Physician Assistant Salary in Dallas, TX 2026,
$134,900 Median | BLS + Market Data

Dallas physician assistants earn a BLS median of $134,900/yr, or $64.86 an hour, published for the combined Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro, with a band of $96,770 to $171,660. That is level with the Texas statewide median and 0.7% below the US median. Specialty and call burden drive most of the movement in that band.

No — the metroplex is level with the Texas statewide median. Houston, Austin and San Antonio all pay comparably because Texas health systems benchmark against each other and the supervision rules are identical statewide. The metroplex offers more subspecialty roles rather than better pay for the same job.

Operative first-assist roles in cardiothoracic, orthopaedic and transplant surgery, and trauma and emergency coverage at the metroplex's Level I centres. Those posts stack call, night and weekend pay onto a higher base and are the route to the $171,660 top of the published band. Outpatient primary care sits near the median.

A Texas physician assistant licence from the Texas Physician Assistant Board, administered with the Texas Medical Board, requiring graduation from an ARC-PA accredited programme and current NCCPA certification. Texas also requires a delegating physician relationship with defined prescriptive delegation, which is site-specific and must be re-established on changing employer.

It is solid and stable. The metroplex has academic, quaternary and Level I trauma capacity that generates genuine subspecialty PA roles, pay matches the national median, and no state income tax applies. The counterpoint is that PA employment concentration sits at 0.77 times the national rate, so the market is not as deep as the region's population suggests.

The gap between this metro's 25th percentile and its median is unusually small, which happens when a few large employers dominate hiring and pay on published grades. That is exactly the metroplex's structure: several large non-profit health systems employ most of the region's PAs and benchmark against each other. The practical effect is predictability — a PA can anticipate their pay from their grade — and limited scope for individual negotiation below the subspecialty tier.

OEWS reports base wages, excluding call stipends, first-assist arrangements and productivity components that are a large share of surgical PA income at the top. The estimate also blends Dallas, Fort Worth and the suburbs into one figure spanning academic hospitals, community systems and a substantial urgent-care sector.

Texas ties PA prescribing to a delegating physician and a defined site, so changing specialty or employer means re-establishing that arrangement. In a market where large systems dominate, this raises the cost of moving from outpatient work into a surgical or emergency post — the receiving service has to want you specifically. PAs who reach the upper quarter of this band generally enter hospital-based practice early rather than transferring in later.