Medical assistants
Also called MA, Certified medical assistant, CMA, Clinical medical assistant, Registered medical assistant
In brief
In May 2025, BLS counted 817,870 US medical assistants, with median pay of $45,690 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2015, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 50,000 from 1960, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for medical assistants: Telehealth surge + MA remote-rooming workflows, 2020 to 2022.
What the sources say
Official outlook
BLS projects employment to grow 12.9% from 2025 to 2035.
AI exposure studies
- 14.1% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
- 0.3 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013
Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.
Last updated .
Cite this page
Future History. (2026, October 11). Medical assistants: jobs and pay since 1960 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/31-9092
Future History. "Medical assistants: jobs and pay since 1960." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/31-9092.
@misc{futurehistory_31_9092, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Medical assistants: jobs and pay since 1960}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/31-9092}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }
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≈ $44,519 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)
Summer 1955: Maxine Williams and Carmen Kline co-chair the founding meeting of what will become the American Association of Medical Assistants. The women gathered in Kansas City are doing a job that exists in every physician's office in the country (taking vitals, preparing exam rooms, handling billing, scheduling appointments, drawing blood) but they have no professional identity, no credential, no recognized title, and no organization. The AAMA is formally incorporated the following year (1956). Williams becomes the first national president in 1957 from Kansas. The AAMA's founding mission: give medical assisting the same professional recognition that nursing and other allied health fields had earned. Unlike nursing, there will be no national licensure: the AAMA's CMA credential will remain voluntary, a structural feature that shapes wages and scope of practice for the next seven decades.
July 30, 1965: President Johnson signs Medicare and Medicaid into law. The immediate effect on medical assistants is indirect but profound, by creating federal health insurance for 30 million elderly and low-income Americans, the legislation floods physician offices with newly insured patients who previously avoided formal medical care. The billing workflow becomes significantly more complex: Medicare's Part B payment rules require encounter documentation and CPT-coded claims. Medical assistants in physician offices absorb much of this administrative burden, becoming more important to practice revenue as billing accuracy becomes central to physician income.
The Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 (P.L. 93-222) provides federal grants and loans to start HMOs and requires employers with 25 or more employees to offer an HMO option. The law drives the shift from solo physician practice to multi-physician group practices and outpatient clinics: the organizational form that would employ most medical assistants for the next fifty years. In the group practice model, MAs are shared resources across multiple physicians; the MA-to-physician ratio (typically 1:1 or 2:1) becomes a practice management metric. Managed care's emphasis on throughput, more visits per physician per day, elevates the MA's role as a patient-flow manager.
February 17, 2009: President Obama signs the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, including the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. The law provides $27 billion in EHR adoption incentives through the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs (Meaningful Use). The effect on medical assistant work is immediate and comprehensive: within five years, physician office EHR adoption rises from 42% (2008) to 87% (2015). The MA's paper-based workflow (chart pulls, handwritten vitals, carbon-copy superbills) transitions to electronic documentation, electronic ordering, and EHR-mediated billing. The physical work of the job is unchanged; the data-management half becomes entirely digital.
March 23, 2010: President Obama signs the Affordable Care Act. For medical assistants, the ACA's most significant impact is the Medicaid expansion (implemented state by state from 2014 onward) and the requirement that employer health plans cover preventive care without cost-sharing. Both provisions bring large numbers of newly insured patients, and previously avoided preventive visits, into primary care offices. MA employment accelerates: from 523,260 (BLS OEWS 2010) to 793,460 (2024), a 52% increase in 14 years, driven substantially by this demand expansion.
Nuance Communications, best known for Dragon Medical speech recognition, publicly launches Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX), an ambient AI clinical documentation system that listens to physician-patient conversations and auto-generates clinical notes in the EHR without requiring physician dictation or typing. DAX is the first commercially deployed ambient AI scribe at scale. Within two years, it is in use at over 130 health systems. The technology directly addresses the documentation burden that EHR adoption had imposed on physicians, but its downstream effect on medical assistants (who had been absorbing documentation assistance tasks) is not yet studied.
