Physician assistant certification (PA-C)

The number the pay figure leaves out

Of the 201,038 board-certified physician assistants counted in 2025, federal employment records account for 162,150 working in the occupations it is for — 80.7%. That leaves 38,888 holders it does not account for.

That gap is an upper bound, not an unemployment rate. Holding a credential is not the same as looking for work with it. The gap contains everyone who moved into management, teaching, sales, inspection or a related job that federal data files under a different occupation; everyone who retired or left without surrendering the credential; everyone working part time, agency or self-employed in a way the employment survey does not capture; and everyone holding it as a second string to another job. So the gap is the CEILING on how many trained people are not working in this field — the real figure is lower, and it is not a count of anyone who is unemployed. What the pair does establish is the size of the pool the published pay figure is silent about, which is the thing no pay site shows you.

Both sides are standing counts. Holders on a date against employment in a period — the same kind of quantity, which is the only reason the two may be divided at all.

What that count includes: People holding current NCCPA board certification on that date, whether or not they are practising. 731 of them have addresses outside the United States or at military installations. It is not the cumulative figure NCCPA also publishes — more than 231,000 people have been certified since 1975 — because most of the difference is retirement and lapse, and using it would overstate the pool. Certification is not the same as a state licence, but every state requires it or accepts it as the basis for one.

Denominator: board-certified physician assistants = 201,038 (Standing count of people holding the credential, as at 31 December 2025) · NCCPA, 2025 Statistical Profile of Board Certified PAs · view

One of the tightest pairings on the site. The remainder is mostly PAs working in roles federal data files under other occupations — administration, education, industry — plus people holding certification while not practising.

Four years after completing — a figure for the programme code, not for this job alone

Of 13,462 people who completed Allied health diagnostic and treatment, master's degree and were no longer studying four years later, 166 had no earnings on record at all — 1.2%. The ones who were working earned a median of $127,347, with the middle half between $103,242 and $152,756.

“No earnings on record” is not “unemployed”. The measure is the absence of any wage record and any positive self-employment income for the whole year. Nobody was asked whether they wanted work, so the count holds people who left the workforce by choice — raising children, caring, travelling, living on someone else's income, moving abroad — alongside everyone who wanted a job and had none. Nobody publishes the split and we will not guess it. What it does establish is how many people finished this training and were earning nothing from it or from anything else four years on, which is exactly what the pay figure above cannot tell you.

And this figure is not specific to this job. The federal government publishes programme outcomes at four-digit granularity and no finer, and this credential's programmes share their code with others. So the figure describes everyone who completed anything under that code at this level, not only the people who went on to do this work.

What that programme code covers: CIP 51.09 is the broadest code on this page and it is shared. Radiography, respiratory therapy, surgical technology, cardiovascular technology, sonography, perfusion, athletic training and physician assistant studies are all inside it, and the Department publishes no split. At associate level the code is dominated by imaging, respiratory and surgical technology; at master's level by physician assistant programmes, which is why the earnings jump. No figure here is specific to any one of those occupations and it must not be quoted as though it were.

The master's level of this programme code is dominated by physician assistant programmes, which is why the earnings figure is so much higher than the rest of the code. It is still not a PA-only figure and must not be quoted as one.

Who is in the cohort: completers who received federal student aid — roughly half of US undergraduates, and the other half are not measured here. People who went on to further study are in neither column. The Department suppresses institutions with cohorts too small to publish and adds statistical noise to the rest, so this is a sum over the institutions large enough to report: 161 of them, recovering 83.6% of the Department's own national count for this programme. Dropping the smallest reporting programmes moves the rate by 0.0 percentage points.

Source: US Department of Education, College Scorecard, Field of Study data, 2026 — release of 10 June 2026; measured four years after completion · view · the same figure for every programme we can publish