Estimates for the recent period and projections of the Antarctic surface mass balance (SMB) often rely on high-resolution polar-oriented regional climate models (RCMs). However, RCMs require large-scale boundary forcing fields provided by reanalyses or general circulation models (GCMs). Since the recent variability of sea surface conditions (SSC, namely sea ice concentration (SIC) and sea surface temperature (SST)) over the Southern Ocean are not reproduced by most GCMs from the 5th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) for the last decades, RCMs are then subject to potential biases. We investigate here the direct sensitivity of the Antarctic SMB to SSC perturbations around the Antarctic. With the RCM MAR, different sensitivity experiments are performed over 1979–2015 by altering the ERA-Interim SSC with (i) homogeneous perturbations and (ii) mean anomalies estimated from all CMIP5 models and two extreme ones, while atmospheric lateral boundary conditions remained unchanged. Results show increased (resp. decreased) precipitation due to perturbations inducing warmer (resp. colder) SSC than ERA-Interim significantly altering the SMB of coastal areas, as precipitation is mainly related to cyclones that do not penetrate far into the continent. At the continental scale, significant SMB anomalies (i.e, greater than the interannual variability) are found for the largest combined SST/SIC perturbations. Sensitivity experiments with warmer SSC reveal integrated SMB anomalies (+5 %–+13 %) over the present climate (1979–2015) in the lower range of the SMB increase projected for the end of the 21st century.