Physician Assistant Salary in Massachusetts 2026,
$142,410 Median | BLS Data by City

Massachusetts physician assistants earn a median $142,410 a year, $68.47 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a 25th percentile of $128,020, a 75th of $169,980 and a 90th of $204,140. The 10th percentile of $65,220 reflects part-time and early-career arrangements rather than full-time practice. The median sits 4.8% above the $135,880 national figure.

Barnstable Town at $162,330, then Springfield at $161,770, Worcester at $152,860, Boston-Cambridge-Newton at $142,410 and Pittsfield at $137,620. Boston being fourth of five is unusual and is the clearest signal in the data of where Massachusetts finds it hard to recruit clinicians.

Through the Board of Registration of Physician Assistants at the Department of Public Health. You need a degree from an accredited physician assistant programme and passage of the national certifying examination, after which the Board issues the licence and registers prescriptive practice. Massachusetts has moved away from requiring an individual supervising-physician agreement for experienced PAs in favour of practice-level collaboration arrangements.

Because Boston does not have to pay more. The city's teaching hospitals and PA training programmes create a deep local supply of clinicians who want to be there, so employers can fill posts without bidding. Cape Cod, western Massachusetts and Worcester community hospitals compete for a much smaller willing pool and pay accordingly — $162,330 in Barnstable Town and $161,770 in Springfield against Boston's $142,410.

Yes, practically. Removing the requirement for an individual named supervising physician for experienced PAs makes it easier for community hospitals, urgent care networks and primary care practices to deploy PAs, particularly in parts of the state where physician recruitment is difficult. That is exactly where the state's pay premiums sit, so the regulatory change and the wage pattern point the same way.

Hours, not rate. That gap is far too large to be a pay difference between comparable full-time roles, and it indicates part-time, per-diem and partial-year arrangements annualising low in the survey. Massachusetts has a substantial per-diem PA market, particularly in urgent care and surgical first assist. Anyone reading this page for a full-time benchmark should start at the $128,020 twenty-fifth percentile.

It covers a profession whose pay is set by specialty more than by anything else. Surgical, emergency medicine and high-acuity specialty PAs in Massachusetts earn substantially more than primary care PAs, and both appear in this one row. The $169,980 seventy-fifth percentile is a specialty figure; the median is closer to a general practice one.

Specialty, call and location — with location doing more work here than in most states. Surgical first assist, emergency medicine and hospital specialty practice with call carry the premiums that reach $169,980. But so does simply working outside Greater Boston: Barnstable Town's $162,330 and Springfield's $161,770 are general-market figures, not specialty ones, and combined with lower housing costs and the state's flat 5.0% tax they represent one of the better clinician arbitrages in the Northeast.