The pathologist gap

Before a patient starts cancer treatment, someone has to look at the tissue. The diagnosis, the tumour type and grade, the margins after surgery and, increasingly, the choice of targeted therapy all rest on a pathologist’s report. Pathologists are also among the scarcest specialists in medicine, and nobody keeps an official global count of them.

The most complete country-level dataset was compiled by pathologist Andrey Bychkov and published by The Pathologist in 2023, using national registries, publications and local pathology societies. We matched it with current population figures, checked the largest countries and Poland against national sources, and updated the numbers where newer data exist. The registry covers 162 countries and 96% of the world’s population.

This page is a living registry. We update the figures as new national data appear, and anyone can report a correction with a source.

A hundred-fold difference

About 108,000 pathologists work in the countries covered, roughly 14 for every million people. That average hides a huge range. The United States has 63 pathologists per million and Australia 71. At the other end, 31 countries, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, have fewer than one per million. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 45 pathologists serve 105 million people.

Per-million figures are abstract. Turned around, they say how many people depend on a single pathologist: about 16,000 in the United States, 40,000 on average in the European Union, 128,000 in China and 876,000 in Ethiopia.

Where the people are, the pathologists are not

Africa is home to 18% of the population in the registry but has only 3% of its pathologists, 2.4 per million. Asia has 59% of the people and 45% of the pathologists. Northern America is the mirror image: 4.8% of the population and 21% of the world’s pathologists.

Grouping countries by density shows the same imbalance. Nearly 1.8 billion people, 23% of the population covered, live in countries with fewer than five pathologists per million, and those countries have just 2% of the global workforce. At the other end, the 18% of people living in countries with 20 or more per million have 52% of all pathologists.

Ten countries, two-thirds of the workforce

The workforce is also concentrated. The United States, India, China, Iran, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Russia, Japan, Australia and Germany together employ 68% of the world’s pathologists. The other 152 countries share the rest.

Poland: last in the European Union

Across the 27 EU member states there are about 25 pathologists per million people, one for every 40,000 inhabitants. Poland, with around 450 practising pathologists for 37.5 million people, has 12 per million: one pathologist for every 83,000 people. That places it last in the EU, just behind Bulgaria and Greece, and at roughly half the density of Germany, which reported 1,923 pathologists at the end of 2024.

Why the numbers are hard to compare

The author of the base dataset describes all figures as estimates, and some differences between countries reflect definitions rather than staffing. The main limitations:

• Definitions differ. The UK figure of 3,900 includes all pathology specialties, such as chemical pathology and microbiology. Histopathologists alone number about 1,550, or 23 per million. In many European countries clinical pathology is done by non-pathologists.
• Sources disagree. The US count of 21,292 active pathologists comes from official statistics. The Association of American Medical Colleges reports only 12,180 in anatomic and clinical pathology, but a 2024 study by the College of American Pathologists and the AAMC found its data undercounted pathologists by 39%. Estimates for China range from 10,000 to 20,000.
• Trainees are excluded. Residents make up anywhere from under 10% to half of the workforce, depending on the country.
• Years differ. Most data come from 2019–2022, but 13 countries have figures from 2016 or earlier.
• Population has changed. Ukraine’s population fell sharply after 2022, so its current density of 22 per million is probably overstated. Population figures for Moldova and Cyprus cover only the areas controlled by their governments.
• Small numbers are fragile. In countries with one to ten pathologists, a single retirement or arrival changes the figure noticeably.

What can close the gap

Training more pathologists is necessary, but it takes more than a decade from medical school to independent reporting, and the existing workforce is ageing: in the UK, 47% of pathologists are 50 or older. The shortage will not be solved by recruitment alone.

Digital pathology changes what one pathologist can reach. Once slides are scanned, a case can be sent for a second opinion in minutes instead of being posted, work can be shared between hospitals and regions, and AI tools can pre-screen slides and measure what is tedious to count by hand. None of this replaces the pathologist, who still signs the diagnosis. It lets the specialists we have serve more patients, wherever those patients live.

At CancerCenter.ai in Wrocław we build this infrastructure: a cloud slide viewer for remote consultation, a laboratory information system and AI-assisted analysis, already used by laboratories and medical universities in Poland.

Data and update history

The full registry is below, with the source and data year for every country. You can download it as CSV and reuse it with attribution to CancerCenter.ai.

Update history

• 13 October 2026First edition. Base data: Bychkov / The Pathologist (2023). Updated Poland (450, Polish Society of Pathologists 2025) and Germany (1,923, German Medical Association 2024). Removed duplicate entries for Guyana and Suriname.

Methods and sources