Physician Assistant Salary in Utah 2026,
$134,740 Median | BLS Data by City

A median $134,740 a year, or $64.78 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $123,570 and $152,480 and a full range of $82,910 to $171,430. That is 0.8% below the $135,880 national median — essentially level — and stronger in real terms given Utah's flat 4.65% income tax.

St. George at $138,110, ahead of Ogden at $135,930, Provo-Orem-Lehi at $134,490, Salt Lake City-Murray at $130,240 and Logan at $127,350. Salt Lake City sitting fourth is consistent with the pattern across Utah's clinical occupations — the hard-to-staff south-west and the smaller markets pay above the state's largest city.

It depends on your experience. Utah has moved further than most states toward physician assistant autonomy: experienced practitioners who meet defined practice-hour and setting requirements may work without a formal collaboration agreement, while newer licensees practise under a collaborative arrangement. The thresholds and the settings to which they apply are set by the Division of Professional Licensing, so confirm with the division and your employer exactly which arrangement applies to you.

Through the Division of Professional Licensing at the Department of Commerce, which handles most health professions in this state. You need a degree from an ARC-PA accredited programme and current NCCPA certification, plus the division's application requirements. Certification is maintained through the NCCPA continuing medical education and recertification cycle, and the collaboration or autonomy arrangement applying to you depends on your accumulated practice hours.

Hours, not rate. It sits more than forty thousand dollars below the 25th percentile of $123,570 — by far the largest step in this band, and the unmistakable signature of part-time, locum and partial-year practitioners being counted in an annual wage series. A full-time Utah physician assistant should read the $123,570 to $152,480 range as the realistic market, not the published floor.

Practically, quite a lot, and it is worth understanding before you plan a career here. In the supervision-agreement states elsewhere in this batch, a physician assistant's scope, prescribing authority and day-to-day latitude are set by a document negotiated with an individual physician, and that document can be more restrictive than the licence itself. Utah's approach ties autonomy to accumulated practice hours and setting instead, which means the constraint eases as you gain experience rather than depending on who employs you. For a physician assistant intending to work rurally, or to build a long career in one specialty, that structural difference is a genuine advantage even where the salary is comparable.

It is a base-wage median excluding call pay, surgical first-assist stipends, productivity bonuses and rural recruitment incentives, all of which are common. It treats primary care, emergency medicine and surgical subspecialty practice as one occupation, which is much of what the $123,570 to $171,430 full-time range describes. And the published tenth percentile is a part-time artefact that makes the band look wider at the bottom than the full-time market actually is.

Specialty first — surgical first assisting, emergency medicine and critical care are what reach the $152,480 seventy-fifth percentile and the $171,430 ninetieth. Location second and it points away from Salt Lake City: St. George at $138,110 against Salt Lake City-Murray at $130,240, with Ogden at $135,930 also ahead. Then accumulated practice hours, because in Utah they change your regulatory position and not just your seniority. And call and first-assist stipends, which are negotiated individually and sit outside the base wage.