What CAAs actually earn (2026)

Last reviewed 2026-08-12 · Every figure is linked to its source and labeled by what it measures.

Job postings in mid-2026 advertise CAA base salaries averaging about a quarter-million dollars. But there is no audited government wage statistic for this profession. Every number you will see, here or anywhere, comes from job postings, self-reports, or program marketing. This page shows the numbers and tells you what kind of number each one is.

The headline numbers

Figure	Amount	What it measures
Advertised base, average	$250,600	Full-time W-2 base pay in job postings, BagMask Q2 2026 — excludes bonuses, overtime, call pay, and 1099 roles
Advertised base, median	$245,000	Same posting data, Q2 2026
Advertised range	$180,000 – $425,000	State floor (Alabama) to the top posting maximum (Colorado and Texas), Q2 2026
New-grad starting average	~$215,000	Program-published (Case Western) — recruitment marketing, no class year or methodology stated
New-grad first-year total	~$239,000	Self-reported (Marit Health, 59 new-grad reports) — unaudited, selection-biased
"Official" lookup result	$135,880	The physician assistant median that government sites display for CAAs. See below for why this is wrong.

Why you can't just Google it

The federal government has no occupational code for anesthesiologist assistants. O*NET lists "Anesthesiologist Assistants" (29-1071.01) as a sub-occupation of Physician Assistants. The wage panel it shows is explicitly the parent PA figure: $135,880 median (BLS 2025 data). Salary aggregators fill the gap by redirecting CAA searches to physician assistant or anesthesia technician data (a ~$40,000–$50,000 job). That is how the same job title ends up "earning" anywhere from $40,000 to $300,000+ depending on the site. None of those numbers describe the actual CAA market.

New grads vs. experienced CAAs

AAAA's official page still says starting pay is "about $150,000". That figure reads years stale against everything else observable in 2026. Case Western, one of the largest programs (~120 matriculants a year across four campuses), publishes a ~$215,000 starting average with nearly 100% of graduates holding offers by commencement. Self-reported first-year totals run higher still (~$239,000 average including bonuses, per Marit's 59 new-grad reports). At the experienced end, posted maximums reached $350,000 in Q1 2026 and $425,000 in Q2 (postings in Colorado and Texas). Sign-on bonuses average ~$34,500 self-reported, with $50,000–$100,000 outliers on select 2025 postings, usually tied to 1–2 year commitment clauses.

Geography — and why the map matters more than the ranking

State rankings reshuffle every quarter because per-state posting samples are small: Texas set the $350,000 advertised ceiling in Q1 2026; Washington posted the highest floor and ceiling in Q4 2025; Colorado and Texas shared the $425,000 top posting in Q2 2026. Alabama has repeatedly been the advertised floor at $180,000. Treat quarter-to-quarter rankings as noise, and remember the more fundamental constraint: CAAs can only work where the law allows. Check the state-by-state practice map first. A salary ranking in a state where you can't practice is trivia.

Beyond base pay

Full-time roles are typically W-2 with benefits (health, malpractice, PTO). PRN and locum work is usually 1099, where the CAA covers taxes, malpractice, health insurance, and CME. Self-reported and agency-posted locum rates run roughly $180–$260/hour. Call and case-complexity premiums (cardiac, transplant, trauma) stack on top of base pay. The advertised-base figures above exclude call pay, overtime, and bonuses, so posted base understates achievable total compensation. No published data quantifies the W-2/1099 split across the workforce.

The trend

In 2008, Nova Southeastern advertised near-guaranteed jobs at $120,000–$150,000 starting. Program-published starting averages in 2026 are ~$215,000. BagMask framed Q1 2026 as an acceleration: the advertised ceiling moved from $330,000 (Q4 2025) to $350,000 (Q1 2026), which it attributed to care-team hospitals responding to surgical volume. These comparisons mix source types across eras and are not inflation-adjusted; the direction is clear, the precision is not.

How to read CAA salary data

Government data: does not exist for CAAs. Anything citing BLS for a "CAA salary" is showing you physician assistant data.
BagMask reports: advertised salaries scraped from postings. Roughly 64% of eligible postings lacked usable salary data in Q2 2026, per-state samples are small, and BagMask is itself a CAA job board, not a neutral statistics bureau.
Self-report platforms: unaudited and selection-biased toward higher earners.
Program-published figures: recruitment marketing without stated methodology.
Coming: the first known profession-run compensation survey (AAAA/NCCAA/AAAEP/ARC-AA) closed in April 2026; results were unpublished as of August 2026. This page will be updated when that report lands.