Physician Assistant Salary in Minnesota 2026,
$141,190 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Minnesota figure is $141,190 a year, or $67.88 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025 — 3.9% above the national median of $135,880. The band runs from $112,390 at the 10th percentile to $183,320 at the 90th. The bottom of that band is high because the occupation is degree-gated and certified, so there is very little low-paid physician assistant work in the state.

No. Minnesota removed the mandatory written collaborative agreement, so a PA licensed by the Board of Medical Practice practises on the basis of education, training and experience within a healthcare team, with scope set by the employing practice or system's credentialing rather than by a document naming one supervising physician. Prescribing authority, including controlled substances with the appropriate registrations, follows the licence.

Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington at $145,030, then Mankato $142,020, Rochester $137,340, Duluth $135,860 and St. Cloud $132,650. The metro spread is modest next to the specialty spread — the distance from primary care to surgical or emergency practice within the same city is larger than the distance between the highest and lowest Minnesota metros.

New graduates cluster between the 10th percentile of $112,390 and the 25th of $131,720, depending on setting and location. Minnesota's large integrated health systems compete for new PAs and generally hire at structured starting rates with full benefits, CME allowances and licensure reimbursement, so the negotiating room on base pay is limited but the total package is substantial.

By specialty rather than by tenure. The $163,690 seventy-fifth percentile and the $183,320 ninetieth belong to surgical subspecialties, emergency medicine, interventional and procedural roles, and hospitalist work with night and call coverage. Rural and critical-access posts also pay premiums because those facilities depend on advanced practice clinicians to keep services open, and Minnesota's removal of the collaborative agreement makes covering multiple rural sites administratively simpler.

Mostly the friction, and friction is worth money over a career. Under a mandated agreement, a PA's ability to practise is tied to a named physician: if that physician leaves, retires or changes employer, the PA's practice is disrupted until a new agreement is executed, and covering an additional clinic or a rural site can require additional paperwork. Minnesota removed that requirement, so scope is determined by the PA's education, training and experience and by the employer's credentialing process. The wage effect is modest — Minnesota sits 3.9% above the national median — but the structural effect is real: PAs here can move between employers, cover multiple sites and staff rural facilities without renegotiating a supervision document each time, which is exactly what a state with many small hospitals needs.

Because there is no unqualified entry into this occupation. A physician assistant must complete an ARC-PA accredited master's programme, pass the NCCPA certifying examination and hold a Board of Medical Practice licence before working at all, which eliminates the low-wage tail that broader occupations carry. On top of that, Minnesota's employer landscape is dominated by large integrated health systems that hire on structured scales with benefits rather than on ad-hoc offers. The result is a 10th percentile of $112,390 — higher than the median of many licensed healthcare occupations — and a 25th percentile of $131,720 that is already close to the national median for the profession.

Outward and upward. The metro systems around Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, which publishes the state's highest metro figure at $145,030, keep expanding procedural and specialty PA roles — surgical first-assist, emergency, hospitalist and interventional coverage — because those are the services where an advanced practice clinician most directly increases a department's capacity. Meanwhile outstate Minnesota's critical-access hospitals and rural clinics depend on PAs and nurse practitioners to keep emergency departments and primary care open at all, and they compete for them with recruitment incentives that do not appear in a wage table. The 20.4% national growth projection understates neither, but it does hide that the two kinds of demand pull in different directions geographically.