March 4, 2022: Microsoft closes its acquisition of Nuance Communications for approximately $19.7 billion, the second-largest acquisition in Microsoft's history, behind LinkedIn. The deal signals Microsoft's conviction that ambient AI in clinical documentation is a major market. Under Microsoft, Nuance DAX becomes Dragon Copilot, integrated with Azure Health Data Services and Microsoft 365 Copilot for Healthcare. The acquisition brings the full resources of a $2 trillion company behind the technology most likely to reshape the administrative-clerical half of medical assistant work.
February 2024: Abridge, an ambient AI clinical documentation startup founded in 2018 by Dr. Shiv Rao, raises a $150 million Series C round at a reported $2.5 billion valuation, from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and UPMC Enterprises. Abridge competes directly with Microsoft/Nuance DAX by auto-generating clinical notes from ambient recordings, deployed inside Epic's EHR. By early 2024, Abridge is live at UCSF, Yale New Haven, Kaiser Permanente, and other major health systems. The ambient scribe market now has multiple well-funded competitors (Abridge, Microsoft DAX, AWS HealthScribe, Google MedLM, Suki) all targeting the same documentation burden that medical assistants had partially absorbed during the HITECH era.
Will AI replace medical assistants? What the research says
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.
What's changing day to day for medical assistants
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is sitting alongside you hereManage patient scheduling and phone triage using AI-assisted communication tools, handling appointment requests, cancellations, and reschedules
Manage patient scheduling and phone triage using AI-assisted communication tools, handling appointment requests, cancellations, and reschedules; using Phreesia VoiceAI or practice management AI scheduling tools to route and process routine scheduling requests automatically; triaging incoming clinical calls to determine urgency and route to the appropriate provider or staff member; managing patient messages in the EHR in-basket and reviewing Epic AI ART draft responses for accuracy before sending; and escalating urgent clinical calls for same-day or emergency routing.[12],[6]
Phreesia VoiceAI (launched September 2025) achieves 87% call volume reduction at early adopters by handling routine scheduling, appointment reminders, refill requests, and standard patient inquiries autonomously. Epic AI ART generates draft in-basket message responses at 1M+ per month across more than a hundred organizations. The phone and message tasks that consumed the most reactive MA time are increasingly handled by AI, but the escalation decisions (which call is a clinical emergency, which patient message needs a provider callback rather than a scripted response) require the clinical judgment and contextual patient knowledge that only a human MA has. Build triage acuity skills and develop fluency with your practice's AI escalation workflow to capture the expert position on this task.
AI is sitting alongside you hereManage prior authorization and insurance verification workflows using AI-assisted tools, processing prior authorization (PA) requests for specialist referrals, imaging, and prescriptions using Epic AI's PA recommendation engine (which auto-populates PA responses from chart data)
Manage prior authorization and insurance verification workflows using AI-assisted tools, processing prior authorization (PA) requests for specialist referrals, imaging, and prescriptions using Epic AI's PA recommendation engine (which auto-populates PA responses from chart data); verifying patient insurance eligibility via Phreesia or EHR-integrated eligibility tools before appointments; tracking PA status and follow-up with payers on denied requests; and escalating complex denials to the billing team or provider.[6],[13]
Prior authorization is the most heavily AI-targeted administrative task in the MA workflow: Epic AI PA automation recommends answers to PA questions from chart data, and a growing number of payers support electronic PA with automated approval pathways. The volume of PA work is not shrinking: the administrative rules are getting more complex as payers add more prior-auth-required services. Your value on this task is shifting from data transcription (filling in the same PA form fields manually each time) to exception management: catching the cases where the AI recommendation is wrong, knowing when to escalate versus rework, and building payer-specific knowledge about approval criteria for your specialty. MAs who develop PA specialist expertise command wage premiums in high-volume specialty practices.
