgical services logistics, and team coordination, planning and scheduling pediatric surgical cases including coordination with neonatology (for ex utero intrapartum treatment (EXIT) procedures), pediatric cardiology (for cardiac-associated anomaly repair), and pediatric radiology

Manage OR scheduling, surgical services logistics, and team coordination, planning and scheduling pediatric surgical cases including coordination with neonatology (for ex utero intrapartum treatment (EXIT) procedures), pediatric cardiology (for cardiac-associated anomaly repair), and pediatric radiology; reviewing Caresyntax AI OR analytics dashboards for case duration variance, first-case on-time start rates, and preference card accuracy; directing and coordinating activities of scrub technicians, surgical residents, anesthesiologists, and nursing staff in the pediatric OR.[16],[1]

Where your edge is

Pediatric OR scheduling is unusually complex: case duration variance is high (congenital anomaly repair is notoriously difficult to time-predict), equipment requirements are patient-weight-dependent (pediatric instrument sets, neonatal-specific robotic arms and trocar sizes for da Vinci), and multidisciplinary coordination (neonatology, PICU, cardiac surgery, radiology) adds scheduling overhead. Caresyntax AI analytics reduce the administrative cognitive load by surfacing case duration variability and preference card accuracy, enabling OR directors and surgical department chiefs to optimize block time allocation and reduce supply waste. Your leadership contribution is the clinical-strategic integration: setting realistic block time expectations for complex congenital cases, advocating for dedicated pediatric robotic program infrastructure, and building the interdisciplinary team relationships (neonatology, PICU, anesthesia) that define a high-functioning pediatric surgery program.

Where pediatric surgeons go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Medical and Health Services Managers

Pediatric surgeons with section chief, quality committee, or program leadership experience are well positioned for Medical and Health Services Manager roles: CMO, VP of Surgical Services, or chief of pediatric surgery at a large children's hospital system. As robotic surgery (da Vinci 5), AI OR analytics (Caresyntax), and AI-assisted outcome registries (NSQIP-Pediatric, Epic-integrated benchmarking) proliferate, children's hospitals need physician executives who understand pediatric surgical AI governance, robotic program buildout, and value-based care contracting for pediatric surgical episodes. Pediatric surgery CMO roles at freestanding children's hospitals command compensation packages competitive with clinical practice, with the added stability of administrative career trajectory.

What you'd add
  • · Pediatric healthcare economics: DRG reimbursement for pediatric surgical procedures, Medicaid pediatric surgical case mix, Bundled Payment for Care Improvement (BPCI) applicability to pediatric episodes
  • · Surgical program leadership: OR block time optimization, robotic surgery program credentialing standards, pediatric surgical subspecialty service line strategy (fetal surgery, pediatric transplant, pediatric oncology)
  • · Healthcare executive credentials: MBA (healthcare management) or ACHE/American College of Healthcare Executives certification; Joint Commission pediatric surgical quality metrics
  • · AI governance for pediatric surgical programs: evaluating surgical AI tools (robotic platforms, video analytics, diagnostic AI) for pediatric populations; NSQIP-Pediatric data governance; clinical AI oversight committee participation
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of pediatric surgeons changed since 1855?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Ether anesthesia + antiseptic technique (post-1846 surgical revolution)

    Before October 16, 1846 -- the day William Morton demonstrated ether anesthesia publicly at Massachusetts General Hospital's Ether Dome -- operations on children were performed without analgesia, held down by force, completed in seconds. Ether changed everything: elective surgery on children became bearable for patients and methodical for surgeons. The first pediatric ether anesthetic documented with reasonable certainty was given on January 8, 1845, but mass adoption followed the Boston demonstration. Antisepsis (Lister, 1867) and aseptic technique completed the transformation: children's hospitals founded in the 1850s-1870s could now accumulate meaningful surgical case series with survivable outcomes. The distinguishing tool of this era was not a device but a compound -- ether -- that made it possible to operate deliberately on a child without killing them from shock or pain, and thereby to accumulate the experience that would eventually constitute a specialty.

  • Ladd-era specialty formation: dedicated training, open visceral surgery, congenital anomaly repair

    When William Ladd became Surgeon-in-Chief at Boston Children's Hospital in 1927, he transformed what had been occasional operations at general hospitals into a systematic clinical enterprise. Ladd defined the operative approach to intestinal malrotation (still called Ladd's procedure) and pyloric stenosis; trained Robert Gross, who in 1938 ligated the first patent ductus arteriosus; and co-authored with Gross the first modern American pediatric surgical textbook in 1941. The tool of this era was not hardware but technique -- the systematic development of operative approaches to conditions unique to neonates and children. By the 1950s, esophageal atresia repair, Hirschsprung pull-through, and pyeloplasty were becoming achievable at high-volume centers. Gross's 1953 "green bible," The Surgery of Infancy and Childhood, published in four languages and sold tens of thousands of copies, codified the body of knowledge.

