The 2025 Otolaryngology Workforce Report

Andrew J. Tompkins, MD, MBA

With your help, the AAO-HNS Workforce & Socioeconomic Task Force released the 2025 Otolaryngology Workforce report in early October. Please take the opportunity to review the report, which focused on call and compensation. Rather than highlight pieces of the report, I would encourage each member to read it in full and take note of what might be of particular interest in their work environment. We were delighted to be joined by the AAO-HNS Board of Governors for the release of their call survey results in this report, which unpacked the nuances of call in different practice environments. As always, the Academy staff and leadership deserve our thanks as they worked diligently to help push this over the finish line before the AAO-HNSF 2025 Annual Meeting & OTO EXPO in October. 

We hope these reports allow otolaryngologists to understand the market and benchmark their own practices. The responses were 30% higher than our 2023 survey, which allowed us to describe compensation and call information across more diverse practice settings than ever before. We were also able to describe clinical income by economic regions and by fellowship in academic settings. A few physicians have reached out regarding the specifics of ancillary income, so we have updated the report with an appendix that shows the survey questions, which we hope clarifies income types.

We were excited to describe call income for the first time. Your open-ended responses helped to clarify the types of questions we should be asking to understand this topic with more specificity. The project to understand our workforce and patient care needs is a constantly evolving one, and we appreciate you giving us the opportunity to improve our future inquiries. 

Many of you have reached out to give feedback, describe how these reports are helping, and are eager to partner for future projects. We thank you for that and look forward to working together with the Academy sections, subspecialty societies, and others so that we can take our work to the next level. Uniting our specialty under one roof has never been more important—a point emphasized by our Academy President Gene Brown, MD, RPH. Our workforce matters to all of us, most importantly our patients. We are perhaps as subspecialized as ever, but we are all still otolaryngologists and our workforce concerns are very much interrelated.

Also, in taking things up a notch in our next survey, we will be describing patient access in the terms that are important to them—wait times and geographic access. While this assessment will represent a departure from the standard access measure of physicians per 100,000 population, it positions us to be at the forefront of patient access research.

We look forward to our next and more comprehensive survey, which is planned for next year. As always, please reach out to our task force with any ideas or questions. Thank you again for your participation in these surveys. We are excited to help describe our workforce in further detail, in particular unmet needs, so we can all work toward optimizing patient care delivery.

Register here to participate in a webinar on the highlights from the 2025 Otolaryngology Workforce Survey 8:00 – 9:00 pm ET on Wednesday, December 3, 2025.