Medical Assistant Salary: BLS Data by State

The MA who rooms for two physicians gives two weeks' notice on a Monday. The new job is a health-system clinic fifteen minutes away. BLS puts the May 2025 national median for medical assistants at $21.97 an hour, but state medians run from $35,360 a year in Mississippi to $59,290 in Washington. The national figure is a starting point; the local one decides whether your MA stays.

National medical assistant salary numbers

Medical assistants are SOC 31-9092 in the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey. Unlike medical receptionists, BLS publishes them as their own occupation, so the figures describe the actual job. The latest release covers May 2025 and was published in May 2026.

BLS projects 13% growth for medical assistants from 2025 to 2035, much faster than average, with about 109,700 openings a year. Many of those openings come from replacing people who move to other occupations or leave the workforce, per the Handbook. That is the market your offer walks into: steady demand, and a lot of employers fishing in the same pond.

Medical assistant pay by state

The median wage for medical assistants varies by more than $20,000 a year from one state to the next. The chart sorts every state by median annual wage. The table lists the same figures alphabetically, with the 10th and 90th percentiles, so you can see the range a candidate is negotiating inside.

Washington's median of $59,290 is $23,930 above Mississippi's $35,360, by our arithmetic from BLS 2025 wage data. The six highest are Washington, Alaska, the District of Columbia, Minnesota, Oregon, and California. The six lowest are Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Cost of living and local labor markets both play a part.

Two cautions before you use a row. These are all-industry figures, so they blend hospitals and outpatient centers with physician offices. And a wide gap between the median and the 90th percentile, as in California ($49,660 against $77,300), means a slice of local MA jobs pays far more. Find out what those jobs require before you anchor to them.

Your metro can matter more than your state

A state median averages a big city with the rural counties around it. Inside one state, the spread between metro areas can be as wide as the spread between states.

Among the large California metros in the table, the median MA wage runs from $39,800 in Merced to $61,970 in Sacramento, a gap of $22,170, by our arithmetic from BLS 2025 wage data, and smaller metros such as Vallejo ($77,410) and Santa Rosa ($64,820) run higher still. That is nearly the whole Washington-to-Mississippi spread inside one state. A Fresno practice pricing from the state median would pay slightly above its local market. A Sacramento practice doing the same would sit more than $12,000 a year below its own.

Write the release next to every figure, such as "BLS OEWS May 2025, pulled October 2026." Undated numbers get reused for years after they stop being true, usually in the offer that loses the candidate.

Who else is hiring your MA

Your MA's next employer is often not another small practice. It is the outpatient center or hospital clinic down the road, and the BLS industry figures show why that move is tempting.

Offices of physicians employ 56% of medical assistants and pay them a median $3,040 a year less than outpatient care centers, by our arithmetic from BLS data. A small practice cannot always match a health system on base pay. It can match on schedule, on a short chain of command, and on a job where the MA's skills are visible and paid for.

Two recruiting realities sit in that table. An MA earns about the same as a phlebotomist or a medical secretary at the median, so a candidate weighing those jobs is choosing on schedule and stress, not pay. And the step up to LPN is $8.99 an hour at the median, which is one reason your best MA may be in nursing school. Plan for that, and be glad about it.

Setting an offer that holds

Our stance: start at or above the local median for an MA who rooms, documents, and works the inbox, and move toward the local 90th percentile only for skills you will use and measure. Write the offer from the job, not from what the last MA made. The medical assistant job description lists the duties that justify each step.

Picture a Tuesday at a two-physician family practice in Ohio. The owner offers $18.50 an hour because that is what the last MA started at. The Ohio median is $20.58. Two candidates decline, and the third takes the job and leaves in five months for an outpatient center.

The $2.08 an hour the practice saved came to about $4,300 a year. Replacing the MA, at the common 40% estimate of turnover cost, ran about $17,000.

Put the 90-day step in the offer letter, tied to a competency checklist the MA can see on day one. It turns a vague promise into a target, and it lets you start a strong candidate at the median without losing them to a quarter more an hour elsewhere. Use the medical assistant competency checklist as the list.

A pay ladder tied to skills

Many small practices pay every MA the same and then wonder why the best one leaves. A three-step ladder, tied to skills you can verify, costs little and gives people a reason to stay. The ranges below are positions inside your local BLS range, not dollar amounts, because the dollars depend on your metro. This table is ClinicOps judgment, not a BLS category.

The ladder only works if the skills are written down and checked, which is why it sits on top of a task list. The MA task list and RACI assigns who does what, so a raise rewards work the practice can see. Whether a credential is required for specific tasks depends on your state and your payers; confirm before you tie pay to it.

What an MA departure costs

A common estimate puts the cost of turnover at about 40% of salary, covering recruiting, the vacancy, training, and slower rooming while a new MA ramps up. A UNC analysis from 2020 put one MA departure at about $14,200. At the 2025 national median, 40% of salary is $18,276, by our arithmetic.

MGMA reported in 2025 that 47% of practices find medical assistants the hardest role to recruit. Its May 2026 MGMA Stat poll described turnover as stabilized but not solved, with the front desk and MAs at the top of the churn. Put your own number on a departure with the staff turnover cost calculator, and see what MGMA's turnover data means for your front desk for the other half of the team.

Pay keeps people from leaving over a dollar. Systems keep them from leaving over chaos: a clear task list, a competency path, a schedule that holds. Ask what would make them stay before they tell you why they left, with the stay interview questions.

Compare the MA numbers with medical receptionist pay from the same BLS release. The trackers, checklists, and SOPs are free in the ClinicOps Template Library, and the full set of systems is in the operations system library.

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