It’s the fifth year in a row and the seventh year out of ten that compensation for cardiologists has increased, according to MedAxiom’s Cardiovascular Provider Compensation and Production Survey report.

Invasive cardiologists earn the top starting salary in medicine, according to a new report from Merritt Hawkins, raking in an average $648,000 in their first year of practice.

Medical directors of cardiac catheterization and EP labs receive three to four times the amount of money from pharmaceutical companies and device manufacturers as other interventional cardiologists in the same zip code, according to a JAMA Internal Medicine study.

Cardiologists earn the fourth-most money of any medical specialty, according to Medscape’s 2019 physician compensation report, bringing in an average of $430,000 each year.

Cardiology ranks seventh among all medical specialties with an average annual salary of about $454,000, according to Doximity’s 2019 compensation report.

The average U.S. cardiologist’s salary dropped by 4 percent last year, to $559,568, MedAxiom reported in its annual Cardiovascular Provider Compensation & Production Survey. The dip follows three consecutive years of salary hikes that reached an all-time high in 2016.

Physician assistants (PAs) specializing in cardiology earned a median base salary of $105,000 in 2017—equivalent to the median across all specialties, according to the 2018 Salary Report from the American Academy of PAs.

The salaries of cardiothoracic surgeons are increasing faster than any other specialty, according to the American Medical Group Association’s 2018 Compensation and Productivity Survey. Cardiothoracic surgeons pulled in a median of $734,299 last year, up from $690,000 the previous year and a 23.1 percent increase from 2015.