Occupation / job
Physician Assistants
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
How many people are qualified for this, and how many are doing it
The pay figure above only describes people who got the job. This is the part it leaves out.
There are 201,038 board-certified physician assistants (2025). Federal employment records account for 162,150 people working in Physician Assistants — 80.7%.
The remainder is a ceiling, not an unemployment rate. Holding the credential is not the same as wanting a job with it, and the remainder also holds everyone who moved into management or teaching, retired without giving the credential up, or works self-employed in a way the employment survey misses. What the pair does establish is that the pay figure above is a survivor's figure, and roughly how many people it is silent about. Everything else that gap contains
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
Who this suits
The $135,880 midpoint is $7,155 a month above the $50,020 typical American job, which puts Physician Assistants near the ceiling of published federal wage data. Everything at this level is gated, and the gate is usually years long.
National employment is 162,150. At that scale hiring is continuous, the market rate is well established, and your leverage comes from being credibly willing to go somewhere else.
These roles suit people who want responsibility for the whole of a patient’s problem rather than a part of it, and who can carry that home without it consuming them.
We carry no verified training length for Physician Assistants — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.
Who should not do this
The middle half runs $120,670 to $163,980 — $3,609 a month between the quarters, a 1.4x ratio. Spreads this narrow are usually set by a grade or a scale, so the negotiation you are imagining probably is not available.
The 25th percentile is $120,670, $70,650 above the $50,020 typical American job. When even the floor is this high, the thing to investigate is the entry requirement rather than the pay.
Avoid it if the length and cost of the training would be unbearable if you changed your mind halfway.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 162,150 figure counts people already working as Physician Assistants, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
The quarters are $120,670 and $163,980, a ratio of 1.4x. In a distribution this narrow, the biggest single lever on your pay in Physician Assistants is the cost of living where you do it.
The middle half of this field earns between $120,670 and $163,980. That is $43,310 of range, with $135,880 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $163,980, the 75th percentile, is worth $28,100 a year more than the $135,880 midpoint and $43,310 more than the $120,670 a quarter of Physician Assistants settle for.
It is $15,210 from $135,880 down to $120,670 but $28,100 up to $163,980. When a range leans this far upward, the interesting question is what puts someone in the top half, because the money is disproportionately there.
Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $65.32 at the midpoint for Physician Assistants, $58.01 at the 25th percentile and $78.83 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Physician Assistants. The self-employed are excluded, so $135,880 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $135,880 because we have no verified record of unpaid hours or out-of-pocket costs for this work, and we would rather convert honestly than adjust invented ones.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else