Telehealth Salary: What Nurses and Physicians Actually Earn

Published 2026-09-13. Last verified 2026-10-27 by the TelehealthHiring editorial team. Sources are linked at the bottom; salary figures inside are labeled as benchmarks or observed ranges, never mixed.

Salary talk in telehealth usually fails for one reason: two different kinds of numbers get mixed into one sentence. A national median for an occupation and the pay advertised in a job listing are not the same measurement, and only one of them is evidence about a specific job.

This guide keeps them apart. First the benchmarks from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, labeled as benchmarks. Then the live listed-pay figures from this board's current pool — computed fresh on every build, not hand-written once — and the pay report carries the full distributions. Then how to read them together.

Part 1: BLS benchmark medians (not employer pay)

BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook profiles report national median wages from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program, plus the 10th and 90th percentile wages. These are benchmarks for the occupation across all employers and settings — not telehealth rates, and not an offer from any employer. The May 2025 figures:

Registered nurses (RNs)

• Median: $97,550 per year, $46.90 per hour
• 10th percentile: less than $68,940; 90th percentile: more than $137,470
• Jobs: 3,465,400; projected change 2025–2035: +6%, about 180,800 openings a year

Nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives and nurse practitioners (one combined BLS profile)

• Median: $134,920 per year, $64.87 per hour
• 10th percentile: less than $102,190; 90th percentile: more than $224,490
• Jobs: 399,000; projected change 2025–2035: +36%, about 32,200 openings a year

Physician assistants

• Median: $135,880 per year, $65.33 per hour
• 10th percentile: less than $99,380; 90th percentile: more than $190,280
• Jobs: 168,900; projected change 2025–2035: +21%, about 11,500 openings a year

Physicians and surgeons

• Median: $275,930 per year, $132.66 per hour
• 10th percentile: less than $76,560; 90th percentile: more than $488,320
• Jobs: 862,800; projected change 2025–2035: +4%, about 22,100 openings a year

For context, BLS notes that the median annual wage for all workers in May 2025 was $50,980. Two cautions when reading these: the nurse practitioner median comes from a profile that also contains nurse anesthetists and nurse midwives, so it is not an NP-only figure; and the physician and surgeon median reflects every specialty, from pediatrics to neurosurgery, which is why its 10th-to-90th percentile spread is enormous.

Part 2: Listed pay on the live board (not benchmarks)

The current edition of the pay report is computed from the postings live on this board right now, restricted to salaries the **employer actually listed** — feed model averages are excluded, contradiction-checked against the posting text, and hourly figures annualized at 2,080 hours with an explicit annualized footnote. See the live numbers on the pay report — per-role deep-dives with middle-50% bands and employer-by-employer tables are linked from there.

Why this guide no longer quotes fixed "observed" figures from a past date: a static salary snapshot ages within days on a pool that refreshes daily, and a guide that disagrees with the pay report is exactly the kind of mixed-message data this site was built to never produce. Every listed-pay number on this site now comes from one pipeline, computed at build time, with its sample size shown.

How to read the extremes

Raw maximum and minimum figures are kept, but the interquartile band is the more honest read: telehealth postings quote part-time schedules, per-assignment arrangements, 1099 structures and per-visit rates, and a raw maximum is rarely a full-time annual rate. When an hourly range for RNs is annualized at 2,080 hours, it lands near the low end of the BLS benchmark — expected, because the benchmark spans hospitals, clinics and telehealth alike.

A 1099 posting's gross figure also has to cover costs a W-2 role absorbs — self-employment tax, benefits, malpractice coverage — so contractor figures are not directly comparable to salary figures. Read the 1099 vs W-2 guide before comparing them.

Why the two datasets disagree, and why that is normal

The BLS benchmark is national, covers all settings and is a median of everybody in the occupation. The listed set is a narrow slice: telehealth-oriented postings, only a portion of which disclose pay, with no adjustment for schedule, productivity bonus, payer mix, panel type or state.

Practically: use the benchmark to sanity-check whether an offer is in the normal territory for the occupation, and use the live pay report to see what employers on the all telehealth jobs board are actually advertising right now. Neither number is a promise about your contract. The only number that binds is the one in the offer, with the pay structure, schedule, productivity terms and information return type stated in writing.

State medians — BLS OEWS May 2025

Government median annual wage for the whole occupation in each state, all work settings. Not telehealth-specific, not our data — included because the listings column above is a national slice. Source: bls.gov/oes.

Sources

• https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/registered-nurses.htm
• https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/nurse-anesthetists-nurse-midwives-and-nurse-practitioners.htm
• https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/physician-assistants.htm
• https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/physicians-and-surgeons.htm