Physician Assistant Salary in Tennessee 2026,
$118,240 Median | BLS Data by City

A median $118,240 a year, or $56.85 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $102,690 and $132,500 and a full range of $93,380 to $141,670. That is 13.0% below the $135,880 national median, and Tennessee's 75th percentile sits below the national median for the occupation.

Nashville at $129,050, well clear of Memphis at $121,900, Clarksville at $121,710 and Chattanooga at $121,600, with Kingsport-Bristol at $117,490 at the bottom. The eleven-and-a-half-thousand-dollar spread between Nashville and the Tri-Cities is one of the widest metro gaps in this Tennessee unit.

Through the Board of Medical Examiners' Committee on Physician Assistants at the Department of Health. You need a degree from an ARC-PA accredited programme, a passing NCCPA certification, and a Tennessee licence application; NCCPA certification is maintained through the required continuing medical education and recertification cycle. The committee also handles the paperwork governing your collaborating physician relationship.

Yes. Tennessee requires a physician collaboration arrangement rather than independent practice, with the scope of what you may do set by the practice agreement and by chart review requirements. In practice the arrangement is far less restrictive in a hospital or established group than in a solo rural clinic, and it is worth reading carefully before signing — the agreement determines your prescribing authority and your day-to-day autonomy more than your specialty does.

A location quotient of 0.65 means about a third fewer PAs per worker than the national average, on roughly 2,240 posts, and it reflects how recently the profession scaled in this state rather than any shortage of work for them. Tennessee has a dense hospital sector — Nashville is the headquarters city of the for-profit hospital industry — and 20.4% projected national growth through 2034. A thin starting base plus fast national growth is the reason recruiting incentives appear frequently outside the big metros, even while the median sits 13.0% below the national figure.

Mix and market maturity, mostly. Tennessee's PA workforce skews toward primary care, urgent care and hospital medicine rather than the surgical subspecialties and metropolitan academic centres that pull the national median upward. The state's location quotient of 0.65 says the profession is still filling in here, and newer markets typically pay closer to primary-care rates until specialty demand deepens. The no-income-tax position recovers a meaningful part of the difference in take-home terms, and Tennessee housing costs recover more, but a PA optimising purely for gross salary will find better numbers elsewhere.

It is a base-wage median and does not capture call pay, surgical first-assist stipends, productivity bonuses or the rural incentive packages that Tennessee employers use to fill hard posts — all of which are common in this state and can be worth several thousand a year. It also blends specialties whose economics differ sharply: an emergency medicine or surgical PA in Nashville and a primary care PA in a rural clinic are both in this number, and they are not in the same market. Read $118,240 as the anchor, then price the specialty and the package separately.

Specialty and setting. Surgical first assisting, emergency medicine and critical care sit at the top of this band and are what reach the $132,500 seventy-fifth percentile and the $141,670 ninetieth. Geography is a real second lever here in a way it is not for most Tennessee occupations — Nashville at $129,050 against Kingsport-Bristol at $117,490 is worth more than eleven thousand dollars. After that, call obligations, lead PA responsibilities within a large system, and the rural incentive packages used across East and West Tennessee are the levers worth negotiating on.