Physical therapist salary
2026-10-18 · 9 min read
The national median is $102,760 a year. The interesting part is the spread underneath it — the same licence pays very differently depending on the setting and who carries the risk.
The national median
Median annual wage
$102,760
$49.40 an hour · 283,700 jobs
Median, not mean — half of physical therapists earn less than this and half earn more, which is the more useful shape for a wage distribution with a long upper tail. The figure comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ May 2025 wage data and covers employed therapists; it excludes owners of unincorporated practices.
Entry requirement
The typical entry-level qualification is a doctoral or professional degree, which puts most new graduates into the market carrying debt. That changes how the first offer should be read: a higher figure in a high-cost metro is not automatically the better deal.
Pay by setting
| Setting | Median | Against the national median |
|---|---|---|
| Home healthcare services | $114,740 | +$11,980 |
| Nursing and residential care facilities | $110,460 | +$7,700 |
| Hospitals; state, local and private | $106,800 | +$4,040 |
| Offices of physical, occupational and speech therapists, and audiologists | $97,160 | −$5,600 |
The ordering is stable and it is not about skill. Home health pays most because it carries travel, autonomy and an unpredictable day. Outpatient private practice — the setting most therapists picture — sits at the bottom of this table, roughly $5,600 below the national median.
Outlook and supply
BLS projects 12% employment growth over 2025–35 — about 33,800 additional positions — which it classes as much faster than average. Demand is demographic and fairly insensitive to the economic cycle; the constraint on the profession is the number of accredited programme places, not the number of patients.
A profession that grows faster than its training pipeline is one where the leverage sits with the clinician.
What actually moves an offer
Three things, in this order. Setting — the table above moves an offer more than any negotiation will. Caseload structure, because a 60-minute one-to-one model and a double-booked 30-minute model are different jobs at the same nominal salary. And who carries productivity risk: a base plus per-visit bonus transfers volume risk to you, which is worth money and is rarely priced as such.
If the answer is to open your own practice, the arithmetic changes completely — your salary becomes a cost line rather than the outcome. The visit fee calculator and the business plan template work that side. Assistant pay is covered in the PTA guide.
Read the productivity target before the salary
A required visits-per-day number tells you more about the job than the offer does. Ask for it in writing, and ask what happens in the month it is missed. If you are still choosing between professions, the physical therapy vs chiropractor comparison sets the two side by side.
Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook — Physical Therapists (May 2025 wage data) — https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/physical-therapists.htm. Read 2026-10-18. Wage data exclude self-employed workers and owners of unincorporated businesses.
Sources
- BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook — Physical Therapists — May 2025 wage data · read 2026-10-18
Keep reading
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The CMT codes, their spinal-region counts and the modifiers that go with them.
Published 2026-09-04 · reviewed 2026-10-18