Physical Therapists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Physical Therapists worker at that point in the distribution, so $117,190 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 248,630 jobs nationally, Physical Therapists make up 0.16% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 24,380 of those jobs, the top three states hold 24.3%, and the deepest concentration sits in Rhode Island (location quotient 1.79, 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 $132,500, which is 1.8 times the $74,420 at the 10th, a difference of $58,080 annually. Because the mean wage ($102,400) sits above the median ($101,020), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 24,380 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, California would lead at $123,300. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Physical Therapists stands number 139 by employment and number 121 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 3% more than its group median, and it supplies 2.6% of the group's 9,592,720 jobs. In 18 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $101,020, 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 15,750 jobs, 6.3% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Rochester, NY posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $85,300 a year, against $143,000 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Physical Therapists paycheck, gross, is $3,885 every two weeks on an annual $101,020, which is $8,418 a month and $1,943 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($83,470) to the 75th ($117,190) is worth $33,720 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 $111,122 would sit between the median ($101,020) and the 75th percentile ($117,190), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $83,470, is $17,550 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Surgeons, All Other, Surgical Assistants, Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Therapists, All Other, Radiation Therapists, Cardiologists. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.