Massage Therapists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($33,280) to the 90th ($97,450). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 96,040 people in May 2024, 0.06% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 15,240 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 31.9% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Hawaii, whose location quotient of 3.68 says this work is 3.68 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

One in ten workers in this field earns $33,280 or less, and one in ten earns $97,450 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.9 to 1 and the annual gap is $64,170. The mean ($63,430) versus median ($57,950) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 15,240 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Alaska would lead at $135,200. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Massage Therapists stands number 280 by employment and number 444 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Support Occupations, the group median wage is $41,590 across 17 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 39% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.3% of the group's 7,448,000 jobs. In 24 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $57,950, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA is the largest metro employer with 6,060 jobs, 6.3% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 238 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $48,970 a year, against $88,670 in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Massage Therapists paycheck, gross, is $2,229 every two weeks on an annual $57,950, which is $4,829 a month and $1,114 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($44,870) to the 75th ($77,170) is worth $32,300 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $63,745 would sit between the median ($57,950) and the 75th percentile ($77,170), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $44,870, is $13,080 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Healthcare Support Occupations

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Healthcare Support Workers, All Other, Medical Equipment Preparers, Orderlies, Occupational Therapy Assistants, Physical Therapist Aides, Medical Transcriptionists. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.