AI is sitting alongside you hereSupport provider clinical documentation and ambient scribe workflows, in practices deploying ambient AI scribes (Dragon Copilot, Abridge, Suki), coordinating the room-setup and patient consent process for ambient recording
Support provider clinical documentation and ambient scribe workflows, in practices deploying ambient AI scribes (Dragon Copilot, Abridge, Suki), coordinating the room-setup and patient consent process for ambient recording; entering structured clinical data (vital signs, medication updates, problem list additions) into the EHR that the ambient scribe does not capture from the encounter audio; reviewing AI-generated clinical note drafts for missing MA-documented data before the provider signs; and managing the post-encounter EHR cleanup tasks (charge capture verification, referral order entry, follow-up scheduling) that the ambient scribe surfaces as action items.[9],[7]
As ambient AI scribes move from pilots to enterprise-wide deployment at health systems, MAs become the operational backbone of the ambient documentation workflow rather than a transcription resource. The scribe handles note generation; you handle the structured data entry, consent management, action-item follow-up, and provider-facing coordination that the AI cannot initiate. In practices using Dragon Copilot or Abridge, MAs who develop fluency with post-encounter AI action item management (the referrals queued, the follow-up orders, the after-visit summary generation) are positioned for expanded care coordination roles that carry meaningful scope and compensation growth.
Where medical assistants go next
Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.
- Registered Nurses
- US median pay
- $97,550 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +5.6%
- Pharmacy Technicians
- US median pay
- $45,750 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +6.4%
- Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses
- US median pay
- $64,400 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +3%
- Medical Secretaries and Administrative Assistants
- US median pay
- $45,930 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +4.8%
What each move takes
Registered Nurses
MA experience provides meaningful credit toward RN preparation: clinical foundational skills (phlebotomy, EKG, vital signs, patient prep, EHR proficiency) accelerate community college ADN programs where clinical competency demonstrations are built into the curriculum. ADN programs typically take a few years; LPN-to-ADN bridge is several months if the MA first completes LPN licensure. Fully accredited online-hybrid BSN completion programs (for ADN RNs) allow RNs to reach BSN within several months while working. RN scope expansion vs. MA is substantial: independent nursing assessment authority, full care plan ownership, delegation authority over MAs and CNAs, IV push administration, patient education as a licensed professional, and the broad advanced-practice ceiling (NP, CRNA, CNS). MAs who have developed AI tool fluency in ambulatory settings (Epic AI, Phreesia, ambient scribe workflows) enter RN practice with EHR and AI literacy advantages that new RN graduates frequently lack.
- · ADN or BSN nursing program: 2-year (ADN) or 4-year (BSN) pathway; community college ADN is the fastest MA-to-RN route; prerequisite credits in anatomy, physiology, microbiology, chemistry, and statistics typically needed
- · NCLEX-RN preparation: full nursing process (assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation, evaluation), independent clinical judgment, complex medication management including IV push and blood products, and delegation framework
- · Nursing assessment and clinical reasoning: comprehensive head-to-toe assessment with nursing diagnosis formulation; ability to identify deteriorating patients and initiate intervention without standing physician order
- · Leadership and delegation: RN-to-MA, RN-to-CNA, and RN-to-LPN delegation within state nurse practice act scope; charge nurse accountability and patient assignment management
- · Specialty pathway development: RN opens pathways to emergency nursing, critical care, OR, labor and delivery, and oncology, specialties largely inaccessible to MAs regardless of experience level
How has the work of medical assistants changed since 1955?
The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Paper chart + carbon-copy intake forms + manual vital-signs equipment
The founding toolkit of medical assisting was the manila folder, the Korotkoff-sound stethoscope, the mercury thermometer, and the aneroid sphygmomanometer. The medical assistant roomed the patient, pulled the paper chart, filled in the intake form, often a mimeographed template, and transcribed vital signs in ink. Appointments were booked in a paper ledger. Billing was done by hand or with a typewriter, producing carbon-copy encounter forms (the 'superbill') that were mailed to insurance carriers. The chart was the record; when it was lost, the record was lost. Every practice developed its own filing system, its own form templates, its own abbreviation conventions. Standardization existed at the professional level, the AAMA curriculum specified what clinical skills an MA should have, but the paper workflow was entirely local. An experienced MA knew the physician's handwriting, the filing system, the billing codes in use, and the insurance carriers' quirks by memory.
