Physician Assistant Salary in Maryland 2026,
$137,560 Median | BLS Data by City

Maryland physician assistants earn a median $137,560 a year, $66.13 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $125,140 and $160,090 and a full range of $110,190 to $174,280. That is 1.2% above the $135,880 national median, with an unusually high floor for the occupation.

Salisbury at $142,580, ahead of Baltimore-Columbia-Towson at $138,790, Hagerstown-Martinsburg at $137,220 and Lexington Park at $136,860. The Eastern Shore leading the state reflects a recruitment premium rather than a richer market. The Washington suburbs are counted inside the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria multi-state metro and are not reported as a Maryland area.

Yes. Maryland licenses PAs through the Board of Physicians and requires a delegation agreement with a supervising physician, filed with the board, that sets out the scope of the PA's practice. Prescriptive authority is exercised within that agreement. It is a formal structure, but in practice it gives Maryland PAs considerable latitude, particularly in the rural and emergency settings that rely on them most.

Because it has to. Salisbury and the surrounding Eastern Shore counties are a considerable distance from Baltimore and the Washington suburbs, with fewer amenities, thinner spousal employment options and a smaller candidate pool. The regional health systems there compete for clinicians who could work in a metro corridor instead, and the $142,580 figure is what that competition costs. The same effect appears in Maryland's western counties.

Maryland's state income tax is graduated to 5.75%, and every county plus Baltimore City adds a local income tax of between a little over 2% and 3.20%, charged on where you live. At a $137,560 salary that county choice is worth low thousands annually — a real factor when weighing a lower-taxing Eastern Shore county against a central-corridor jurisdiction.

Because the state's PA market is mature and its employers are large. Academic centres in Baltimore, the University of Maryland system's regional hospitals, and the ambulatory networks built out under the global budget model all employ PAs at scale on structured pay bands, and there is very little of the low-paid, marginal PA employment that drags down the bottom of the distribution in less developed markets. A tenth percentile of $110,190 means an entry-level Maryland PA starts well into six figures.

The occupation code spans an enormous range of clinical work, and the $110,190 to $174,280 band reflects specialty mix more than career progression. The published figure also excludes production bonuses and call stipends, which in surgical and emergency practice can be a meaningful part of total compensation. And Maryland's global budget hospital system means clinical pay here is set against constrained hospital revenue in a way that does not apply in fee-for-service states — a structural cap on how far the top of this band can drift.

Specialty, call and geographic scarcity. Moving from primary care into emergency medicine, hospital medicine, orthopaedics or another procedural specialty is the largest reliable step. First-assist responsibility, call coverage and night and weekend obligations add layers on top. And Maryland's rural markets — the Eastern Shore, Garrett and Allegany counties — pay above the corridor because they cannot recruit otherwise, which is a genuine and often overlooked route to the $160,090 seventy-fifth percentile.