  • Specialty institutionalization: APSA (1969), board certification (1975), Journal of Pediatric Surgery (1965)

    The Journal of Pediatric Surgery launched in 1965 -- with C. Everett Koop as first editor -- and for the first time gave the nascent field a venue for systematic knowledge accumulation. APSA was formally organized in 1969 by Lucian Leape and Thomas Boles, held its first meeting in April 1970 with Robert Gross as inaugural president, and succeeded where previous applications in 1957, 1961, and 1967 had failed in securing specialty recognition from the American Board of Surgery. The ABS approved special certification in June 1972; in April 1975, hundreds of pediatric surgeons sat for the inaugural three-hour certifying examination in Puerto Rico, and hundreds of passed. This era's "technology" was institutional: the creation of the credentialing and knowledge infrastructure that transformed pediatric surgery from a personal practice style into a certifiable medical specialty.

  • Minimally invasive / laparoscopic pediatric surgery (laparoscopy from 1971, mass adoption 1990s)

    The first laparoscopy in pediatric surgery was reported by Stephen Gans in 1971, but mass adoption of laparoscopic techniques in children lagged behind the adult surgical revolution. By the early 1990s, pediatric laparoscopic appendectomy and cholecystectomy were entering routine practice. Critically, laparoscopy required adaptation for pediatric anatomy: instruments sized for adult abdomens were proportionally crude in an infant, and abdominal insufflation pressures that adults tolerated created physiologic challenges in small children. Pediatric surgeons who mastered laparoscopy significantly reduced postoperative pain, length of stay, and incisional complications for their patients. By 2000, laparoscopic appendectomy was standard of care for pediatric appendicitis at most major children's hospitals, and the scope of laparoscopic pediatric procedures expanded to include fundoplication, splenectomy, and initial approaches to biliary disease.

  • Robotic-assisted pediatric surgery -- da Vinci system (first pediatric case July 2000, FDA cleared 2000)

    The da Vinci surgical system received FDA clearance in 2000, and the first reported pediatric use followed immediately: Meininger and colleagues reported robotic-assisted Nissen fundoplication in a child performed in July 2000. Pediatric robotic pyeloplasty was first reported in 2002. Adoption at high-volume children's hospitals accelerated through the 2000s and 2010s. By the mid-2010s, pediatric robotic pyeloplasty and fundoplication had largely displaced laparoscopic approaches at centers with robotic programs. The da Vinci 5 (released 2024) added force feedback and a tenfold increase in computing power over the Xi, further extending precision for neonatal-scale anatomy.

    Effect on the work

    Robotic adoption changed the skill profile required of pediatric surgeons: centers with da Vinci systems increasingly expected fellowship graduates to have baseline robotic exposure. A small number of community general surgeons who had previously performed laparoscopic pediatric cases at non-children's hospitals found the technology investment barrier reinforced referral to children's hospital centers.

  • AI-augmented pediatric surgical workflow: ambient documentation, imaging AI, OR analytics, surgical video intelligence

    A cluster of AI tools entered the pediatric surgical workflow in the 2020s, not at the operating table but at the edges of the surgeon's day. Ambient documentation platforms (Abridge, Dragon Copilot) capture family consultation and post-operative visit notes from ambient audio, recapturing several hours per clinical day in a specialty with unusually high documentation burden due to the family-centered care model. AI radiology triage tools (Aidoc) provide on-call urgency flagging for appendicitis, intussusception, and bowel obstruction CT findings, reducing the time from image acquisition to surgeon notification. OR analytics platforms (Caresyntax) surface case duration variance and preference card accuracy at institutions managing complex multi-disciplinary pediatric surgical programs. AI surgical video analytics (Theator, raised $70M Series C in November 2025) bring the first systematic competency-based assessment substrate to pediatric surgery training, where previous performance review was almost entirely subjective. None of these tools operate autonomously in the OR or make operative decisions; all function as peripheral augmentation around the irreplaceable intraoperative judgment of the surgeon.

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Pediatric Surgeons employment and pay by year

On record since1855
Latest US employment1,190 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$559,030 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+2% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 9 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
1975300$60,000Est., Nakayama DK et al (employment) Researched contextEst., University of Missouri Libraries (pay) Researched contextReport
1980416n/aEst., Nakayama DK et al Researched contextReport
2000661$250,000Est., Nakayama DK et al (employment) Researched contextEst., MGMA DataDive Provider Compensation Data (pay) Researched contextReport
20091,150n/aEst., Nakayama DK, Lund DP Researched contextReport
2021820n/aBLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022780n/aBLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
20231,180n/aBLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
20241,050n/aBLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
20251,190$559,030BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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