The purpose of this work was to determine the relationship between academic burnout and self-esteem in undergraduate medical students in San Juan de Pasto, Colombia. This was a descriptive correlational study with the participation of 184 students in their second, fourth, sixth, eighth and tenth semesters, aged between 17 and 40 years. The Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey (MBI-SS) and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale were used. There were no statistically significant differences in the sub-scales of academic burnout according to gender. Similarly, no differences were found by gender or semester in the variable of self- steem. It was possible to confirm the existence of an inverse relationship between self-esteem and the subscales of emotional exhaustion and cynicism, while the relationship with academic effectiveness was direct. This showed that students with high levels of self-esteem have a lower chance of presenting the syndrome.