Physical Therapist Assistants Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Physical Therapist Assistants worker at that point in the distribution, so $77,270 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 108,010 jobs nationally, Physical Therapist Assistants make up 0.07% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 11,230 of those jobs, the top three states hold 26.9%, and the deepest concentration sits in West Virginia (location quotient 1.84, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $87,630, which is 1.9 times the $46,020 at the 10th, a difference of $41,610 annually. Because the mean wage ($67,160) sits above the median ($65,510), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is California at $79,410; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Physical Therapist Assistants stands number 256 by employment and number 324 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 58% more than its group median, and it supplies 1.5% of the group's 7,448,000 jobs. In 18 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $65,510, 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 3,780 jobs, 3.5% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $56,780 a year, against $98,250 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $65,510 works out to $5,459 a month before taxes, $2,520 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,260 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($58,240) to the 75th ($77,270) is worth $19,030 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $72,061 would sit between the median ($65,510) and the 75th percentile ($77,270), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $58,240, is $7,270 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

Sibling occupations in Healthcare Support Occupations: Healthcare Support Workers, All Other, Massage Therapists, Medical Equipment Preparers, Orderlies, Occupational Therapy Assistants, Physical Therapist Aides. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.