Physician Assistant Salary in Arizona 2026,
$134,650 Median | BLS Data by City

Arizona physician assistants earn a median $134,650 a year, $64.73 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $123,990 and $156,500 and a full range of $106,030 to $174,420. That is 0.9% below the $135,880 national median, though Arizona's flat 2.5% income tax makes the take-home comparison favourable.

Prescott Valley-Prescott at $135,630, then Flagstaff at $135,600, Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler at $134,650, Yuma at $133,290 and Tucson at $129,880. Two small mountain markets outpaying the Phoenix metro reflects how hard it is to recruit clinicians to isolated communities, and Tucson's position at the bottom reflects the opposite — a desirable university city with a steady supply of candidates.

Yes. Arizona licenses PAs through the Arizona Regulatory Board of Physician Assistants, a dedicated body rather than a committee of the medical board. It administers licensure on ARC-PA accredited graduation and NCCPA certification, sets the collaboration requirements, and handles prescriptive authority including the additional controlled substance registration. Having a board that regulates only this profession is a real structural difference from most states.

Supply. Tucson is a university city with a medical school, a steady flow of clinicians who want to live there, and a smaller, less commercially intense health market than the Phoenix corridor. Employers there do not have to bid as hard. The reverse holds in Prescott, Flagstaff and Yuma, where at $135,630, $135,600 and $133,290 respectively the health systems must pay above the metro to attract PAs at all.

A flat 2.5% state income tax with no city or county income tax anywhere in Arizona — the lowest wage-tax rate of any state that levies one. At a $134,650 salary that is worth several thousand dollars a year against a graduated coastal schedule, which is why an Arizona offer at the national median generally beats a nominally equal one elsewhere.

It concentrates the regulatory attention. A board whose entire remit is physician assistants writes rules about collaboration, scope and prescriptive authority without balancing them against physician licensing questions, and it processes applications and complaints for one profession rather than several. For a PA moving to Arizona, the practical effect is a licensing body that understands the profession's specifics, and a rule set that has evolved as its own body of regulation rather than as a subsection of the medical practice act.

The occupation code spans an enormous range of clinical work, and the $106,030 to $174,420 band is mostly specialty mix rather than career progression. It also excludes production bonuses and call stipends, which in Arizona's emergency and surgical practice can be a meaningful share of total pay. And the rural premium visible in the metro table comes attached to conditions — isolation, wide scope, limited specialist backup — that a wage figure cannot convey and that anyone weighing a Prescott or Yuma post should weigh directly.

Specialty, then scarcity. Emergency medicine, orthopaedics, dermatology and procedural specialties pay above primary care and are the reliable route to the $156,500 seventy-fifth percentile. After that, Arizona's geography creates real premiums: rural hospitals, tribal health programmes and border communities pay above their cost of living because they cannot recruit otherwise, and the scope of practice in those settings is correspondingly wide. Call coverage, first-assist responsibility and locum work across the state's long distances add further layers.