Chiropractor salary

Offices of chiropractors — the setting most employed chiropractors work in — report a median of $78,460, close enough to the overall figure that the two can be treated as the same number for planning purposes.

BLS wage data exclude self-employed workers and owners and partners of unincorporated businesses. In most occupations that removes a rounding error. In chiropractic it removes about 36% of the profession — and, importantly, the part of it with the widest income distribution.

Ownership income is a business result, not a wage. It is the practice’s collections minus rent, staff, supplies, insurance, software and the associate’s salary — and the owner’s own clinical time should be costed at what it would take to replace them before anything is called profit.

Do that honestly and the question becomes readable: is the practice paying you a market clinical wage plus a return, or is it paying you a market wage and calling it a business? The visit fee calculator runs that arithmetic from your own overhead and kept-visit rate.

The employed chiropractic median sits below the physical therapist median of $102,760, and the projected growth rates differ too — 9% for chiropractors against 12% for physical therapists over the same decade. Both require a doctoral-level qualification.

The employed comparison favours physical therapy. The ownership comparison is a different question entirely.

Chiropractic ownership is far more common and the profession is structured around it, which is why the wage tables read as they do. If practice ownership is the plan, the salary line is close to irrelevant — see the marketing guide for what actually fills the schedule, and the PT versus chiropractic comparison for the clinical difference patients ask about.

Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook — Chiropractors (May 2025 wage data) — https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/chiropractors.htm. Read 2026-09-04. Wage data exclude self-employed workers and owners of unincorporated businesses.