Geriatric Psychiatry Jobs

Who Hires Geriatric Psychiatrists

Geriatric psychiatry sits at the intersection of mental health, neurology, and medicine for older adults. That intersection creates demand across a wide range of employers, from academic medical centers to long-term care operators. If you are researching Geriatric Psychiatry jobs, the useful first step is understanding that the work is not confined to one setting. A geriatric psychiatrist may spend a week split between a memory clinic, a nursing facility, and a consultation-liaison service, or may work exclusively in one of them.

The employers most commonly associated with the subspecialty include:

• Academic medical centers and university health systems that run outpatient geriatric psychiatry clinics, memory disorder programs, and fellowship training. Public job postings from these institutions, such as Stanford's outpatient Geriatric Psychiatrists posting, show that rank-based faculty appointments are a common structure.
• Hospital systems that operate inpatient geriatric psychiatry units or consultation-liaison services for older medical patients with delirium, depression, or behavioral symptoms of dementia.
• Integrated and community health organizations that embed geriatric mental health into primary care, collaborative care, or ambulatory behavioral health.
• Long-term care and post-acute operators that need psychiatric coverage for nursing facility residents, including medication review and behavioral management.
• Veterans health systems and other public-sector employers serving aging populations with complex combined psychiatric and medical needs.
• Private practice and group practices that focus on late-life depression, anxiety, cognitive evaluation, and caregiver support.

Because this article focuses on what is documented, it does not claim national openings counts or hiring growth rates. Those figures vary by region and year, and this site does not publish unverifiable numbers. What is consistent is the underlying driver: older adults carry high rates of the conditions this subspecialty is trained to evaluate and treat.

Practice Settings and What the Work Looks Like

Outpatient and memory clinic practice

Outpatient work typically centers on diagnostic evaluation and longitudinal management. A visit may involve differentiating a neurocognitive disorder from late-life depression, reviewing a medication list for anticholinergic burden, coordinating cognitive testing, and counseling a family caregiver. This setting draws heavily on diagnostic procedures and treatment skills.

Inpatient geriatric psychiatry

Inpatient units manage older adults with severe depression, psychosis, mania, agitation in dementia, and complex medical comorbidity. Safety, capacity assessment, medical stabilization, and coordination with discharge planners are central. Electroconvulsive therapy knowledge is relevant to treatment-resistant late-life depression in many programs.

Consultation-liaison and medical settings

Consultation work places the psychiatrist in the general hospital, evaluating delirium, capacity, behavioral disturbances, and psychiatric symptoms in patients with significant medical illness. Skill in interpreting medical workups and neurologic findings is a daily requirement.

Long-term care and facility-based practice

Nursing facility practice emphasizes behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia, psychotropic medication review, and regulatory awareness. Systems-based practice matters here, because documentation, interdisciplinary team communication, and facility policies shape how care is delivered.

Academic roles

Faculty positions combine clinical care with teaching, supervision of residents and fellows, and sometimes research. Academic job postings usually specify rank, and compensation is tied to rank and institution rather than to a single national scale.

The Clinical Content Behind the Jobs

The ABPN content specifications for Geriatric Psychiatry classify every question along two dimensions, and that structure maps closely onto what employers expect you to do. Dimension 1 covers psychiatric disorders and topics, and Dimension 2 covers physician competencies and mechanisms. Questions are classified in both dimensions, so the percentage ranges overlap and should never be added together or treated as fixed point weights. These are exam objectives, not a preparation curriculum, and no single examination tests every detailed outline topic.

On the Dimension 2 side, Treatment (Domain 28, 31-35%) is the largest range and Clinical aspects of psychiatric and neuropsychiatric disorders (Domain 26, 23-27%) follows. Diagnostic procedures (Domain 27, 10-14%) and Systems-based practice (Domain 32, 8-12%) are also substantial. Employers care about each of these because they correspond to what you do in a visit: diagnose, treat, and operate inside a health system. For a full breakdown of all 32 headings, see the Geriatric Psychiatry exam domains guide.

