Surgical Assistants Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Surgical Assistants worker at that point in the distribution, so $80,860 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

The occupation employed 22,860 people in May 2024, 0.01% of every job BLS counted. Texas is the largest employer at 2,770 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 26.6% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Maryland, whose location quotient of 2.33 says this work is 2.33 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $62,850 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($102,390) is 2.6 times the 10th percentile ($39,540), a gap of $62,850 a year. The mean of $67,190 sitting above the median of $60,290 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 Texas first at 2,770 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Nevada would lead at $110,020. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Surgical Assistants stands number 530 by employment and number 405 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 39% less than its group median, and it supplies 0.2% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 19 of the 45 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $60,290, 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

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX is the largest metro employer with 1,010 jobs, 4.4% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $61,430 a year, against $87,250 in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Surgical Assistants paycheck, gross, is $2,319 every two weeks on an annual $60,290, which is $5,024 a month and $1,159 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($49,140) to the 75th ($80,860) is worth $31,720 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 $66,319 would sit between the median ($60,290) and the 75th percentile ($80,860), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $49,140, is $11,150 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: Dermatologists, Orthotists and Prosthetists, Podiatrists, Acupuncturists, Nurse Midwives, Exercise Physiologists. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.