Physician Assistant Salary in South Carolina 2026,
$122,490 Median | BLS Data by City

A median $122,490 a year, or $58.89 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $105,560 and $134,100 and a full range of $77,620 to $158,860. That is 9.9% below the $135,880 national median, though the state's 90th percentile sits well above the national median.

Charleston-North Charleston at $128,920, followed by Myrtle Beach at $125,700, Hilton Head Island-Bluffton at $125,350, Greenville-Anderson-Greer at $123,310 and Spartanburg at $121,990. The whole table spans under seven thousand dollars, which is a narrow geographic range for this occupation — specialty and setting will move your pay considerably more.

Through the Board of Medical Examiners at the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation. You need a degree from an ARC-PA accredited programme and current NCCPA certification, and you file a scope of practice agreement with a supervising physician as part of practising here. Certification is maintained through the NCCPA continuing medical education and recertification cycle.

Yes. South Carolina requires a scope of practice agreement with a supervising physician, filed with the Board of Medical Examiners, and that document — not your specialty or your seniority — is what defines your prescriptive authority and your day-to-day autonomy. In a hospital or a large group the arrangement is generally light-touch; in a small independent practice it can be considerably more restrictive. It is worth reading in detail before accepting a post.

Because the $77,620 tenth percentile is measuring hours, not rate. It sits nearly twenty-eight thousand dollars below the 25th percentile of $105,560 — a step far larger than any other in the band, and the classic shape of part-time, locum and partial-year workers being counted in an annual wage series alongside full-time ones. A full-time South Carolina PA should be reading the $105,560 to $134,100 range as the realistic market, not the published floor.

Surgical and high-acuity practice, mostly, and it is worth dwelling on because it sits well above the national median of $135,880. Surgical first assisting, emergency medicine, critical care and interventional specialties pay materially above the primary care and urgent care roles that dominate South Carolina's PA mix, and the academic and tertiary centres — MUSC in Charleston, the larger Prisma Health hospitals — are where those posts are. Call obligations and first-assist stipends layer on top. The state median being 9.9% below the national figure is therefore a statement about mix, not a ceiling.

It is a base-wage median that excludes call pay, surgical first-assist stipends, productivity bonuses and the rural recruitment incentives South Carolina employers use along the I-95 corridor — all of which are common and material here. It also treats a part-time primary care PA and a full-time cardiothoracic surgical PA as the same occupation, which the width of the band from $77,620 to $158,860 makes obvious. Read the median as an anchor and price the specialty, the schedule and the package separately.

Specialty above all. Surgical first assisting, emergency medicine and critical care are what reach the $134,100 seventy-fifth percentile and the $158,860 ninetieth, and the gap between those and a primary care post is larger than any geographic difference in this state. Setting is second — academic and tertiary centres pay above community practice. Then call and first-assist stipends, which are negotiated rather than scheduled. Rural incentive packages in the Pee Dee and along I-95 are a genuine option, and given how compressed the metro table is, they can outweigh the coastal premium.