Medical Assistant Salary in Washington, D.C. 2026,
$51,050 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Washington, D.C. figure is $51,050 a year, or $24.54 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $39,620 at the 10th percentile to $76,900 at the 90th. That is 11.7% above the national median of $45,690. The District employs 2,260 medical assistants at a location quotient of 0.61, well below the national employment rate.

The District is a single jurisdiction, so the comparison here is between the District-wide figure of $51,050 and the wider Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro at $46,640, against the United States all-areas figure of $45,690. The District proper pays more than the surrounding metro — the premium sits with the District's own academic, federal and specialty institutions rather than with the suburbs.

No. Medical assisting is unregulated in the District — no examination, registration or renewal, and no legal barrier to hiring an untrained candidate. Employers set the standard, and in a market dominated by academic medical centres, federal health facilities and large multi-specialty practices, that standard is generally a national certification such as the AAMA's CMA, the AMT's RMA, the NHA's CCMA or the NCCT's NCMA, plus internal credentialing for delegated clinical tasks.

Because the top of this band is a different job. The District's clinical employment is concentrated in academic medical centres, federal health facilities and large institutions that place medical assistants on structured pay scales with defined clinical scope, and that include clinical coordination and research-study support roles. Those posts sit at the $76,900 ninetieth percentile — far above what general outpatient assisting reaches anywhere — and they are institutional positions rather than senior versions of a routine job.

Partly. The nominal $51,050 median is 11.7% above the national figure, but the District's housing costs are among the highest in the country and absorb much of that. The tax position is better than the headline suggests — the District's schedule reaches 10.75% only at high incomes, and a medical assistant is well below that. The strongest genuine case for working here is the ceiling: a $76,900 ninetieth percentile that most jurisdictions cannot offer this occupation at all.

Because the District's clinical employers are institutionally different from its suburbs'. Inside the District are academic medical centres, teaching hospitals, federal health facilities and specialty practices with structured pay scales and credentialing requirements. The Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro figure of $46,640 takes in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs, where routine outpatient primary care employs the bulk of medical assistants at conventional rates. The District-wide $51,050 reflects the institutional employers; the metro figure reflects the average.

It rests on only 2,260 jobs, a small base, and it spans a band whose top and bottom are barely the same occupation. The $39,620 tenth percentile is uncertified general assisting; the $76,900 ninetieth is clinical coordination and research support in an academic institution. With no District licensure to define the role, SOC 31-9092 is doing a great deal of work holding those together, and a candidate should identify which end of the market an offer belongs to before benchmarking it.

Getting inside an institution. An academic medical centre, teaching hospital or federal health facility places assistants on structured scales with defined clinical scope and internal progression, and that is essentially the whole distance from the $47,740 twenty-fifth percentile to the $59,850 seventy-fifth. Above that, clinical coordination and research-study support roles in those same institutions reach the $76,900 top decile. National certification is the entry ticket to all of it, since the District itself requires nothing.