Examine patients, order tests and write prescriptions, after about seven years instead of a doctor's eleven.
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The median pay is about $135,880 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $99,380 at the lower end to about $190,280 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
6 to 8 years after high school, on the usual route.
$83,000 to $183,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
Yes. It is a regulated job, so you need a license or registration before you can work.
Very high demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$135,880
Bottom tenth
$99,380
Top tenth
$190,280
The 2025 national median is $135,880 a year, and the bottom tenth earn $99,380 or less. The federal wage survey has its own line for this job, so these are not borrowed from a broader group.
$120,670 a year or less
The 25th percentile of the national wage survey, 2025
Three in four physician assistants earn more than that. The catch is that you get there carrying graduate school debt, and your first year is steep: you are seeing real patients from week one.
$163,980 a year or more
The 75th percentile of the national wage survey, 2025
The survey does not say which physician assistants are at the top.
Roughly, all in
$83,000 to $183,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a cheap undergraduate route into a public in-state master's program near $50,000 for the whole thing, plus the $550 certifying exam application and a first state license. The high end is four full years of undergraduate tuition and a master's program costing $130,000. The patient care hours you need before applying cost nothing, because they are paid work. Most graduates leave owing a large amount, so file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid every single year, and nonprofit or government hospital work afterwards can cancel the balance through Public Service Loan Forgiveness after ten years of qualifying payments.
Roughly $83,000 to $183,000 in all. File the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) every single year. Most graduates leave owing a large amount. Work for a nonprofit or government hospital afterwards and Public Service Loan Forgiveness can cancel what is left after 10 years of qualifying payments.
Malpractice insurance paid by your employer
Almost always included, and expensive to buy yourself.
Public Service Loan Forgiveness
Nonprofit hospitals, public health departments and government clinics all qualify.
Loan repayment for underserved areas
The National Health Service Corps pays cash toward your loans for a few years in a rural or inner-city clinic.
Continuing education money
Most jobs give you a yearly allowance and paid days off to use it.
You can change specialty without a new degree
Almost nothing else in medicine lets you do that.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
A bachelor's degree, real hours working with patients, then a hard two-year master's.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Biology, chemistry and math. Get a job or volunteer post that puts you near patients as early as you can.
Bachelor's degree
4 years
Any major is allowed as long as you finish the science prerequisites: anatomy, physiology, microbiology, chemistry and statistics. Keep your GPA high, because admissions is numbers-first.
Patient care hours
1 to 2 years, often overlapping
Many programs want a large number of hours of hands-on work first, and each sets its own minimum. People get them as a medical assistant, an emergency medical technician, a paramedic or a nursing assistant. Some do this during the degree, some take a year after it.
Physician assistant program
About 2 to 3 years
Usually more than two years, ending in a master's degree. One year of classroom science, then rotations through family medicine, surgery, emergency, psychiatry, pediatrics and obstetrics. Apply through CASPA (Centralized Application Service for Physician Assistants), which sends one application to many schools.
Certify and get licensed
A few months
Pass the national certifying exam, then apply to the medical board in the state where you want to work.
Biology and chemistry
Every prerequisite later is built on these two.
Anatomy and physiology, if your school offers it
A head start on the hardest first-year class.
Statistics
You read research papers for the rest of your working life.
Spanish or another second language
Clinics hire for it.
Every state licenses physician assistants through its medical board, so moving means a new application and a new fee. The national exam is the same everywhere: the PANCE (Physician Assistant National Certifying Examination), run by the NCCPA (National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants). Pass it and you may use the protected title Physician Assistant-Certified (PA-C). Your program itself must be accredited by ARC-PA (Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant), or the exam is closed to you.
A physician assistant is trained on the medical model, the same way doctors are: diagnose the disease, treat the disease. A nurse practitioner reaches similar work through nursing school instead. In practice the two jobs overlap heavily and often sit side by side in the same clinic. The real differences are the route in, the supervision rules your state writes, and the fact that a physician assistant can switch from orthopedics to psychiatry without going back to school.
Things you don't need, but that help.
You move between these by being hired, not by earning another degree.
Surgery
First assisting in the operating room, then managing patients on the ward. Long days.
Emergency medicine
Shift work, no call at home, and you see everything. Burnout is real.
Dermatology
Clinic hours and no nights.
Psychiatry
Badly short of staff nationwide, so hiring is easy and telehealth is common.
Primary care
The widest medicine. Often qualifies for loan repayment programs.
Paid patient care hours, not just shadowing
Programs count hours where you touched patients, so a job beats observing.
Shadowing a working physician assistant
Several schools require a signed log of it.
A high science GPA
Admissions screens on this number before a human reads anything.
Rural or underserved background
Several programs weigh it, and it opens loan repayment later.
The Department of Veterans Affairs, the Indian Health Service, federal prisons and the armed forces all hire physician assistants, and they post those jobs on USAJOBS (the official federal hiring site). Federal posts pay on a published table rather than by negotiation, which means more certainty. They also count toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness from your first paycheck.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
In a clinic you take a full patient list, often with short visits: sore throats, blood pressure, diabetes checks, mental health, stitches. You examine, decide, prescribe and refer. A supervising doctor is reachable but rarely in the room. In a hospital the day starts with rounds on your own patients, then admissions, procedures and discharge paperwork. Charting eats the last hour of every shift.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Duke University started the first program in October 1965 and filled its first class with former Navy corpsmen. Three of them graduated on October 6, 1967, as the first physician assistants.
The PANCE (Physician Assistant National Certifying Examination) is five blocks of 60 questions, 60 minutes each, and costs $550. You get at most six attempts within six years of graduating.
Federal projections give physician assistants a Bright Outlook: much faster than average growth from 2025 to 2035 and about 11,500 openings a year.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Nursing and patient care first, then the rest of the field. See every career in health.
Last checked October 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.
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