Physician Assistants Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Physician Assistants worker at that point in the distribution, so $160,160 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 155,540, or 0.10% of the U.S. total. New York leads the state table with 19,390 jobs; the top three states sum to 28.0% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Connecticut posts a location quotient of 2.18, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $86,960 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($182,200) is 1.9 times the 10th percentile ($95,240), a gap of $86,960 a year. The mean of $136,900 sitting above the median of $133,260 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts New York first at 19,390 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Hawaii would lead at $163,020. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Physician Assistants stands number 195 by employment and number 51 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations, the group median wage is $98,340 across 71 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 36% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.6% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 23 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $133,260, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 15,550 jobs, 10.0% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 341 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Little Rock-North Little Rock-Conway, AR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $72,940 a year, against $167,710 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Physician Assistants paycheck, gross, is $5,125 every two weeks on an annual $133,260, which is $11,105 a month and $2,563 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($113,770) to the 75th ($160,160) is worth $46,390 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $146,586 would sit between the median ($133,260) and the 75th percentile ($160,160), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $113,770, is $19,490 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Dietitians and Nutritionists, Ophthalmic Medical Technicians, General Internal Medicine Physicians, Cardiovascular Technologists and Technicians, Nurse Anesthetists, Pediatricians, General. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.