Physician Assistant Salary in Philadelphia, PA 2026,
$135,640 Median | BLS + Market Data

Physician assistants in Philadelphia earn a BLS MSA median of $135,640/yr, or $65.21 an hour, across the Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington metro, with a published range of $103,720 to $170,140. That is 6.7% above the Pennsylvania statewide median and level with the US median. Specialty and call obligations, not years of experience, explain most of the spread.

Yes — 6.7% above the Pennsylvania median. Philadelphia concentrates the state's academic hospitals and trauma centres, and those employers pay for operative and overnight coverage that smaller Pennsylvania markets simply do not need. Outside those settings, a Philadelphia outpatient PA earns much closer to the statewide figure than the headline gap implies.

Operative first-assist roles in cardiothoracic, orthopaedic and transplant surgery, followed by emergency and trauma coverage. Those posts combine a higher base with call, weekend and holiday pay, which is the mechanism that carries a Philadelphia PA toward the $170,140 top of the published band. Dermatology and outpatient specialty work pay less here than the national reputation suggests.

A Pennsylvania physician assistant licence from the State Board of Medicine or the State Board of Osteopathic Medicine, depending on your supervising physician's degree, plus current NCCPA certification. Pennsylvania also registers the supervising-physician relationship, so a licence alone does not let you start — the practice agreement has to be on file before you see patients.

It is competitive at entry and comfortable afterwards. The region hosts several large PA programmes whose graduates want to stay, which keeps applicant volume high for the outpatient and urgent-care roles at the bottom of the band. Once a PA has hospital-based or surgical experience the picture reverses, because call-covering subspecialty posts across the metro are persistently hard to fill.

Pennsylvania's statewide PA median is held down by rural and small-city markets where the only employers are primary-care practices and critical-access hospitals. Philadelphia has the specialty mix that pays, so it clears the state figure comfortably. Nationally, though, it is competing with metros that combine the same specialty mix with far higher costs, which is why the Philadelphia figure lands level with the US median rather than above it.

The estimate blends the whole Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington MSA across four states, so Wilmington and South Jersey PAs are inside the same number. It also reports base wages only: call stipends, first-assist billing arrangements, productivity bonuses and the tuition remission that the region's university-affiliated employers offer are real Philadelphia PA income that never appears in the median.

Pennsylvania ties a PA licence to a registered supervising physician and a defined scope, and changing specialty means changing that registration. Practically, this raises the friction of moving from an outpatient post at the bottom of the band into a surgical one at the top — the move requires an employer willing to sponsor the new agreement, which is why Philadelphia PAs tend to change specialty early or not at all.