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Surgeons earn a median salary of $226,080 a year.
- The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) provides data on wages and employment in the medical field.
- It takes a lot of people to run a single hospital, and 5.2 million people are employed by over 6,000 hospitals in the US.
- Here are the median salaries and number of employed workers for every hospital occupation, from janitors to chief executives.
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Most people don't think much about hospitals unless they work there or until they end up being treated at one.
But hospitals are a major part of the giant US healthcare industry, with spending on the sector as a whole set to reach nearly 20% of the US economy.
Hospitals have long been a big employer, and it's on the rise, US Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show, with hospitals employing 5.2 million people, according to the most recent data.
People who work in hospitals perform a wide range of jobs, including nurses who take care of patients, lab technologists who run complicated tests to detect disease, and radiology technicians who manage the scans that can help diagnose patients.
Those skilled occupations could explain why hospital workers tend to make more than the average healthcare worker. The average hospital worker made $33 an hour and worked just over 37 hours a week on average, according to preliminary government data from March of this year.
There are about 6,210 hospitals across the US today, according to industry group the American Hospital Association, ranging from nonprofit community ones to for-profit hospitals and hospitals run by state and local governments or the federal government.
Here are some of the more prominent occupations at hospitals, and how much they make:
