Physician Assistant Salary in Louisiana 2026,
$128,870 Median | BLS Data by City

A median $128,870 a year, or $61.96 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $117,130 and $144,100 and a full range of $100,920 to $162,200. That is 5.2% below the $135,880 national median, though the state's 75th percentile clears the national median by more than eight thousand dollars.

Slidell-Mandeville-Covington at $138,310, ahead of Houma-Bayou Cane-Thibodaux at $135,960, Lafayette at $134,550, Shreveport-Bossier City at $134,090 and Alexandria at $132,710. Every published metro sits above the state median of $128,870, which tells you the non-metro parishes are what pull the state figure down.

Through the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners. You need a degree from an ARC-PA accredited programme and current NCCPA certification, and you register a supervising physician arrangement with the board. That arrangement defines your prescriptive authority, including controlled substances, and the level of physician involvement expected, so its terms matter as much as the licence itself.

Yes. Louisiana requires a supervising physician arrangement registered with the State Board of Medical Examiners, and that document — rather than your specialty or seniority — defines your prescriptive authority and day-to-day latitude. In a hospital or large group it is generally light-touch; in a small independent practice it can be considerably more restrictive. Read it in detail before accepting a post.

A location quotient of 0.68 on about 1,360 posts is the thinnest in this batch, and it is a market maturity question rather than a demand one. Louisiana ranks near the bottom nationally on population health measures and carries extensive shortage designations, so the clinical need is acute. But the state has leaned on nurse practitioners — whose location quotient here is 1.34 — rather than physician assistants to fill the gap. With 20.4% projected national growth, that imbalance is likely to shift.

That the parishes outside the published metros pay materially less, and they are numerous enough to pull the state figure down below every city in the table. Louisiana is a rural state with a lot of small parish hospitals and clinics operating on thin margins, and those employers cannot match what Ochsner, LCMC or the Lafayette and Shreveport systems pay. For a physician assistant that produces an unusual situation: unlike in several states in this batch where rural posts pay a premium for being hard to fill, in Louisiana the rural posts appear to pay less, which means the metro decision here is worth taking seriously even though the metros themselves are closely bunched.

It is a base-wage median that excludes call pay, surgical first-assist stipends, productivity bonuses and rural recruitment incentives — the last of which are used in Louisiana to fill exactly the posts pulling the state figure down. It also treats primary care, emergency medicine and surgical subspecialty practice as one occupation, which is much of what the $100,920 to $162,200 range describes. And with about 1,360 physician assistants statewide, the percentile ladder rests on a small sample and should be read as a shape rather than a precise scale.

Specialty first — surgical first assisting, emergency medicine and critical care are what reach the $144,100 seventy-fifth percentile and the $162,200 ninetieth, and that gap dwarfs anything geography offers. Employer second: Ochsner, LCMC and the larger regional systems pay above small parish practice, which is where the state median is being weighed down. Then call and first-assist stipends, negotiated individually. And the terms of the supervision arrangement, which determine what you can actually do and therefore what you are worth to the practice.