Occupational Therapists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Occupational Therapists worker at that point in the distribution, so $110,460 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

With 152,280 jobs nationally, Occupational Therapists make up 0.10% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 12,020 of those jobs, the top three states hold 22.5%, and the deepest concentration sits in Connecticut (location quotient 1.81, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

One in ten workers in this field earns $67,090 or less, and one in ten earns $129,830 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 1.9 to 1 and the annual gap is $62,740. The mean ($98,240) versus median ($98,340) comparison shows an unusually symmetric ladder in this occupation.

Pay by state

California posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $119,470, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Occupational Therapists stands number 202 by employment and number 134 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations, the group median wage is $98,340 across 71 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 0% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.6% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 21 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $98,340, 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

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 9,630 jobs, 6.3% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 361 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, Buffalo-Cheektowaga, NY posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $80,130 a year, against $137,950 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. 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 Occupational Therapists paycheck, gross, is $3,782 every two weeks on an annual $98,340, which is $8,195 a month and $1,891 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($80,490) to the 75th ($110,460) is worth $29,970 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 $108,174 would sit between the median ($98,340) and the 75th percentile ($110,460), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $80,490, is $17,850 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 Practitioners and Technical Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Acupuncturists, Nurse Midwives, Exercise Physiologists, Neurologists, Dentists, All Other Specialists, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons. The full directory is on the Careers hub.