Early practice management systems (IDX, Medisoft) + dedicated EKG machines
The 1970s introduced the first computerized practice management systems: IBM mainframe-based billing platforms used by large group practices and hospital outpatient departments, and early minicomputer systems like IDX (founded 1969) and Medisoft that brought scheduling and billing automation to mid-size practices. For medical assistants, this meant a new skill layer: data entry into billing terminals, learning billing codes (the precursor to ICD-9-CM and CPT coding adopted broadly in the 1980s), and reconciling electronic billing against paper superbills. The dedicated 12-lead EKG machine became common in physician offices during this era, the Burdick company's machines were the standard, adding a clinical task (EKG acquisition and annotation) that required specific training. The 1973 HMO Act drove multi-physician group practice, creating larger offices that needed more MAs per physician.
Windows-based practice management + early desktop EHR (Allscripts, eClinicalWorks)
The Windows-based practice management generation (Allscripts [founded 1986, went public 2000], eClinicalWorks [founded 1999], Greenway Health) brought scheduling, billing, and basic electronic charting to small and medium practices for the first time at price points the physician-owner could absorb. For medical assistants, this era introduced the dual-screen desk: paper chart in one hand, keyboard in the other, transcribing the visit note from the physician's dictation or handwritten encounter form into the practice management system. E-prescribing began to appear in leading practices by the late 1990s, shifting a piece of the MA's phone-call burden, calling pharmacies to clarify illegible prescriptions, into a digital workflow. The clinical tasks were unchanged; the administrative tasks were multiplying and computerizing simultaneously.
Epic / Cerner early ambulatory expansion + e-prescribing mandate discussions
Epic Systems had dominated hospital inpatient EHR since the 1990s; its ambulatory (physician office) module, Epic Ambulatory, began significant expansion into large multi-specialty physician groups and health-system outpatient departments in the mid-2000s. For MAs in Epic-adopting practices, this meant a new clinical workflow paradigm: the rooming process was now a structured Epic encounter, MA opens the visit note in Epic, enters vitals directly into the system, documents the chief complaint and medication reconciliation, places nursing orders, and activates the visit for the physician. The physician's note was generated in Epic rather than on paper. This was the first generation of MA work that was explicitly EHR-mediated rather than paper-first.
HITECH Act / Meaningful Use: EHR adoption from 42% to 74% of physicians 2008-2014
The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, signed February 17, 2009, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, provided billions of dollars in incentive payments to physicians and hospitals that adopted and meaningfully used certified EHR systems. For medical assistants, the HITECH era transformed the administrative half of their job. EHR-mediated rooming, vitals entry, medication reconciliation, problem list maintenance, and order entry became standard practice across the country rather than in leading practices only. The prior authorization workflow, previously a phone-and-fax process, began migrating to EHR-integrated insurance portals. The MA's desk acquired a second (and sometimes third) monitor.
Effect on the workA 2013 Annals of Internal Medicine study found physicians spent a few hours on EHR/desk work for every hour of direct patient care after HITECH-driven EHR adoption. Medical assistants absorbed a share of this new documentation burden, rooming workflows that had taken several minutes on paper now took several minutes in the EHR.
Patient portal + e-prescribing + prior authorization platforms
The ACA Meaningful Use Stage 2 (2014) required patient portal functionality: a channel through which patients could message their care team, view lab results, and request prescription refills. For medical assistants, the patient portal became a new inbox: request queues of portal messages, refill requests, lab-result acknowledgments, and appointment requests, routed through the EHR, needed to be triaged and acted on between in-person visits. Electronic prior authorization platforms (CoverMyMeds, launched 2008; Surescripts PA integrations from the mid-2010s) digitized a workflow that had previously consumed many minutes per PA request by phone and fax. The net result was not time savings so much as volume increase: practices could handle more PAs per day, which they did, because the ACA had brought more insured patients into the system.