The Pathway: From Fellowship to Board Certification

Jobs in this field are built on a specific training sequence, and the ABPN eligibility rules are explicit. For a fuller treatment, read the Geriatric Psychiatry requirements guide and the overview of Geriatric Psychiatry training.

1. Complete a qualifying medical degree and general Psychiatry residency.
2. Hold active, full, unrestricted U.S. or Canadian medical licensure.
3. Achieve ABPN general Psychiatry certification by December 31 of the year preceding the exam.
4. Complete one year of ACGME-accredited Geriatric Psychiatry fellowship. General residency exposure does not substitute for fellowship, and international fellowship training is not accepted under the published specialty policy.
5. Meet licensing and training requirements by July 31 of the exam year.
6. Pass the exam within seven years of the required training, or complete ABPN's requalification requirements.

Compensation: What Can and Cannot Be Said

Salary questions dominate job searches, so it is worth being careful about what the evidence supports. One public data point comes from Stanford's outpatient Geriatric Psychiatrists posting, which lists assistant-professor psychiatrist base pay of USD 238,000-250,000, excluding incentives. That is a single employer's rank-specific range. It is not a national specialty average, and it should not be read as a certification premium.

For a broader discussion, see the Geriatric Psychiatry salary guide. When comparing offers, always ask what the quoted figure includes and excludes.

Does Certification Matter to Employers?

Subspecialty certification in Geriatric Psychiatry is awarded by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN). Many employers, particularly academic centers and larger health systems, value or prefer it for geriatric-focused positions, and some credentialing and privileging processes reference board status. Requirements differ by employer, so the best approach is to read the individual posting and ask directly during interviews.

The decision to pursue certification is a cost-benefit question for each clinician. Fees are specific: the initial subspecialty exam fee is USD 1,900, and a late application adds USD 500, under the fee schedule posted January 5, 2026. A fuller accounting is in the certification cost breakdown, and the broader question is analyzed in Is the Geriatric Psychiatry certification worth it?

Aligning Exam Preparation With Job Skills

The exam is a computer-delivered test at a Pearson VUE/Pearson center with 220 stand-alone, one-best-answer multiple-choice questions in four sections of 55. Question-answering time is 230 minutes, within a 240-minute total session that includes five minutes for the NDA/tutorial and five for the closing survey. Questions can be flagged or skipped, there is no penalty for guessing, and any research or pretest items are excluded from scoring. Two valid signed IDs are required, including a government-issued photo ID, and you should arrive 30 minutes early. Personal books, papers, and electronic devices are prohibited, and an erasable whiteboard is supplied.

Because the content mirrors real clinical work, the best preparation is to read your own caseload through the blueprint. One short way to sequence it:

For a complete plan, use the Geriatric Psychiatry study guide, and when you want realistic question practice, try the Geriatric Psychiatry practice tests. To gauge how demanding the test is, read how hard the exam is. For outcomes data, the pass rate analysis explains that the latest published first-time initial-certification pass rate was 95% in 2024 (95 of 100 candidates), and the 2021-2025 aggregate is 97% (206 of 212). These are small-cohort figures and should be interpreted cautiously. For scoring details, see the passing score guide: ABPN uses a criterion-referenced standard on total percent-correct score, with no fixed cutoff asserted.

Staying Certified Once You Are Employed

Certificates issued from 2012 onward have no fixed expiration date and remain valid through ongoing Continuing Certification (CC), which also requires maintaining your primary Psychiatry certification and required licensure. Many employers expect you to keep your board status current, so it helps to understand the obligations early.

Employers may offer CME allowances or protected time, so ask about these during negotiation. For an orientation to the credential itself, see Geriatric Psychiatry certification and what Geriatric Psychiatry certification is.

Frequently Asked Questions