Telehealth surge (COVID) + MA remote-rooming workflows
When COVID-19 hit US physician offices in March 2020, visit volume collapsed: the CDC reported a reduction in office visits in April 2020. For medical assistants, telehealth created a new challenge: rooming a patient you cannot physically see. MA workflows adapted: telephone or video pre-visit, confirming symptoms, reviewing medications, troubleshooting the patient's connection, documenting the chief complaint in the EHR before the physician joined the video call. The clinical half of the job (vitals, injections, draws) moved online for whatever could be deferred; the administrative half expanded to manage the new platform. When in-person visits resumed, MA workloads spiked as deferred care flooded back.
Ambient AI clinical scribes: Nuance DAX (2020) → Microsoft acquisition (2022) → Abridge Series C (2024)
In 2020, Nuance Communications launched Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX), the first commercially deployed ambient AI clinical scribe: a system that listens passively to the physician-patient conversation and automatically generates a structured clinical note, populated into the EHR, without the physician dictating or typing. Microsoft recognized the significance immediately: it acquired Nuance in a deal, closed March 2022, the second-largest acquisition in Microsoft history. The AI ambient scribe market exploded: Abridge (founded 2018) raised a $150 million Series C in February 2024 at a reported $2.5 billion valuation; AWS, Google Health, and Suki all shipped competing products by 2023-24. Epic integrated ambient AI note generation directly into its EHR. For medical assistants, the ambient scribe era is transforming the downstream documentation burden. When a physician's note is auto-generated from the ambient recording, the MA's post-visit tasks (entering orders, reconciling the note, managing the billing interface) change in character: they become more supervisory (reviewing AI-generated content, flagging errors) and less data-entry. The rooming workflow and clinical tasks are entirely unaffected. The clerical half of the job is being automated; the clinical half is not. Whether this frees MA time for more patient-facing work or reduces MA headcount will depend on how practices choose to redeploy the efficiency gain.
Effect on the workThe downstream effect on MA documentation assistance is not yet quantified in peer-reviewed literature as of the curation date (May 2026).
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Browse all rolesMedical Assistants employment and pay by year
In other countries
The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.
Australia (ANZSCO 3112)
- Employment, 2025
- 40,900, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 3112 Medical Technicians, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
- Median pay, 2025
- A$80,028, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$1,539 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile.
View all 26 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
| Year | US employment | Annual pay (median unless marked) | Source | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | 50,000 | n/a | Est., AAMA Researched context | Report |
| 1980 | 200,000 | n/a | Est., BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook Researched context | Report |
| 2000 | 330,830 | $23,000 | BLS OEWS 2000 Official statistic | Report |
| 2003 | 362,670 | $24,170 | BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic | Report |
| 2004 | 380,340 | $24,610 | BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic | Report |
| 2005 | 382,720 | $25,350 | BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic | Report |
| 2006 | 409,570 | $26,290 | BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic | Report |
| 2007 | 434,540 | $27,430 | BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic | Report |
| 2008 | 475,950 | $28,300 | BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic | Report |
| 2009 | 495,970 | $28,650 | BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic | Report |
| 2010 | 523,260 | $28,860 | BLS OEWS May 2010 (employment) Official statisticBLS OEWS (pay) Official statistic | Report |
| 2011 | 539,220 | $29,100 | BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic | Report |
| 2012 | 553,140 | $29,370 | BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic | Report |
| 2013 | 571,690 | $29,610 | BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic | Report |
| 2014 | 584,970 | $29,960 | BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic | Report |
| 2015 | 601,240 | $30,590 | BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic | Report |
| 2016 | 623,560 | $31,540 | BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic | Report |
| 2017 | 646,320 | $32,480 | BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic | Report |
| 2018 | 673,660 | $33,610 | BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic | Report |
| 2019 | 712,430 | $34,800 | BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic | Report |
| 2020 | 710,200 | $35,850 | BLS OEWS May 2020 (employment) Official statisticBLS OEWS (pay) Official statistic | Report |
| 2021 | 727,760 | $37,190 | BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic | Report |
| 2022 | 752,460 | $38,270 | BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic | Report |
| 2023 | 763,040 | $42,000 | BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic | Report |
| 2024 | 793,460 | $44,200 | BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic | Report |
| 2025 | 817,870 | $45,690 | BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic | Report |